Icons of Grief: Val Lewton's Home Front Pictures 9780520937765, 9780520241008

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. The Madonna of the Backyard
2. The Power of the Minor Actor
3. Stillness and Recollection
4. This Pretty World
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Icons of Grief

The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book provided by the General Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Associates.

Icons of Grief Val Lewton’s Home Front Pictures

Alexander Nemerov

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley

.

Los Angeles

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London

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2005 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nemerov, Alexander. Icons of grief : Val Lewton’s home front pictures / Alexander Nemerov. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-520-24099-5 (cloth : alk. paper)—isbn 0-520-24100-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Lewton, Val—Criticism and interpretation. 2. World War, 1939–1945—Motion pictures and the war. I. Title. pn1998.3.l469n46 2005 791.4302'33—dc22 2004022512 Manufactured in the United States of America 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed on Ecobook 50 containing a minimum 50% post-consumer waste, processed chlorine free. The balance contains virgin pulp, including 25% Forest Stewardship Council Certified for no old growth tree cutting, processed either tcf or ecf. The sheet is acid-free and meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).∞

For my daughters, Lucy and Anna, and for my parents, who met during the war

It was the war that gave me a sense of usefulness. —Joan Clews (Phyllis Calvert) in Val Lewton’s My Own True Love (1948)

Contents

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction Fragments of the Home Front

1

1. The Madonna of the Backyard Simone Simon and Ann Carter in The Curse of the Cat People

13

2. The Power of the Minor Actor Skelton Knaggs in The Ghost Ship

58

3. Stillness and Recollection Darby Jones in I Walked with a Zombie

97

4. This Pretty World Glenn Vernon in Bedlam

132

Notes

171

Selected Bibliography

197

Index

205

Acknowledgments

Many years ago I met Val Lewton Jr., who told me about his father’s movies. I put them out of my head until a few years later, when I decided to teach a course on American film of the 1940s. When I finally sat down to watch I Walked with a Zombie, I was overwhelmed by its beauty and melancholy. This book is the result of many years’ thinking about where that sadness comes from, and now that it is complete, I owe my first debt of thanks to Val Lewton Jr. He allowed me to consult his personal collection of his father’s letters, and he loaned me rare copies of his father’s novels 4 Wives, A Laughing Woman, and This Fool, Passion, all of them crucial in the pages that follow. Val’s generosity with these materials is a great act of kindness. My research benefited from the expertise and kindness of many people in Los Angeles, New York, and Washington, D.C.: Barbara Hall, Heather von Rohr, and other staff members at the Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills; Edward Comstock, senior library archivist at the Cinema-Television Library at USC; Yvonne Behrens, of the UCLA Film and Television Archive; the staff at the Billy Rose Theatre Collection of the New York Public Library, and at the Museum of the City of New York; the staff at the Divisions of Manuscripts and Films at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.; Richard Mangan, administrator at the Raymond Mander and Joe Mitchenson Theatre Collection in London; Richard Lees, steward at Tewkesbury Abbey in Tewkesbury, England; Steve Pool, of Sheffield, Enxi

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Acknowledgments

gland; my colleague Tim Barringer, who put me in touch with Steve; Paul Root, of Syracuse, New York; and Kristy Kubrin and Eryn Brown, of Los Angeles. Many scholars of film and American visual culture have helped me think about the issues I present in this book. Scott Bukatman encouraged my work on Lewton from the first, starting with my presentations at the Stanford Film Workshop in the late 1990s and continuing with a careful reading of the finished manuscript. Without Scott’s encouragement, I am sure I never would have written this book. David Lubin likewise encouraged the project, and he has been kind enough to give my ideas a tough critique all along the way. At Yale, Dudley Andrew, Charlie Musser, and Noa Steimatsky kindly supported the idea of a scholar like me from outside film studies writing on a film topic. I am especially grateful to Noa for her comments on a synopsis of the book as it was taking shape. I have received great editorial and technical support throughout this project. At Yale I am grateful to Jude Breidenbach, Carl Kaufman, Phil Kearney, and Joseph Szaszfai of Media Services. At the University of California Press, I am indebted to three editors: Mary Francis, for her faith in the project even before a word was written; Susan Ecklund, for her attention to detail; and Stephanie Fay, for her superb editing skills and kind encouragement. Last, right at home, I must say—as how could I not say?—that I owe the greatest thanks to my wife, Mary. We were driving down the street one day, and I was saying, for the umpteenth time, that I wasn’t sure that I could write this book. She turned to me and said, write it. So I did.

Introduction Fragments of the Home Front

World War II haunts the horror films of Val Lewton. He produced nine of these movies for RKO between 1942 and 1946: Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, The Leopard Man, and six others. Though none is about the war, it appears in them all the same, even if we never catch a clear glimpse of it. Like a ghost moving through the house, it slams doors and tips over the pottery, inverts pictures on the wall, and shatters windows with rocks never thrown. In movies celebrated for their portrayal of the unseen, the war is the singular invisible beast, the Damned Thing, that stalks around and bends the grass as we look in vain for shade of hide or hair. How is this so? Horror films were popular in the early 1940s, and that might seem to be the answer. People wanted to be scared when they were afraid. “During war, for some mysterious reason, people love to be frightened,” said Jacques Tourneur, who directed the first three films Lewton produced, Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, and The Leopard Man, all in 1942–43.1 Lewton agreed. “Strange to say, servicemen overseas seem to like the fantasy-mystery idea,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1945.2 When the war ended, the market for horror movies sharply declined, and Lewton never made another one after Bedlam, which he filmed in July and August 1945, just as fighting in the Pacific was concluding. The “mysterious demand” for fright that the New Republic film critic Manny Farber noted in 1944 ended with the hostilities.3 1

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Edmund Wilson, writing in the New Yorker in 1944, offered the two sharpest explanations for the craze: First, the longing for mystic experience which seems always to manifest itself in periods of social confusion, when political progress is blocked: as soon as we feel that our own world has failed us, we try to find evidence for another world; second, the instinct to inoculate ourselves against panic at the real horrors loose on the earth—Gestapo and G.P.U., tank attacks and airplane bombings, houses rigged with booby-traps—by injections of imaginary horror, which soothe us with the momentary illusion that the forces of madness and murder may be tamed and compelled to provide us with a mere dramatic entertainment.

Wilson called it “homeopathic horror,” and Cat People and other Lewton pictures met this public appetite.4 The Seventh Victim and The Ghost Ship, The Body Snatcher and Isle of the Dead, to name several, took their place alongside the productions of other Hollywood studios such as Universal and Paramount, all aiming to capitalize on this market for “spinechilling nights, titillated nerves, and goose pimples,” as Boris Karloff put it in the introduction to his 1943 anthology, Tales of Terror.5 But this desire to scare does not give Lewton’s work its deepest energy, nor does it explain how the war flows through his films. As many people have noticed, Lewton’s movies are usually not very scary. “Val Lewton is the man responsible—for horror pictures with no horror to speak of,” wrote Barbara Berch in Collier’s early in 1944.6 Even allowing for the erudite Karloff’s distinction between horror and terror—“the terms are literally poles apart in their true meaning and impact”—Lewton’s films are rarely horrifying or terrifying but more often gentle, sweet, and sad.7 Lewton had what Farber called “an almost delicate distrust of excitement.”8 The Curse of the Cat People, with its lurid studio-assigned title, is actually the story of a little girl and her imaginary/ghostly companion, and it would have been better called by Lewton’s preferred title, Amy and Her Friend. Home front audiences were shocked from time to time by some of Lewton’s well-designed scares, but this is not the films’ most profound allusion to wartime. The war lurks in Lewton’s films in a subtler way. It appears in their melancholy beauty, the visual poetry that James Agee singled out in 1944, when he called The Curse of the Cat People and Lewton’s juvenile delinquency film Youth Runs Wild (one of two nonhorror pictures he made during the war) “the best fiction films of the year,” and that later admirers ranging from the Argentine novelist Manuel Puig to the filmmaker Martin Scorsese have also noted.9 At the center of this beauty is

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a logic, a set of visual effects, that rigorously recurs in all the producer’s films and helps to stamp these indisputably corporate productions as Lewton’s. This set of effects is their repeated imagery of immobilized figures—I call them icons—standing statuesque and alone. These figures are often played by minor actors all but forgotten now, and the roles themselves are minor and sometimes speechless. In the one case when a star performs in this iconic role—Simone Simon as Irena in The Curse of the Cat People—she appears in only a few short scenes. Even in their most exalted manifestations the icons appear during just a tiny fraction of the films’ sixty-six- to seventy-nine-minute running times. But they are granted an extraordinary visual intensity that makes them stand out like nothing else in these movies. Plots flow around these frozen figures like colored smoke around a stationary object in a wind tunnel. Made to look carved or painted, they show a desire to arrest the flow of images that constitutes a film, to give the viewer something to look at that is thick and dense, like stone or metal—something that might endure amid the ephemeral stream of pictures. What we see with such intensity are figures of social and psychological deprivation, figures even of death itself. Together they constitute Lewton’s vocabulary of the tragic, a static visual language of grief haunted, as we will see, by the war. These icons stand out amid American visual culture of that time. On the home front the war remained curiously abstract, almost as if it were not happening. Agee wrote in 1943 that Americans at home “remain untouched, virginal, prenatal” about the war, and that “our great majority will emerge from the war almost as if it had never taken place.”10 The literary historian Paul Fussell notes that during the war “analysis, criticism, evaluation, and satire yield[ed] to celebration, charm, and niceness,” and that “increasingly, the tone that [was] felt appropriate to wartime” was “folksy, coy, over-simplified, [and] self-satisfied.”11 The War Department contributed to the situation, as the historian George Roeder notes, by censoring all images of dead, wounded, and disturbed American servicemen until late 1943, when it realized that the public’s widespread ignorance about the brutality of the fighting was a potential drain on morale.12 War movies were rarely a help, especially prior to 1944. Early that year Farber described how the classic war film formula sterilized and abstracted death: At an early point in the picture the hero finds he is fighting a righteous war, because he sees the Germans or the Japanese taking blood from children to use for their own soldiers, firing on survivors of ships they have torpedoed, behaving ruthlessly in Pearl Harbor or Czechoslovakia, ripping up a paint-

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Introduction ing by Picasso or the house that Tolstoy lived in. The only conflicts in the pictures arise out of someone’s discontent with the way things are going, e.g., that he should have been promoted instead of flunked out of pilot school, that he is too conceited, surly and know-it-all to be liked, or that he is asked to be officer of the day too many times in a row. . . . This conflict is resolved during the first battle . . . or when he finds that the captain is not the hard-boiled egg he supposed, because the captain asked him to play parchesi. . . . Usually there is a father in the battle whose son is killed, or has to have his leg cut off, which is meant to imply that the war is as grim as could be imagined.

War movies, Farber concluded, were “slight.”13 In this vacuum Lewton appeared with memorable figures that bring the fact of tragedy intensely before the American public. Not that the icons are simple allegories. If they were, they would succumb to the formulas outlined by Farber. They carry no flags or guns, and they never speak of the war, when they speak at all. Instead they exemplify the “precise, inexhaustible poetry” of Lewton’s images, the quality the film scholar Kim Newman notes when he writes that each viewing of Cat People “has revealed some new aspect, some unnoticed detail carefully crafted, some resonance perhaps unintended.”14 Agee summarized this aesthetic when he wrote in 1945 that “somewhere close to the essence of the power of moving pictures is the fact that they can give you things to look at, clear of urging or comment, and so ordered that they are radiant with illimitable suggestions of meaning and mystery.” His topic was John Huston’s combat documentary The Battle of San Pietro and, more precisely, a “simple, wordless use of children” near the end of the film that struck him as “the first great passage of war poetry that has got on the screen.”15 Lewton’s icons are like that: each presents an infinity of connotation. They are versions of his belief in the suggestive power of darkness, the allure of the unseen over what is plainly visible. But in the icons this illimitable darkness resolves into exact shapes, and though it continues to palpitate mysteriously, it also takes coherent form, and draws this coherence from the war. How this is so is the subject of the four chapters that follow: the first on Simone Simon’s and Ann Carter’s roles in The Curse of the Cat People; the second on Skelton Knaggs’s performance as the Finn in The Ghost Ship; the third on Darby Jones as Carre-Four in I Walked with a Zombie; and the fourth on Glenn Vernon as the Gilded Boy in Bedlam. These minor figures visualize the murmurs of grief and lost gestures of mourning, transient and sensuous as the touch of a finger on nylon, that

Introduction

5

moved beneath the home front’s official slogans. They try to commemorate the inchoate sway of sadness that otherwise remained inarticulate and concealed amid the unsettling gleam of brave smiles and clenched teeth. The great visual intensity still discernible in these solitary icons shows Lewton’s wish to find a portrayal more durable and true than the belting bright tunes of the Andrews Sisters, the pious intonations of sacrifice, and the home front’s whole mellifluous amnesiac cavalcade. This means that Lewton’s films are not simply more or less good horror movies but among the most eloquent expressions of the war years in America. They take their place alongside pictures by Vincente Minnelli, Elia Kazan, Alfred Hitchcock, and a few others able to hit occasionally on a wartime sense of sadness and trauma, but they also exceed these more exalted works by providing a sustained memorial imagery in film after film, icon after icon. Lewton (1904–51) both was and was not a likely figure to produce these memorable tragic figures. He came to the United States with his mother and sister in 1909 from his native Russia at the urging of his aunt, the Broadway actress Alla Nazimova, herself a recent immigrant. He embraced the new culture, changing his name from Vladimir Leventon to Val Lewton, and soon became an expert in the more low-brow American arts. Living in and around Manhattan in the 1920s and early 1930s, he generated advertisement copy, movie publicity, radio scripts, tabloid journalism, and pornography.16 Between 1931 and 1934, he published a quick succession of skillful pulp novels using either his own name or the pseudonyms Carlos Keith, Cosmo Forbes, and Herbert Kerkow: The Fateful Star Murder, Rape of Glory, No Bed of Her Own, Yearly Lease, Where the Cobra Sings, A Laughing Woman, 4 Wives, and This Fool, Passion. The novels are knowingly half literary: their revelations come equally from the Bible and transparent negligees, sometimes in the same chapter. They show Lewton’s extensive reading in Western literature and his proudly asserted insignificance within it. There never was a more effortless and self-loathing adaptation of Joseph Conrad than Where the Cobra Sings, Lewton’s tale of lust and jealousy on Cambodian tea plantations. Lewton continued his career as a minor man of minor culture in Hollywood. He moved there in 1934 to work for the producer David O. Selznick and served for the next eight years as his story editor, first at MGM and then at Selznick International Pictures, helping plan and develop such films as A Tale of Two Cities, Anna Karenina, Gone with the Wind, and Rebecca. Even when RKO hired him to produce his own

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Introduction

horror films in 1942, Lewton remained a minor player. He openly borrowed plots from previous work—I Walked with a Zombie, as many commentators have noted, is an adaptation of Jane Eyre—and he found himself working in arguably the most degraded of all Hollywood genres.17 “I know so surely that whatever small talent I have in this field will be broken and ruined by working in cheap things, just as surely as my writing was ruined,” he wrote to his mother and sister upon accepting the job.18 And though he was not ruined by this job—it made his reputation and allowed him to produce some of the most gorgeous imagery ever to appear in Hollywood film—it is not as though even then he was some brilliant man of letters deftly inserting deep philosophy into a vulgar form. Newman is right to note that “too much writing about Lewton is embarrassed that such a tasteful man should have made horror pictures, and many of the anecdotes about [the making of Cat People] suggest some tension between a philistine front office eager for a lurid cat werewolf movie and a daring band of film-makers intent on slipping them a serious bit of psychiatry instead.”19 Lewton was a writer of pulp novels, after all, and though he really was far more erudite, cultured, and humane than his bosses at RKO, he also relished the low, the little, and the tawdry, and he was much better at it than any of his superiors. The studio assigned the lurid titles of his movies, but Lewton was inventive here, too. A cultured lowness was his métier. A character in his novel A Laughing Woman plays King Mark’s lament from Tristan and Isolde on the organ and then pulls out a gun in “ ‘the grand tradition of the movies and the tabloids.’. . . With his left hand he depressed the basso profundo stop. With his right hand he brought the revolver to his temple. The booming note of the organ shook the heavily-framed pictures on the walls.”20 The two sounds—tabloid gunshot and deep old-world tragedy—always blend in Lewton’s work. So how could someone of this modest aesthetic ambition—even antiambition—make some of the most vital and lasting art of the war years? The answer is that minorness gave Lewton the chance to say the most. This is true for reasons beyond his comfort in smaller-budget pictures, his oft-noted temperamental aversion to grandiosity, pomp, splendor. In ways deeply informed by his Russian background, he was able to take the foundation of the forgotten—the brief moment usually featuring a minor actor—and turn it into a shrine of tragic singularity. The little scene, the bit player, the spare setting all combine to make a rhetoric of insignificance—brevity, obscurity, cheapness—lovingly ex-

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plored with a complete faith that this triviality could yield a lasting and powerful statement. Manny Farber, in his 1957 essay “Underground Films,” put it best when he wrote that low-genre filmmakers including Lewton did “their best shooting . . . from the deepest, worst angle . . . with material that is hopelessly worn out and childish.” In it they were able to find “the unheralded ripple of physical experience, the tiny morbidly life-worn detail,” something “hard and formful.”21 Lewton’s icons take this shape. The first scene of Lewton’s first film, Cat People, exemplifies these tiny frozen moments. In it Oliver Reed introduces himself to the Serbian fashion artist Irena Dubrovna at the Manhattan zoo. They chat for a few moments as she draws pictures of a panther in its cage. As they leave the scene, the camera lingers behind to focus on a failed drawing Irena has discarded as it is borne along on the breeze, scuttled among the leaves on the ground (fig. 1). The drawing, which shows the panther impaled on a giant sword, is just a detail, a brief moment in the film, yet Lewton and Tourneur make sure that we take notice. On one level, they concentrate on it because it portends the whole story, providing an exact transcription of Irena’s innermost drives, even as it also anticipates Lewton’s career-long preoccupations with forces of irrationality.22 Yet on another level, the focus on Irena’s drawing indicates something less thematic and hence more important. I agree with Agee that Lewton’s weaknesses were “romantic-literary,” his strengths “poetic and cinematic,” and this is a book about Lewton’s strengths.23 Irena’s drawing is most compelling because it is a static picture that moves, a perfect augury of the kinetic immobility that recurs in Lewton’s films—an emblem of his penchant to go against the motion of motion pictures and to let states of stillness be swept cinematically along, like the drawing, without ever losing their primal immobility. There is always a strangely powerful visual poetry to these stilled images in Lewton’s films. Irena’s drawing indicates something else about these static moments. The drawing is trash, the last of three pictures Irena rips up in the scene. “I’m not an artist,” she tells Oliver—a highly revealing line for anyone to speak in the first minutes of the first Lewton film. “May I see it?” Oliver asks about one of the drawings. “Oh no,” responds Irena. “It is not good. If I let you see it you might never want to know any artists, ever.” Says Oliver, “I’m afraid it’d have to be pretty bad to do that.” Just a few months earlier, Lewton had written to his mother and sister upon getting the RKO job: “I’m to work on such wretched and uninteresting material”—and here he was, proclaiming himself “no artist” at the very

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Figure 1. Cat People (1942): Irena’s abandoned drawing.

beginning of his first film.24 And long before that Lewton liked to note the trashiness of his work: the final words of his novel The Fateful Star Murder, an orange book with black lettering, feature a character throwing an orange book with black lettering onto the ground and exclaiming, “Open that door and kick that book out into the street. . . . God damn these cheap and ready writers!”25 Cat People’s opening scene follows in this spirit. The film is meditating on its own disposability almost before it begins. It even includes a placard above a wastebasket that reads as a hopeful but mocking directive from the producer to himself as he set out on his career making B movies: “Let no one say, and say it to your shame, that all was beauty here, until you came.” Yet as any viewer of these films knows, trash was beauty for Lewton, and this first scene shows how. The wastebasket and its saying are signs of American proper-mindedness—perfect expressions of what Fussell calls “the self-righteous popular tone of 1942,” when it was the duty “of all virtuous people to teach lessons in correct thought and behavior to others.”26 Oliver, the plain American, puts trash in its place—he throws not one but two of Irena’s discarded drawings away without bothering to look at them. But at the end of the scene the camera stays with Irena’s

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abandoned third picture, left torn and strewn upon the ground among the windblown leaves, overlaid with shadows of the panther’s cage, as the actors vacate the scene. Beauty for Lewton lies in what is failed, shameful, not good enough. The scene is all but a plea for us not to put trash in its proper place but to attend to it where it lies. It asks us not to exercise the trim and decorous taxonomic impulses of the kindly philistine Oliver, who shuttles reflexively between trash and art, knowing the location of each. Instead, the forgotten still picture, made by a foreigner and seen for an instant, tells an important story. Recounting that story means examining Lewton’s letters, scripts, and above all his novels. In their focus on trashiness and states of stillness, these books help us recognize the forgotten powerful moments in the films when everything comes to a stop.27 Telling the story also means consulting the work of many scholars and critics, four in particular: Alex Woloch, for his brilliant theory of minor characters in the novel, put forth in his book The One vs. the Many; Fussell, for his acid commentary on the feel-good banality of American home front culture in his book Wartime (1989); and Agee and Farber, who reviewed films during the war for the Nation and the New Republic, respectively. In their different ways, both critics provided a rich commentary on the movies and the moviegoing experience on the home front, and both singled out Lewton for perceptive praise. Telling the story also means going against the received wisdom about Lewton’s films. By now an ironclad set of accounts explains the producer’s work: he made the most of small budgets; he emphasized the unconscious motivations of human beings; he favored darkness and the unseen generally so his audiences could imagine horror instead of see it. None of this is wrong; the trouble at this point is that it is too correct. The standard view of Lewton, with its informative but ready-made explanations, forestalls other ways of looking, consigning the best moments of this strange and difficult filmmaker to the hallowed and dusty spaces of “Art,” where all the wisdom is clear and one need only recite a set of truisms in order to see—really, not to see—the most powerful qualities of these films. The problem of these all-too-accurate views is especially relevant now. Like the art historian T. J. Clark in his work on abstract expressionism, I believe that the 1940s film industry is distant enough now that we no longer need stand in thrall to its self-understandings.28 With distance comes critical detachment, and we can begin to see important connotations that producers, directors, actors, and audiences did not per-

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ceive, or perceived only occasionally or in fragmentary ways. My claim is that the most resonant and powerful aspect of Lewton’s films—their visual language of life and death in wartime—is only just now starting to become fully visible. Even his most insightful critics, Farber and Agee, could not put their finger on it. This language has been there from the first, awaiting discovery like a message encoded in special ink that requires a chemical bath to be discerned, or like a body that has been concealed behind the plaster and lathing that finally, with the deterioration of the wall, begins to show through the cracks. This is true not just for Lewton’s films but for other wartime movies I examine in the pages that follow—comedies, musicals, epics. They have all come to look refreshingly strange now that they are so clearly artifacts of the past. It makes special sense that the war would shape Lewton’s films. He had strong views about the conflict. “I’m convinced it’s the return to barbarism—the savage wars that mark the end of a cycle of civilization,” he wrote on November 30, 1939, the day the Soviet Union attacked Finland. “It will be horrible to see a pax germanicus saddled on the world,” he wrote in March 1940, even more pessimistic. “I think Europe will become a sort of Spartan state, with all the conquered nations as slave states. And then, if we’ve managed to stay out of the war that long, will come the really titanic struggle, the Armageddon, with all the Western hemisphere and the British colonies pitted against Europe. It seems like the end of the world.” Under the circumstances, “the quicker we get into the war or give aid to the Allies, the better.”29 No wonder Cat People was to have started with Nazi tanks rumbling into Irena’s Serbian village. (The idea was dropped.)30 No wonder that Lewton’s two nonhorror films of 1944, Mademoiselle Fifi and Youth Runs Wild, both directly concern animosity on the home front. If the war never does literally appear in the horror films, it lurks there all the same, and, I believe, it is now coming into plain view as the source of their pathos. Recounting this story, last, means studying the many people besides Lewton who contributed to his films. Agee and Farber treated Lewton’s movies as singularly his own, but of course this is not entirely accurate. Lewton developed the stories, wrote scripts, chose actors, and decided myriad other details, and he probably even exceeded the crucial creative role of the producer that Thomas Schatz calls the hallmark of Hollywood filmmaking in the studio era.31 Movies such as Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie, the film critic Robin Wood noted long ago, “are

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usually regarded, and with some justice,” as Lewton’s, “with much of their taste, intelligence, and discretion . . . attributable to his planning and supervision.”32 He was even on the set a lot of the time, according to Albert E. van Schmus, the second assistant director on The Leopard Man.33 As Farber commented in 1944, “Each film has a different director and writing crew, but they look enough alike to make you feel that Lewton controlled the work on all of them.”34 Even so, other creative people naturally made major contributions, and their work is important to my argument: Tourneur, the director of the first three films; Nicholas Musuraca, the director of photography for many of them; DeWitt Bodeen, the screenwriter for a few; Albert D’Agostino and Walter Keller, the set designers; and Roy Webb, the musical composer, among others. The most important artistic collaborators, however, are the minor actors and actresses often playing Lewton’s iconic roles. They are important enough to warrant examining their work even in films and plays not made by Lewton. In these other productions they established a range of affects from which directors and producers could choose to create the characters they wanted. Understanding this spectrum of possibilities helps us see how Lewton emphasized certain connotations of his minor actors while suppressing others; how he depressed certain keys and left others untouched, often producing a sweeter music with the same instrument than other producers and directors at the time. Carter, Knaggs, Jones, and Vernon all had the greatest moments of their modest careers in Lewton’s movies. Because Lewton favored minor players for his iconic roles—actors who sometimes appear uncredited in his movies and in those of others— preparing this book has meant watching seventy-minute, ninety-minute, and two-hour features by other filmmakers, waiting for the ten or twenty speechless seconds in which Skelton Knaggs or Darby Jones might appear. It has also meant taking great pleasure in watching Lewton’s own films over and over again, reviewing the moments when these actors take on an iconic power, and considering how these moments still send out signals of wartime. No doubt there is an oddity to this process—to this sense of excitement as the minor player in the minor role in the forgotten or near-forgotten movie finally makes an appearance—an oddity I have felt myself, as my seemingly unmotivated exclamations of wonder raise eyebrows among fellow researchers or members of my family. But I trust, too, that there is something promising in this strangeness, for where but in the most overlooked corners, and in the briefest moments,

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does one expect to find something like the past? The critic George L. K. Morris wrote in 1938 about Hans Arp’s little collages of torn black paper: “A broken piece of pottery will often bring us closer to Greece than the Laocoön.”35 The four chapters that follow attend to Val Lewton’s fragments of the home front.

chapter one

The Madonna of the Backyard Simone Simon and Ann Carter in The Curse of the Cat People

Lewton’s fiction abounds in still figures. Olive Darcy, in A Laughing Woman, “could sit for hours before a mirror, utterly motionless, her eyes held by the reflected image of herself.” When she suffers facial paralysis as the result of an injury, the immobility only repeats her original state. In the same novel, Mary Lawrence watches her boyfriend depart on a train: “Mary stood, silent and motionless, as he swung himself aboard. Her arms hung down straight at her sides, the tears flowed down either cheek.”1 Amarah, the Cambodian woman in Where the Cobra Sings, “sat motionless, looking out over the water,” later “stood rooted to the spot,” at another point was “transfixed” and “mute, unable to move,” and in still another scene was “as motionless as though carved out of ivory.”2 This Fool, Passion opens with the photographer Alex Sablin asking his model Barbara Tredwell to “hold the pose, please,” and later Barbara “posed, standing motionless for several minutes at a time.”3 This same stillness dominates Lewton’s films, where it appears often in the form of ceremonially isolated figures. Take the case of Irena Dubrovna, played by Simone Simon, in Lewton’s sixth and gentlest RKO production, the misleadingly titled The Curse of the Cat People, which began filming in late August 1943 and was released in March of the following year. Outside on Christmas Eve in a snowy backyard, Irena stands like a statue as she sings a French lullaby beneath a frozen tree (fig. 2). Inside a group of festive carolers gathers to sing around the piano. The two songs play off one another—one solitary and crystalline in the 13

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The Madonna of the Backyard

night air, the other hearty and warm in the bright living room. Indoors only the little girl Amy hears the lullaby. She goes out into the cold to be with Irena, who is either her ghostly friend or a figment of her imagination. We see Irena first in the long shot and then closer up (fig. 3), each time for a few seconds in which she barely moves. A Hollywood Christmas during the war usually meant “potent scenarios of family unity, reunited lovers, and a return to the customs and traditions of an idealized past.”4 The Curse of the Cat People, however, gives us not only the warmhearted carolers, the tree, and the presents, but also a dead or imaginary woman standing alone and motionless in the snow. What is this isolated stillness about, and how does it connect to death and imagination? And how was the combination of these things about the war? The answer starts with Irena’s vividly sculptural appearance. Many factors conspire to immobilize her in the scene, intensifying her stillness. One is the lighting. Nicholas Musuraca, the director of photography for The Curse of the Cat People, used lighting to make objects appear “sculpted,” according to the film historian James Naremore, to give them “a certain dimensionality or sculptural effect.” Irena, as photographed by Musuraca, seems chiseled from her surroundings, a filmic equivalent to Amarah standing “as motionless as though carved out of ivory.” The sculptural figure conjured by Irena’s appearance and pose and the Christmas Eve setting is the Virgin Mary—the “Lady of Lourdes,” the PM film reviewer John McManus called her in 19445—as represented in iconic sculpture that lacks even the illusion of movement. Lewton is interested not in the sculptor Bernini but in a more medieval type of artist, whose figures, in static poses, reiterate the primal stillness of the stone. A comparison emphasizes the point. On the day after Thanksgiving in 1940, Lewton hosted a supper at his home in Pacific Palisades for Alec Miller, an older British sculptor who had come to live in California. Most of Miller’s work had been destroyed in the bombing of Coventry cathedral on November 14, “but he was so completely philosophic and brave about its destruction that I was completely taken with him,” Lewton wrote to his mother and sister.6 Miller’s Virgin and Child at Tewkesbury Abbey (fig. 4), completed in 1939, calls to mind Irena’s cowl, long fluted ankle-length robe, and columnar verticality, with each figure uninterrupted by the extension of arms or hands outside the compass of the cloaked torso. Miller’s work helps us see how Lewton’s Irena alludes to a type of iconic sculpture in which even simulated movement is stilled.

Figure 2. The Curse of the Cat People (1944): Irena (Simone Simon) in the backyard.

Figure 3. The Curse of the Cat People: Irena in the backyard, medium shot.

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Figure 4. Alec Miller, Virgin and Child, 1939. Tewkesbury Abbey, Tewkesbury, England. By permission of the Vicar and Churchwardens of Tewkesbury Abbey.

This exaggerated lack of animation extends to the entire backyard in which Irena stands. The tree trunk doubles her body, the two playing off one another’s inertness. The icicles repeat the cold tone and triangular forms of her open robe and the gravity of the long tassel on her chest, expressing her own frozen stillness. The snow throughout implies a principle of cold fixity, a complete lack of animation, that spreads across the scene, filling it to every last corner. “The room hung over the sleepers, pressing its own silence upon their breathing, locking their lax limbs with

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the weight of its own inertia,” Lewton wrote in A Laughing Woman.7 The movie’s Christmas Eve scene duplicates this mix of scenic and human inertness, with Lewton striving to take literally the idea that on that evening nothing stirs. The scene’s relentless frontality does its own deanimating work. There are no strong diagonals to speak of, nothing to make the eye move rapidly into space. Instead, Simon faces the camera, like the tree, bench, and the chain-link fence in the background, producing a static, flattening effect. The fence, which is surprisingly prominent when one sees the film at a large-screen movie theater, also forecloses the illusion of deep space, working with the background trees to curtail any deep perspectival rush into the distance and therefore doing its part to create a shallow, chilled world of intensive inactivity. This flat frontality is still stronger in the second, closer shot of Irena. The effect is compelling but odd. For one thing, it goes against the whole principle of what might be called acting. Howard Barnes of the New York Herald-Tribune got it right in 1944 when he wrote that “Simone Simon poses seductively in ghostly raiment, but she does not do much acting.”8 Simon’s pose calls to mind an article Lewton wrote for MGM publicity in the late 1920s called “Actors Like Trees.” Claiming to quote Lionel Barrymore on the craft of silent-film acting (one suspects that Lewton fabricated his copy to meet a deadline and express a personal view, as he often did), the article says: “The protagonist must be . . . like a tree, passive enough until the wind begins to blow. . . . Many poets have found inspiration from an oak or from a willow. But the actor must not only find inspiration, but also a very good example of acting in the tree.”9 The advice of “Barrymore” sounds incredible— how far from Stanislavsky would it be possible to go?—but it predicts the penchant in Lewton’s films for stillness, especially Irena’s. Even more striking, the inertia of the Christmas Eve scene goes against the principle of motion pictures themselves. Ever since the Lumière brothers filmed the leaves fluttering in the breeze on a Parisian street in the 1890s, the portrayal of movement has been an integral, even defining, aspect of cinema. This was never more so than at its origin, notes the film historian Tom Gunning, when cinema seemed almost a pure “art of motion” designed not to reveal particular contents so much as to let loose the depiction of movement itself, considered for its own sake, as “a plasmatic energy that creates forms rather than simply moves them about.”10 Hollywood film in the 1940s had largely divested motion

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of these magical qualities, or rather had transferred the magic to narrative itself, which by then had become a comparably “plasmatic” force, a sheer and autonomous principle of action and acceleration, of constant development, where things were supposed to happen one after another, all the time, quickly, with a downright profligacy of energy. This aversion to slowness and cerebration—this sense, as Farber put it in 1944, that “psychological, economic, and social factors are subordinated almost out of sight to chase-fight, chase-fight, chase-fight”11—activates the pace of footsteps, the speed of trains, the swiveling of the camera itself, and countless other mobilities in films from that era. Farber was referring to war movies, but the principle of narrative action was discernible in a thousand places: the fast-talking dialogue of Billy Wilder’s characters, the slapstick contortions of Preston Sturges’s players, even (in an entirely different register) the stock footage of rampaging water buffalo beheld vertiginously from an airplane window in the opening of the African epic Sundown (1941) and again at the start of Tarzan’s New York Adventure the next year, an effect of “Action! Action! Action!” supposed to draw us into the film from the start. In these cases and many others in 1940s Hollywood film (take your pick), narrative movement comes across as a primal force preexisting any of its particular forms, like a deep communal well from which any filmmaker could draw a fuel to drive any vehicle under the sun: a fast-driving cabbie, a parachuting German airman, Tarzan swinging through the jungle. Walter Neff’s snappy dialogue in Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944) comes from the same source as Tarzan’s vine trapeze or the sprinting of the frightened African animals: an imperative bordering on compulsion that a film contain “intense activity”12 and, like Neff, never stop until the end. The value of the more baroque types of action—the running buffalo, Tarzan, the fetish of speed in Wilder and Sturges—is that they are so energetic, so resistant to sedation, that they call attention to the excesses of this principle of narrative frenzy as it slops over the sides of the vessel supposed to contain it. More dignified narrative action, based on a more refined comportment of moving bodies and objects and on a slowerpaced plot, uses this same plasmatic narrative energy but channels it more decorously into forms where it does not stand out as a vine swung for its own sake. Instead it becomes naturalized, subsumed into a story that erases storytelling speed as an autonomous principle even as it relies on that momentum to set characters and plots on their way. But around Neff and Tarzan and the exploding Nazi half-track there is a

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penumbra of excess akin to a comic book’s spike-edged clouds of exclamation: a thunderous aversion to quietude, a mandorla of crackling narrative energy that cannot be contained, will never be tranquilized, that surrounds characters and actions in many films made during the war. But then there is Irena and her frozen setting. She sings her backyard song in the type of scene Farber must have had in mind when he referred to Lewton’s “almost delicate distrust of excitement.” Even the moments in his films that contain the greatest audience-provoking action—the sudden sound of a bus’s air brakes in Cat People, for example, as it comes to a full stop—tellingly center on moments of arrest. The film theorist Noel Carroll writes that the popularity of horror movies owes to their pleasurable development of the story toward cathartic moments of shock, but the shocking moments in Lewton’s films repel the rest of the story to stand in immobilized isolation.13 Irena’s Christmas Eve scene is not meant to be scary, but its arrested action works like that of Lewton’s fright scenes: it, too, tries to freeze the frame, to create an intense impression that stands apart from the narrative. Why, again, the stillness, and what does it mean? Russian icons provide the answer. The émigré Lewton knew these static, front-facing images. In Rape of Glory (1931), a tale of brawling and lust set in medieval Russia, he writes of the “ikonas” hanging on the walls of a cathedral. The minstrel Nikita, exiting the Kremlin at the Spasski Gate, “doff[s] his cap to the ikon of Christ in the arch as he went through” and lifts his cap to the image once again when he returns.14 In This Fool, Passion the Russian photographer Sablin apologizes to Barbara Tredwell for having no Russian objects in his studio: “And I haven’t any ikonas.”15 In A Laughing Woman, Brenner displays a picture of the true icon, Veronica’s veil, in his New York City apartment, and another Veronica’s veil appears on the wall next to a secretary’s desk in The Fateful Star Murder.16 Lewton’s native country remained a strong topic for his imagination, and his numerous references to “ikonas” reveal the effects of Nikolai Leskov’s “The Sealed Angel” (1873) and other nineteenth-century stories that sparked what the art historian Hans Belting has described as the “rediscovery of the icon in Russia.”17 The Christmas Eve scene corresponds to these icons in several ways. The shot depicting Irena at a distance matches the format of Byzantine figure-ground icons such as the famous sixth-century mosaic of Saint Apollinare in Classe (fig. 5), a design repeated in the Russian icons that drew on Byzantine examples beginning in the tenth century. In each case, a figure poses statically, frontally. In each case, many of the other objects

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Figure 5. Basilica of S. Apollinare in Classe, Ravenna, sixth century. Mosaic. Photo courtesy Scala/Art Resource.

in the shallow space—the mosaic’s little plants and the film’s evenly spaced trees in the backyard, the mosaic’s large cross and the film’s large oak—repeat the figure’s frontal address to the spectator. The second, closer, shot of Irena mimics icons of the Virgin Mary in Russia and elsewhere, pictures in which, seen at full or half length, she poses centrally in a compressed and almost flattened space (fig. 6). “Jesus Christ, don’t she look like a holy picture!” says Jean Daly about the motionless Olive Darcy in A Laughing Woman. “A Madonna,” confirms one of their acquaintances.18 The same is true of Irena in the backyard. Like these icons, Irena serves a nonnarrative purpose. Icons do not tell stories but rather aspire to put us in the presence of the being they represent. Instead of deep spaces permeated by far-flung actions, they give us a flattened space, virtually a nonspace in which static figures solemnly demand the viewer’s direct engagement. No doubt the shallow space intensifies the Christmas Eve scene, our sense that it puts us in the living presence of Simone Simon the performer and not just her narrative-ridden representational cipher. This issue is hugely important, but for now we need to address the concept of foreignness, and specifically Russianness, that Irena’s iconicity raises.

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Figure 6. Anonymous, The Virgin of the Great Panagia, Called the Virgin Orant of Yaroslavl, twelfth century. Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow. Photo courtesy Scala/Art Resource.

Russian themes were popular among Hollywood filmmakers during the war. The North Star, Mission to Moscow, Song of Russia, and Days of Glory, among other movies from 1943–44, all portrayed the Russians as a good-hearted, heroic people not unlike Americans. Communism was strictly off-limits—The North Star (1943), a tale of peasant revolt against the Nazis, never mentions the fateful word,19 and the film shows Dana Andrews, Farley Granger, and others cavorting in Oklahoma-style

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rituals of rustic togetherness before the Nazis appear strafing, pillaging, and finally siphoning the blood of schoolchildren. But Lewton, as far back as the early 1930s, embraced other sturdy conventions of Russianness. One was the story of high manly adventure fueled by swords, women, and drink. The Cossack whoring, backslapping, and mustachio twizzling of Rape of Glory emulates the fiction of Nikolai Gogol in his carousing-and-fisticuffs mode. Indeed, Lewton was brought to Hollywood in 1934 as an expert in this type of Russianness to help write the script for Selznick’s proposed film adaptation of Gogol’s Taras Bulba, the locus classicus for Rape of Glory’s vodka-on-the-bodice tales of fornication in the hayloft and scimitars to the skull. He also worked as story editor on Selznick’s Anna Karenina (1936), with its boisterous opening scene in which Russian officers literally drink themselves under the table. Other types of Russianness inform the Christmas Eve scene, however. One was the Russia of supernatural folklore. In his advisory role to Selznick and the scriptwriter S. N. Behrman for Anna Karenina, Lewton proposed a scene in which Anna would read a poem to her son, Sergei, from “a little book of Pushkin’s verses.” The poem Lewton had in mind in his memo to Behrman of March 30, 1935, an adaptation of the prologue of Pushkin’s “Ruslan and Liudmila,” anticipates Irena in the backyard: In the forest—in the Russian forest, is an oak tree, great and green. To the rounded trunk a cat is tethered with a chain of golden sheen. Passing to the left with tread of velvet, an ancient song the wise cat sings. When she goes to the right she speaks, telling her tale of wondrous things. Of the forest Leichi and of the Bogatirs, and of Ruslan and Lyudmila. And I have been there and have heard her.20

In The Curse of the Cat People, Irena plays the ghost of the cat woman from Lewton’s first film, Cat People, and in the Christmas Eve scene she is like Pushkin’s cat beneath the oak tree, singing and “telling her tale of wondrous things.” In the same way, the witnessing tone of the last line— “And I have been there and have heard her”—prefigures the little girl Amy’s impassioned protests to her father that she really has seen the supernatural creature in the backyard. Lewton was absorbed by this type of Russian folklore. He read Gogol’s supernatural stories in Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka to pass the time while serving as an all-night air-

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raid warden in Brentwood in 1943, or so he told a reporter.21 And his memo to Selznick of March 28, 1935, makes clear how far he would go to get such fables into a film: the little boy Sergei could “act out the parts of the tree, the golden squirrel, the miraculous cat and so on.”22 Selznick and Behrman ignored Lewton’s counsel—there is no such scene in the film. They also mostly ignored the specific lines of the Pushkin poem. In the film Frederic March, as Vronsky, speaks just two of the poem’s lines, both from an alternate version provided by Lewton: “And the breath of Russia lies sweet, and sweet over all the place broods the soul of Russia.”23 But the fable of the oak tree would come to life in Lewton’s fairytale film some nine years later. There was another, sadder, type of Russianness, and it, too, finds a place in the Christmas Eve scene. During the war various filmmakers focused on this convention. “I always thought Russians were sad and melancholy people—you know, sitting around and brooding about their souls,” says the symphony conductor Robert Meredith in Gregory Ratoff’s Song of Russia (1943).24 Meredith, played by Robert Taylor, discovers that Russians are actually good-hearted people not unlike Americans, but Lewton thrived on the convention of the melancholic Russian, maybe because he was one himself. His most concentrated figure of this kind is the Russian émigré Sablin in This Fool, Passion (1934), a successful fashion photographer living in New York, haunted by gruesome memories of his days as a lieutenant fighting for the czar during the Russian Revolution. Sablin remembers standing in a wintry field, “staring at the scattered bodies in the snow, at the stiff, slim limbs and delicate breasts of young maidens, at the fuller bodies of women, and at the ribbed, thin chests of little boys. He looked at the corpse of one girl, dark hair like a silk fan across the snow, cheeks and belly already pinched in, concave with the hollowness of death. An expression of sadness came to his long face. . . . The whole white plain, with the living and the dead upon it, seemed very still.” He also remembers his fiancée, Irina Pavlovna, who unaccountably disappeared on the day they were to escape together. Failing to find her, Sablin says, “I wanted Irina to be dead. I found beauty and peace in death. I hoped to find her among the killed. . . . Whenever I heard of a massacre, of an accident in which many had been killed, I went there and I searched among the bodies. I wanted to know she was dead. I wanted to tear uncertainty and fear of unknown horrors out of my heart. I never found her. I found loneliness instead; it deadens this pain of not knowing.”25

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Sablin’s description informs the Christmas Eve scene. The woman out under the tree, Irena Dubrovna, is a Serbian character played by a French actress singing in French, but her relation to Sablin’s lost fiancée, Irina Pavlovna, is unmistakable. There is only one dead body in the backyard, that of the ghostly Irena—not the many corpses of Sablin’s battlefield description—but the empty, snowy stillness seems freighted with the specifically Russian sense of loneliness he describes. For Lewton, snow was a shorthand sign for Russian melancholy. “A light snow began to fall, and with it a shadow of gentle sadness crept into the stern, the laughing heart of Stenka Razin,” he wrote in Rape of Glory.26 Irena, alone in the backyard, echoes the loneliness of Sablin, not just at the scene of the slaughter, when “he felt suddenly . . . cut off . . . completely alone” as he gazed on the dead, but in America, where his new life made him “even more solitary than before,” at home neither in his adopted country nor in the thought of returning to what was now the Soviet Union. “There is no place for me,” he concludes. No one can “bring this deadness to life— make me feel alive and part of the living world.”27 Like Irena, Sablin is a solitary ghost. The Russian sadness of the Christmas Eve scene refers also to Lewton’s family, specifically his aunt, the famous Broadway and Hollywood actress Alla Nazimova, born Mariam Leventon in Yalta, Russia, in 1879. “My heart was born in a deep shadow,” Nazimova wrote in her account of growing up in the 1880s, a daughter of the frustrated and temperamental pharmacist Yakov Leventon.28 Being a Jew in the especially antiSemitic reign of Czar Alexander III was a heavy burden as well, as Nazimova’s biographer Gavin Lambert points out.29 Nazimova became an actress, adopted her stage name, and eventually got to New York, where for nearly forty years she drew on personal experience to depict the embittered sadness of Ibsen heroines. The same melancholy informed her last Hollywood roles, as the lonely and doomed Marquesa de Montemayor in The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1944) and as the Polish immigrant Sosia Koslowska in Since You Went Away (1944), Selznick’s magnum opus of the home front. In the Selznick film Nazimova’s character is a worker in a defense plant, extolling the virtues of America even as she sits before the film’s crude sign that hers is a prism of old-world tragedy: a large plate-glass window inscribed “Graveyard” (for graveyard shift) through which we see legions of defense workers walking to their jobs. Irena, in her own quieter graveyard that same year, is like a condensed, stilled version of Nazimova’s tragic persona. “I come from

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deep darkness,” she tells the little girl Amy, echoing the actress’s words: “My heart was born in a deep shadow.” At the same time, Irena’s treelike acting is a rejoinder to Nazimova’s flamboyant dramatic style and perhaps to her failure to remain sufficiently emblematic of Russian tragedy. Ever since she made her Broadway debut in a production of Hedda Gabler in 1906, Nazimova was a whirring, intensely active physical presence on stage and in film. She hardly let up even as she got older. During a 1939 production of A Month in the Country, the young actor Harry Ellerbe was astonished at the sixty-year-old actress’s demands that he throw her around with all his might during a confrontation scene, even in rehearsals.30 But that same year Lewton found his aunt’s hyperbolic acting style embarrassing and insufficiently grave. He wrote to his mother and sister that he had gotten “Aunt Alla” an audition in New York for the part of Mrs. Danvers in Hitchcock’s forthcoming Rebecca, but that she “so over-acted, gave so humorless and macabre an interpretation of the part that it brought laughter to the projection room.” In the same letter Lewton expressed his annoyance with his famous aunt for being out of touch with the old country. Nazimova’s older brother, Volodya, had visited her home in Port Chester, New York, but she reported to a friend who relayed her feelings to an annoyed Lewton that “he was the most boring old man she had ever met, who didn’t even comment on the great city of New York and could only sit and talk about old times in Russia. She swore . . . that she would never have him out again.”31 Irena, like Sablin, represents the old-world pathos and stillness Lewton felt his famously fast-paced aunt had tried to abandon. Above all, it is Irena’s iconic form that incarnates this stasis and even deadness. The Russian icon “derives not all that distantly from the Egyptian portraits of the dead, placed in mummy cases, so as to be visible from within the mummy bands,” Annette Michelson writes in her study of Dziga Vertov, another Russian filmmaker indebted to the country’s icons.32 Belting concurs: “The memorial portrait of the dead, which preceded the icon and determined its early development, is best known today from the mummy portraits in Egypt.” The saint icon of later periods “initially resembled the private funeral portrait to such an extent that it was virtually indistinguishable from the latter,” and even when these icons developed separate pictorial conventions, “they made use of the aesthetics that had been developed in ancient portraiture.”33 The icon’s funerary meaning extended to cinematic uses of the form.

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Michelson notes that Vertov’s Three Songs of Lenin (1934) connects filmic stillness to death by using photographs and other stop-action devices. A photograph, she notes, “cuts into time, causing a kind of gap, bringing it to an instant of arrest” that embalms the past forever at that moment. Ordinary cinema, in contrast, “grounded in the persistence of vision,” prevents us from realizing this stasis even as it is composed of innumerable still images. Instead we apprehend only a “flow” like the unfolding of time in which nothing stands out in a moment of posthumous arrest. But when a film such as Vertov’s uses freeze-frame and “other cinematic forms of temporal digression,” these frozen moments constitute a deathly stillness, “a kind of posthumous life within the flow of the film” that commemorates the person or objects shown.34 The still image in cinema is an effigy, a fixed portrait of the dead, not unlike the first icons. The formal and ideological differences between Vertov and Lewton are clear enough. Vertov used freeze-frame and other innovative techniques (slow motion, reverse motion), whereas Lewton achieved effects of cinematic stillness largely by freezing actors and settings rather than the actual frame. One scene in The Curse of the Cat People does freeze at its conclusion, leaving Irena and the little girl Amy in a strange state of photographic stillness, and there are other odd formal moments in the film, including two when Amy goes slightly out of focus as the camera closes in on her during her reveries, but Lewton’s techniques mostly differ from Vertov’s. Lewton was working within the conventions of narrative film, and his moments of stillness had to find a place within that strict format. Ideologically, the differences are just as pronounced. Vertov used the Russian icon in the name of Communism, whereas Lewton used it to evoke a romantic conception of pre-Soviet Russia. For Vertov, the Russian past was a source he could appropriate to fit changing times. For Lewton, the Russian past offered an escape from change, providing a source of romanticized national traits, especially melancholy, that he felt had no place in the Soviet Union. As he put it in This Fool, Passion, “Sablin had seen the Soviet brutality, their thrusting-away of all that was old and well-founded in the land.”35 The Curse of the Cat People was no more Communistic in its Russianness than any other Hollywood depiction of that nation during the war era. In fact, it was less so, since even the Americanized folk dances of The North Star and the guerrilla camaraderie of Days of Glory at least centered on groups, whereas Lewton’s Russia was always about romantic loners like Sablin and his cinematic

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echo, Irena. But both Lewton and Vertov made profound cinematic use of the Russian icon, and in each case they linked it to stillness, death, and mourning. The significance of Lewton’s icon during wartime is complicated. In one sense it shows his belief that only foreigners, and especially Russians, know what it is to suffer and die. Only they know what it is like to remember the past obsessively, and only they give its many tragedies the due of tearful commemoration. Americans do not. Lewton enjoyed his adopted country in many respects, and he finally became a citizen of the United States in 1941 (after thirty-two years in the country). He also did his defense duty during the war. But his novels teem with satire of American attitudes. Everywhere they voice his sardonic distance from the national propensity, as he saw it, to value dull conformity, common sense, and insipid entertainments—“the American code of light-heartedness,” as he calls it in No Bed of Her Own.36 When a character in Yearly Lease hears a “falsely cheerful voice” on her radio announcing that “Ben Wiggin and his Grenadiers” have been playing on New Year’s Eve and that, as the radio announcer puts it, “That poor old year hasn’t got much of a chance now; one foot in the grave and one foot on a banana peel. Ha! Ha! Listen to that crowd yell! Are they having fun? Oh boy!” the canned remarks capture Lewton’s view of much American entertainment (even the kind he himself practiced as a scriptwriter for MGM publicity) and of American culture as a whole.37 The banana peel and the grave, comedy and tragedy, reduced to the delightful antitheses of a moment’s mock hilarity—that about summed up Lewton’s view of the national ability to appreciate pain and suffering. Against these episodes of false cheer and empty culture, the novels pit loners and losers like Brenner, the masochistic writer fascinated by the book of Revelation in A Laughing Woman; Rose Mahoney, the streetwalking Irish immigrant girl of No Bed of Her Own; and Sablin. Plain Americans in Lewton’s novels cannot understand these outsiders. Larry Cunningham, the regular-guy film director in A Laughing Woman, dismisses Brenner’s interest in both Casanova’s Memoirs (“too thick a book for me”) and Revelation (he “can’t make head or tail of it”). In one scene Cunningham “carved his way through the inch-thick steak he had ordered,” not noticing “how Brenner averted his eyes when the bloody juice was pressed out of the meat with the pressure of the knife blade.”38 Jack Burden, another of Lewton’s Americans and the protagonist of Where the Cobra Sings (1932), was “brought up in the American spirit of fair play and a square deal for all” and cannot make sense of abuse,

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loneliness, and pain.39 Yet that masochistic triad is the very element in which Lewton’s losers breathe, and even when an American grieves, the tragedy is expressed through foreign culture. “I’d like to write a Madame Bovary of Culver City,” Lewton noted in 1940. “Call it ‘Mrs. Williams,’ or some such name.”40 In A Laughing Woman the lovesick millionaire Alvin Hawk pours forth “billowing waves of grief” as he plays “King Mark’s lament from Tristan and Isolde,” but his bored call-girl mistress Jean Daly can only impatiently shift her weight from one foot to the other. “It’s a little beyond you, Jean,” says Hawk. Then he kills himself.41 In Sablin’s disastrous relationship with his American fashion model, Barbara Tredwell, Lewton most sharply contrasts tragic foreign culture and bright-eyed America. Sablin’s moodiness separates him from Barbara’s father, Jasper Tredwell, “at heart a most simple soul,” who used to regale “his brother Elks in Maryland” with “long, earnest political discussions,” and from other characters such as Barbara’s friend Aubrey Marshall, whose “face was too pleasant and too friendly for Sablin’s taste, wide-jawed and creased from constant smiling.” It also distances him from Barbara herself. At first they are drawn together by the death of Barbara’s sister—the Russian sees a kindred sadness in his model—but soon Barbara starts to feel better, and when he overhears her chatting about what type of makeup Joan Crawford wears, he feels that the gulf separating Russian and American sensibilities is vast beyond repair. Even when Sablin and Barbara met, she did not really know tragedy: he “could see from her expression that she did not know what he meant by an ikona.”42 Long before Lewton, writers and filmmakers had dwelled on the contrasts between simple-hearted Americans and foreign sufferers. Herman Melville’s kind but naïve Captain Amasa Delano and the eponymous tragic Spanish captain in Benito Cereno (1856), for example, and the cheery mystery writer Peter Alison and the death-obsessed Vitus Werdegast (Bela Lugosi) and Hjalmar Poelzig (Boris Karloff) in Edgar Ulmer’s film The Black Cat (1934) all exemplify the trope. But the formula appears with special intensity in Lewton’s work, notably in This Fool, Passion. Barbara’s loneliness, Sablin tells her, “is passing—yours was born of shame and grief and these pass and loneliness passes with them—mine is for always, a part of me.” Barbara is bored by Sablin’s recurring “long harangue about the soul and about how it may be dead in a body and brain that live, work and suffer.”43 In 1938, after he had moved to Hollywood, Lewton reread the novel and wished that he had been even clearer in telling “the story of the couple’s differences and their gradual

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drawing apart from each other.” Still, he liked what he read—“I’m quite proud of the book”—and he noted that he especially liked “the characterization.”44 The antithesis of Russian loner and American optimist remained important to him even when he was in the film business. True enough, the Christmas Eve scene in The Curse of the Cat People shows the split. The carolers gather in the brightly lit living room. The house is cozy and snug—the work of longtime RKO set designer Albert D’Agostino, who was used to receiving fan letters from viewers wanting to emulate his pragmatically dreamy conceptions of all-American homes.45 The mood in this ideal domestic space is convivial enough. Everyone is content, and even relieved, to take part in expressions of concerted uniformity and conventional manifestations of good cheer. The American normalcy of the scene centers on the father of the house, Oliver Reed, played by Kent Smith, in a reprise of his role alongside Simon in Cat People. Smith was a ubiquitous face and voice of native goodness during the war, and it is conceivable that his modest acting abilities would not have come to the fore in any other environment except one stressing, even demanding, plain decency as the most patriotic of signs. In several films Smith played the moralistic American: Professor Nicholls, the kindhearted master of an American school in prewar Germany in Edward Dmytryk’s huge RKO hit of 1943, Hitler’s Children; John Hill, an American technical engineer gravely injured in a plane crash and saved by volunteer Russian nurses in Three Russian Girls (1943); Danny, the father figure serviceman trying to talk sense to wayward adolescents in Lewton’s Youth Runs Wild (1944); and the narrator of the armed services instructional film called How to Become a Civilian (Smith himself was an enlisted man at the war’s end). But the two Cat People movies feature his most memorable performances as the decent American—and Lewton alone gave that decency sharp little twists of obtuseness. In the first film Oliver is a self-described “good plain Americano,” a man into whose life not a drop of darkness or depression has fallen, who at first can only joke about his Serbian wife’s grim and accurate fear of the animal within herself. In the second film’s Christmas Eve scene, Oliver hosts the cheery gathering while outside his dead first wife sings alone and unheard in the cold. The scene is a diptych of light and dark, schematic in its distinction between American prosperity and foreign melancholy, between Irena’s Russian-Serbian-French foreignness and Oliver’s thick American decency. His kindly ignorance is an intentionally flat characterization—it shows “the deliberate quality of [Lewton’s]

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insipidly normal characters,” as Farber put it. Oliver and his second wife, Alice, have an “ideal innocuousness,” Farber wrote in his review of The Curse of the Cat People on March 20, 1944. They look “exactly like the young married pair that used always to come on in small-town movie advertisements for the local grocer or shoe store.”46 As the film historian Robin Wood noted about Cat People, “If the American protagonists embody a norm of straightforward decency, all the poetry emanates from the foreign elements,” and the “decency is revealed as decidedly limited.”47 Translated to the home front, the scene might mean only one thing: Americans do not know how to grieve. They might even barely know that a war is on. Death is all around, yet inside the American home the rituals of repression based on hearty togetherness, optimistic slogans, and cheerful making-do drown the plaintive song of the dead. The War Department recognized this as a problem in 1943, as George Roeder has pointed out, and in that year a grimmer word and image began selectively to reach the American public. Life magazine published the essay “Three Americans,” along with a photograph showing the bodies of three dead GIs on a beach in the South Pacific, the tide having washed over them at least once.48 Ernie Pyle reported from Italy, in a piece called “Mountain Fighting,” how the body of a likable twenty-five-year-old, Captain Henry T. Waskow of Belton, Texas, was brought down from the mountains stiffly crosswise on the back of a mule and placed on the ground in the gathering darkness: “The first man squatted down, and he reached down and took the captain’s hand, and he sat there for a full five minutes holding the dead hand in his own and looking intently into the dead face. And he never uttered a sound all the time he sat there.”49 William Wellman reenacts the scene as the conclusion of his 1945 film The Story of G.I. Joe. Yet when Lewton made the film in August through early October 1943, this deathly reporting from the front was still new. The prevailing separation between light and dark still held, as it largely would for the rest of the war anyway. The split in the Christmas Eve scene is identical to the one Agee described in his column in the Nation on October 30, 1943, a little more than three weeks after The Curse of the Cat People finished production. “A unique and constantly intensifying schizophrenia,” he called it: Those Americans who are doing the fighting are doing it in parts of the world which seem irrelevant to [people in the United States]; those who are not, remain untouched, virginal, prenatal, while every other considerable population on earth comes of age. . . . While this chasm widens and deep-

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ens daily between our fighting and civilian populations and within each mind, another—much deeper and wider than any which geography alone could impose—forms and increases between this nation and other nations of the world. Their experience of the war is unprecedented in immediacy and unanimity. Ours, even in the fraction which has any experience at all, is essentially specialized, lonely, bitter, and sterile; our great majority will emerge from the war almost as if it had never taken place.50

Agee’s opinion is a virtual diagram of the Christmas Eve scene. The wartime chasm between the home front and the battle lines, the warm and the cold, the living and the dead, is the scene’s subject. Even so, the scene is not exactly a critique of American cheeriness during the war. The idiot optimism and oblivious thankfulness of the home front are not necessarily the stuff only of condemnation. The adult Americans on-screen may be as “untouched, virginal, prenatal” as Agee describes, but the film is more hopeful for the actual audiences in the theater. It gives them credit for knowing that they have a grief that requires only the proper form to find release, even as it condescends by assuming that their own culture uniformly lacks such tragic means. The correct form would not be the sight of likable GIs disappearing into the jungles of Guadalcanal or the happy-go-lucky airman whose Corsair just fails to make the carrier off the Marianas. It would not find expression in the sonorous words of a newsreel narrator or the pieties of the minister bowed in prayer in the church of the bombed ceiling beams pierced by rays of sun to the drone of our avenging squadrons overhead. It would not even be in the voice of Ginger Rogers reading her dead soldier fiancé Robert Ryan’s letter to their little son at the tear-jerking conclusion of RKO’s home front drama Tender Comrade (1943), a film whose backyard set doubled as the Reed backyard in The Curse of the Cat People.51 Instead, it would be in the form of Irena. Her iconic presentation was designed to relate directly to viewers. She sings to the little girl Amy inside the house but also, just as clearly, to the audience. The goal of most soundstage movies like The Curse of the Cat People was to take the audience elsewhere—to transform the shallow set into a believable narrative space—and it was the goal of the increasing number of on-location films during those years to portray a vastly greater depth, an infinitude even, in which an audience could lose itself as it became engrossed in the story. The location footage of the Pacific Ocean in a film such as A Wing and a Prayer (1944), and the endless blue air in William Wyler’s air force documentary Memphis Belle, a film re-

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leased in the same weeks as The Curse of the Cat People—these and other movies created new standards for the depiction of depth in American cinema in the year of Lewton’s movie. Watching the vapor trails and flak bursts and hearing the drone of B-17 engines in Wyler’s film, an audience could be transported into another space, an on-screen world, as never before, and so profound would be the phenomenological patriotism of the aerie and the ocean that they would show up in displaced form as the expansive deserts and ranges of postwar westerns such as Howard Hawks’s Red River (1948) and John Ford’s Fort Apache (1948) as signs of limitless America itself. These and other dramatic new ways of carving cinematic space—the famous deep-focus photography of Gregg Toland in Citizen Kane (1941), for example—made sound stages and limited depths of field look more and more fake, as when a theater manager wrote that the combat sequences in RKO’s Marine Raiders (1944) were “less realistic than those now coming up in newsreels.”52 But in that same year, amid the fifty-mile visibilities, there was Irena in her flattened universe. She did not invite viewers to enter into her space so much as she projected herself into the space of the audience. “The ceremonial frontality of the icon . . . does not draw the viewer into its space but is directed forward: depth is conceived not as behind but in front of the icon, in the space of the devout,” writes the film historian Noa Steimatsky in her study of another filmmaker indebted to icons, Pier Paolo Pasolini.53 Icons simulate the presence of the being they represent, as in the case of Veronica’s veil, and Irena is iconic in this way, too. The film theorist André Bazin wrote that “it is false to say that the screen is incapable of putting us ‘in the presence of’ the actor,” citing the indexical properties of photography and “the artificial proximity provided by photographic enlargement” as two crucial reasons, and the Christmas Eve scene is especially bent on forcing this recognition.54 With Irena filmed in medium close-up facing the audience, the scene has the quality of a live performance. Like an icon, the live performer at the microphone is static and front facing. Irena merges both visual traditions into her role as she sings her song. She embodies what Farber in 1944 called the techniques of “theatrical movies”—films in which events take place before the camera “as though it were the eye of the audience.” In such cases, Farber wrote, singling out Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat (1944), the film is “a re-enactment toward an audience—the process is no longer that of watching an action but of acting it toward those who watch it.”55 Irena’s theatrical orientation derives from a technique of

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early silent cinema, the open address to the viewer. The actor looking out at the audience, a device much in use before 1908, “indicates the space on the screen is not a self-contained fictional world, but can be directly linked to the space of the spectator,” writes Gunning. Such a device, he notes, came from the stage—an adaptation of the way vaudeville and burlesque actors, not to mention Elizabethan ones, would make asides to the audience. It had long fallen out of favor by the 1940s—as early as 1910, one critic wished for a film in which “the players appear to be ignorant that there is a camera taking their picture.”56 Yet Farber’s comments and Irena’s orientation indicate that the technique carried over even into narrative films of the war years and into the practice of movie houses, which included both live and filmed entertainment on the same bill. In The Curse of the Cat People the connotations of live theater and the iconic presence of the actress are especially strong. One of the other characters is the elderly and once-famous actress Julia Farren, who at one point stages a performance of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” for Amy. In the scene she faces the camera (as Irena will later), but she accentuates the effect of a “live” address by emerging from behind a theatrical curtain and moving closer and closer to the camera, intensifying her role not only for Amy but also for actual moviegoers. The reference is one of a dizzying many to theater actresses in the film. Julia Farren bears the name of the famous late-eighteenth-century British actress Elizabeth Farren, whose portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence was exhibited in the Masterpieces of Art exhibition at the New York World’s Fair in 1939.57 The actress Julia Dean, who plays Julia Farren, took her name from a famous nineteenth-century American actress named Julia Dean, and, like the original, had been a famous American stage actress. She was now appearing in her first film since 1915.58 The nineteenth-century Julia Dean is one of the subjects of the book Ladies of the Footlights, an account of famous American stage actresses written in 1937 by DeWitt Bodeen, who collaborated six years later with Lewton to write the screenplay for The Curse of the Cat People.59 Then there is Nazimova lurking in the roles of Irena and Farren.60 These theatrical references emphasize Irena’s iconic qualities—her direct address to the audience and her aura of presence. She sings to the audience as though from directly across the footlights. Her near-perfect stillness, however, entails an immediacy different from that of the live performer. To judge by the Christmas Eve scene, Lewton wanted to create a figure that would appear vividly present to audiences, addressing them directly with a sad song; this figure would

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also arrest the flow of the film, suspend the plot, and for just those moments produce the melancholy and all-but-sculptural frozenness of a world that has stopped. Amid the filmic streams of forgetting and escaping—dependent less on particular stories than on the mere fact that the images roll on and on—Irena congeals the film into a slow, hard, commemorative form. Perhaps Lewton invented this occasion for sorrow for audiences who on the whole did not really feel it. Perhaps they were as “prenatal” in their attitude toward the war as Agee suggested. But perhaps Lewton also gave them a moment of sad commemoration, manifest in this frozen statue, that might elicit something like grief. As Vertov had used the cinematic icon to occasion mourning for Lenin, Lewton used one to solicit tears for the war dead. Irena’s song on Christmas Eve would not seem the most likely place, but it is one of a few scenes in Hollywood wartime cinema that give powerful expression to grief and loss. Her song, so sad even now, is the engraved sound of sorrows otherwise unheard. This wartime poetry perhaps explains why Lewton reprised the character in a movie the following year. The grieving-woman icon appeared again memorably in the blind street singer played by Donna Lee in The Body Snatcher (fig. 7). The film about grave robbing in 1831 Edinburgh premiered in New York in May 1945, just as the war in Europe was ending. The street singer is Lewton’s invention—built out of the brief mention of a character named Jane Galbraith in the Robert Louis Stevenson story on which the movie is based. She is also commanding. She appears four times in the film, and each time she is a dominant figure: director Robert Wise underlined her character’s name in his copy of the script at each of her first three appearances.61 In these she is stationary; in two she stands against a wall like a pilaster or piece of engaged sculpture as she sings her lament. In two of the scenes, moreover, including the film’s opening, she faces the camera directly in the theatrical style of Irena. In this first scene, she even arrests the movie’s flow, for we are led to her frozen position by following a soldier and a gamboling young boy as they move briskly down the street: having found her, the camera stops. Lewton was responsible for turning Donna Lee into this tragic figure. She had won a singing contest at the 1939 World’s Fair at age ten, moved to Hollywood in 1942, and was a novice at movies.62 In her only other credited role, in RKO’s Sing Your Way Home (1945), she plays one of a rambunctious group of show tune–singing American kid entertainers on their way from Cherbourg to New York at the conclusion of the war, a voyage with “plenty of high C’s on the high seas,” as the film historian

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Figure 7. The Body Snatcher (1945): the blind street singer (Donna Lee).

Richard Jewell puts it, including many upbeat songs such as “I’ll Buy That Dream.”63 In The Body Snatcher, in contrast, Lewton tellingly portrayed the fifteen-year-old daughter of a Butte, Montana, department store owner in terms better suited to his own dolorous Russian iconography: as the Grieving Virgin.64 The film requires little acting of her; mostly she stands in place, a dark-cowled version of Irena, singing a song directly to the audience as though it were another of her live performances like the kind in which she had triumphed in New York, except here her song is sad. As an icon of grief, Lee’s character surpasses anything else in the film. Even as The Body Snatcher was shown during the very weeks in which American audiences first saw newsreel footage of the concentration camps, beholding the carnage in “stunned silence,”65 the corpse-ridden content of Lewton’s film was more an instance of Edmund Wilson’s inoculation against “the real horrors let loose on earth” through a “mere dramatic entertainment” than a coincidental chance to perceive genocide.66 The street singer’s lament incarnates something more directly and emotionally related to the war. The script made this almost explicit, calling for her to sing about her lover lying dead on the battlefield, his eyes

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plucked out by crows. In the film her lament has been transformed into more generic lyrics of separation (“When Ye Gang Awa, Jamie,” “Will Ye No Come Back Again”), but it is less the specific content of her music than its sad strains addressed directly to the audience that matter in her role as an emblem of loss. Irena is even more elaborately enshrined in The Curse of the Cat People, and the patriotism of the gesture is equivocal. Was the vivid portrayal of grief a national service, or was it at odds with patriotic fervor? Simone Simon’s roles in 1943–44 illustrate the ambiguity. In 1944 she starred in Lewton’s Mademoiselle Fifi, a drama set during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71 and based on two short stories by Guy de Maupassant, “Boule de Suif” and “Mademoiselle Fifi.” Simon plays Elizabeth Rousset, a laundress whose patriotism sets her apart from her fellow passengers on a coach from Rouen to Cleresville. At one point the coach stops in the snow, and we see Elizabeth apart from the others (fig. 8), a diminished, distant person compared with the rest of the group, especially the tall figure of Alan Napier as the Count de Breville at the far right. These six huddled figures are prosperous businessmen and their wives who want only to accommodate and even consort with the occupying Germans if it means their business routines and social rounds can proceed uninterrupted. Agee wrote that he did not know “of any American film which has tried to say as much, as pointedly, about the performance of the middle class in war.”67 Elizabeth, in contrast, is the only person who understands that a war of national defense is taking place, and she is aligned early in the film with a sculpture of Joan of Arc. Like Elizabeth Rousset, Irena is a patriot. Both of Simon’s characters are alone because they acknowledge the dread seriousness of the times, unlike those who wish to go about their daily lives unbothered. Accordingly, the businessmen and their wives in Mademoiselle Fifi are snooty haute-bourgeois versions of the carolers, and even the generous Oliver and Alice Reed are so full of good cheer that they too make peace with war. But in another sense Irena is far less effectual than Elizabeth Rousset. She incarnates less the patriotic duty of the laundress than the melancholic martyrdom of the shroud-draped sculpture of Joan standing in the wintry dawn. As a kind of sculpture herself, Irena is not a call to arms but an emblem of sorrow, and it is doubtful the government had medals for that. Still, there is a photograph of Simone Simon wearing her Christmas Eve costume as she helps DeWitt Bodeen display a commendation from

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Figure 8. Mademoiselle Fifi (1944): Elizabeth Rousset (Simone Simon, far left) shunned by the other passengers.

the War Department (fig. 9). The award is to Bodeen for his work on the immensely popular Cat People, but he is clearly delighted to share it with Simon, the star of that film. She too was acknowledged for her patriotism, specifically for her work publicizing war bonds, and in October 1944 she would be in New York, alongside Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, helping with the city’s bond drive while promoting Mademoiselle Fifi: “We must not fail our soldiers, sailors and civilians, and those needing our support in the lands of our gallant allies,” she told audiences.68 Simon’s most eloquent statement about the war effort, however, was her part in The Curse of the Cat People. Wartime audiences loved that film when it was released six months after the photograph with Bodeen was taken,69 and a trailer attached to the film addresses the family and friends of servicemen, informing them that it was also being shown “in combat areas overseas.” The Curse of the Cat People must have flickered across makeshift screens in bivouacs from New Guinea to St. Lo.70 Clearly, the story made a vivid impression on wartime audiences at home and abroad. But perhaps so did the poignant moments when there was no story, when all the viewer saw was an isolated, still figure that allowed for the expression of grief. Though the War Department could not have known it, and though there was no

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Figure 9. Simone Simon and DeWitt Bodeen admiring Bodeen’s commendation from the War Department, 1943. Photo courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, California.

patriotic medal for representing sorrow, Irena in the snow portrayed, like nothing else, the presence of sadness and death in an American backyard. Only one character within the film recognizes the dead person’s presence: the little girl Amy. Hearing Irena’s song, she peers through the frosted windows and prepares to go outside (fig. 10). Going out alone to meet Irena, she is the audience’s surrogate, the only figure that can lead us to a confrontation with death. The reason has everything to do with Lewton’s savvy manipulation of a wartime conceit, here brought to powerful fruition: the otherworldly child who knows more than the adults, the little girl on whom Bing Crosby’s blandishments of the home front—“Accentuate the Positive”—are completely lost. Children in wartime films often are not quite Americans, not quite fully assimilated to the wartime ethos of optimism and normal-as-can-be. Too imaginative, too curious, they sense the presence of death in ways that adults alternately busy with the eggnog and card games, the big-band soiree, or screwing that lug nut onto the fuselage of a B-24 found depressing and impolite. In the figure

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Figure 10. The Curse of the Cat People: Amy Reed (Ann Carter) hearing Irena’s song.

of Amy Reed, played by seven-year-old Ann Carter, Lewton raised this foreign child who knows too much to one of its peak expressions during the war. The title that Lewton desperately wanted for the film—Amy and Her Friend—diagrams the heart of its concerns: the child’s special relation to death, and the potential of that child to lead oblivious adults out of their frivolous escapades to a cathartic confrontation. Amy Reed has this quality for several reasons. The actress Ann Carter was accustomed to playing tragic and foreign wartime roles. True, the press presented her as an all-American kid, as when she returned to her native Syracuse, New York, in October 1942 and sang “The White Cliffs of Dover” at the Loew’s State Theater as part of a patriotic rally, or when she was photographed at the center of a studio-arranged ice-cream-andcake party of bright-eyed children held in her honor on that same visit. And, yes, it was true that her father, Bertram Carter, was employed in the defense industry during the war on “a secret military enterprise” with Chrysler Motors in Los Angeles, and that after the war some of her Syracuse friends came to visit her in Los Angeles while their parents attended the American Bowling Congress.71 But on-screen she was never quite American and never quite happy.

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In The North Star (1943) she plays the little Russian girl Olga who, like the rest of her family, is a paragon of rustic innocence as the film begins. “Were you pretty, mama, when you were young?” she asks her mother as her ponytails are tied. Olga’s biggest complaint is that she is kept from going outside to have fun because she is too little. “I’m not so young. There are plenty who are younger,” she complains. “May I, papa? May I, papa?” All this, however, is prelude to the arrival of the Germans, and before long Olga is strafed by a Stuka as she runs screaming down a village street. In Commandos Strike at Dawn (1942), the Norwegian resistance movie directed by John Farrow in his first film after the successful combat drama Wake Island, Carter has a more tragic and extensive role. The movie opens in a peaceful fishing village in summer 1939. Carter plays Solveig Toresen, the daughter of mild, soulful widower Eric Toresen (Paul Muni), a kind meteorologist whose wife died giving birth to Solveig. At first all is peaceful and quiet—“I lost a button from my nightdress,” Solveig tells her father, expressing her deepest concern—though even then there is an element of pathos as Eric and the kind Englishwoman Judith Bowen (Anna Lee) peek in on the beloved daughter as she lies in her bed. Darkness increases as the war starts and the Nazis come, driving trucks and sidecars into the center of the village. Eric becomes increasingly militant as he sees his fellow villagers tortured and murdered. Eventually he leads a victorious commando raid but is killed afterward as he searches for his daughter. The final scene shows Solveig, now an orphan, on a boat for England, asking, “Will we ever come back to our home?” Even a wartime role in which Carter plays an American casts her in a tragic way, bringing us back to her performance in The Curse of the Cat People. In the melodrama And Now Tomorrow (1944), Loretta Young stars as Emily Blair, the daughter of a wealthy Pittsburgh mill owner, who becomes deaf after a case of meningitis. In a seventy-five-second flashback to Emily’s childhood, before she was deaf, Carter plays the young heiress as she stands before a crowd of millworkers assembled for the annual Christmas distribution of food baskets from her family. A man named Jan Vankovitch, played by the Moscow-born actor Leo Bulgakov, has been laid off a week before and begins tormenting the young Emily Blair: “And last week you threw me out to starve,” he yells at Carter’s character as she stands on a platform above the workers. “Merry Christmas. Sure, I got fired. Merry Christmas.” He hurls his basket of food up at the platform, where it scatters at Emily’s feet, before he

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is taken away. Vankovitch’s son recounts many years later, “My father got laid off a week before Christmas. He never got over it.” Carter plays the part of Emily without a word, merely standing there. The foreigner’s lament does nothing, falling on her deaf ears even though she can hear perfectly well what he is saying, and the little girl’s insensitivity predicts the adult Emily’s condition. Her failure to hear is even the cause of her illness, since we are to understand that as a wealthy American heiress she is a little too stuck up and deaf to other people’s misfortunes and must be forced to experience the painful and literal manifestation of her vanity, like a character in Ovid. If she will not hear what the aggrieved have to say, then she will be cursed to hear nothing at all. In The Curse of the Cat People, that same year, Amy turns her head toward Irena’s voice. She alone hears the song coming from the backyard, and it is all that she hears. “She is bored by the adult celebration,” says the script. “Suddenly all the sound for her has been wiped out of her consciousness, and she hears only a very sweet voice singing o.s. [offstage] an old seventeenth century French carol.”72 The structure of the Christmas Eve scene is identical to the Christmas gift scene of And Now Tomorrow, with Carter playing an American child confronting a foreign outsider. But this time the little girl senses the sorrowful foreigner and goes out to meet her, ready for a ritual encounter with this other world. The faculty that allows Amy Reed to commune with the dead is imagination. Paul Fussell notes that qualities like wit, curiosity, and imagination were in “short supply” during the war, when the pervasive demand was that culture be as straightforward and patriotic as possible. Perhaps as a consequence, the era’s portrayal of children bestows on them inordinate powers of fantasy and daydreaming. It is as though a quality absent elsewhere in all the spirited dramas, with their “unironic earnestness and sentimentality,” had to find an outlet somewhere and did so in the seemingly innocent domain of childhood. The danger, however, was that childhood imagination was not necessarily an innocent force. Amy’s father, Oliver, regards her fantasy life as “morbid” and “sickly,” and she is one of several wartime child characters bent on a deeply imaginative confrontation with death. The most famous example is Tootie in Vincente Minnelli’s Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), played by Margaret O’Brien, the doyenne of morbidly imaginative childhood during the war. Tootie points out how her doll Margaretta “won’t live through the night” because she has “four fatal diseases. But she’s gonna have a beautiful funeral, in the cigar box my papa gave me, all wrapped in silver paper.” Later she tells how their

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neighbor Mr. Braukoff keeps bodies in his basement. This is a prelude to the justly famous and unsettling Halloween sequence, aflare in tones of orange and black, in which Tootie, “the most horrible of them all,” proves herself to a gang of hoodlum neighborhood children by venturing alone to Mr. Braukoff’s house to throw flour in his face. At the end of the film she giddily recounts the death and destruction on view at the Galveston Flood exhibition at the fair. Like the fool in a tragedy, Tootie is the one character allowed to speak of the grimness on everyone’s mind. In many respects Meet Me in St. Louis is the charming and innovative nostalgic musical so many critics have made it out to be—a Technicolor epic that kept audience’s minds off the war when it was released in late November 1944. Maybe its tonic was even more soothing because its debut coincided with the latest, more brutal, phases of the war, notably the first kamikaze attacks on American ships in the South Pacific and the Nazi counteroffensive in France. But the movie is not just smoothness. The war’s anxiety and morbidity lodge at different points, some narrative and some visual. They seem to find a particularly comfortable nesting place in the vicinity of Judy Garland, and O’Brien, too, is at the center of this other, darker film. Death has few other outlets than to find expression in her not-so-innocent play, which shows an awareness of the war’s grim social reality that most adults do not perceive. Minnelli represents Halloween as the natural condition of the child’s mind. The imagination of a little girl is also the subject of Elia Kazan’s film A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), based on Betty Smith’s best-selling novel, published in 1943. This time the child’s creativity is more tragic than morbid, but the dwelling on death is the same. Peggy Ann Garner plays Francie, the daughter of Johnny Nolan, a kindhearted alcoholic singer played by James Dunn. The setting is Brooklyn some thirty years earlier, but the book and the film are perfectly pitched to home front concerns. “With her turn-of-the-century setting, Betty Smith fashioned a sentimental tale around an obsession of the war years—the problem of keeping the family together,” the film historian Thomas Pauly notes.73 The privation of Francie’s family speaks to wartime issues of rationing and making do with comparatively little. And the film’s portrayal of the child’s melancholic imagination is another home front artifact. We see this in the way Francie and her father, Johnny, use their imaginative gifts. Johnny loves to tell made-up stories, and Francie adores him and comes to inherit his rich creativity. In a way that says a lot about escapist entertainment during the war, father and daughter both under-

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stand that creativity compensates for loss. At school Francie tells a fib so that she can claim a pie she and her hungry family desperately need. “I’m not going to punish you, child, for being hungry or having an imagination,” says the teacher, but what the teacher misunderstands is that being hungry and having an imagination are the same thing. This is the wonder of James Dunn’s performance as Johnny, his ability to portray flights of fancy as a thin curtain through which other, darker backdrops are always visible. It is also the wonder of Peggy Ann Garner’s acting, not just in her line readings but in her angular yet sensitive face, straight out of a Lewis Hine photograph, which never transfigures in even the happiest moments without looking pained and grounded in sadness. “I think the best thing in the film is the face of the little girl—the lyricism in her character,” said Kazan, who concentrated on “get(ting) the light in that little girl’s eyes, the expression of her face, the feeling in her soul.”74 Francie’s sad imagination is intensified at her father’s funeral (fig. 11). There we see her listening to the priest’s eulogy while in the distance her soon-to-be new father, the kindhearted Officer McShane, stands respectfully. The change in fathers corresponds to a shift in Francie’s imaginative life. She will become more responsible, heeding the admonition of the schoolteacher who says that a sense of play is “very precious,” but “it can also be dangerous unless we learn how to use it.” Continuing in a wartime vein, the teacher urges Francie to use her fantasies for a cause. “Even stories shouldn’t be just, well, pipe dreams. Pipe dreamers are very lovable people, but they don’t help anybody, not even themselves.” Officer McShane’s presence at the funeral shows that Francie’s imagination will no longer sing and dance but walk a beat and try to help people. Her father’s death is the high but necessary symbolic cost of this passage into adult seriousness. But Garner’s face at the funeral suggests that for her, imagination will remain linked to loss—it will remain mournful, a way to compensate now for her greatest loss of all. The funeral, not coincidentally, is one of the moments in Kazan’s movie when the war becomes vivid: a little girl mourning her father’s death. Kazan and Garner deliberately brought that idea to the fore, as the director recalled. During casting Garner told him “that she often dreamed of her father, who was overseas in the air force. When the day came in our schedule when she had to break down and cry, I talked to her about her father. Implicit in what I said was the suggestion that her father might not come back. (He did.) Peggy cried the whole day through, and we caught that piece of feeling. We got it only once, but we only needed it once. Her outburst of pain and fear was essential to her

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Figure 11. Elia Kazan, director, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945): Francie Nolan (Peggy Ann Garner) at her father’s funeral.

performance; it was the real thing.”75 Although this scene takes place not at the funeral but a few moments later, when Francie looks tearfully into the sky from the rooftop of the tenement, the episode only repeats the close-up focus on her grief at her father’s grave. In each scene the war is a driving force.76 The funeral scene has a unique look in the film, too, suggesting that it was conceived in a spirit of self-conscious gravity meant to extend the story into larger realms of public sadness. A static and ceremonial image, it is a rare note of ritualized stillness in the entire film, which Kazan directs mostly at a superb fast pace predicated on quick cuts and the actors’ movements. The editing of the funeral scene is as fast-paced as the rest of the film (we see the extraordinary image reproduced here for only about two seconds; it comprises a scant fifty-two frames), but the exigencies of a graveside ceremony keep the actors memorably motionless. The priest’s solemn oratory, too, contrasts with the street dialect spoken by the characters in the rest of the movie, his formal language befitting the ritual stasis. The result is a Lewton-like moment. The scene separates from the rest of the film and projects out to the audience, away from the

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narrative, even as it contributes to it, with Francie the emissary of graveside sadness. The scene atop the tenement roof does this as well, with Garner’s character addressing her tearful prayers to God and to the audience, but the solemn funeral is visually more intense. Tootie is the jester who brazenly points out the elephant in the room, laughingly telling others what they would prefer not to see. Francie keeps quiet about such things, but her heightened powers of sad envisioning let us glimpse the war’s graveside vigil. This brings us back to Ann Carter’s role in The Curse of the Cat People. In one sense her imagination is cast as innocent and healthy—the opposite of Garner’s and O’Brien’s characters. At one point Amy shows Irena her dolls, saying, “This is Lotte. She’s very good. This is Marianne. She’s good sometimes. This is Virginia. She’s hardly ever good.” The dialogue adapts and even parodies Carter’s lines as Solveig Toresen in Commandos Strike at Dawn when she recites what she has learned at the Nazi-run school: “First come the Germans. They are better than anyone else. And then come the Norwegians—that’s us. We’re almost as good as the Germans. And then come the French—they’re not so good. And then come the Poles—they are very, very bad, and nobody talks to them. And then come the Jews, and . . . what’s a Jew?” Compared with Solveig’s indoctrination into Nazi racial theories, Amy Reed’s play with her dolls represents an American innocence that knows nothing of racial distinctions or hierarchies or of anything beyond her own yard and hometown. This innocence floods the film when it shows children playing, as the Lewton scholar Edmund Bansak notes: “The texture of the photography in Curse’s wonderfully intricate daylit scenes is extraordinarily crisp and vivid, providing visuals that appear rooted in childhood memories.”77 This benign interpretation fits the way the film was understood in 1944. Oliver Reed’s failure to comprehend his daughter’s harmless play was seen to be a major injustice, as indeed it is presented in the film. The entire movie was held up as a sociological illustration of the need for a more enlightened treatment of childhood play. This was David Riesman’s point when he discussed the movie in his famous book The Lonely Crowd (1953), and it was how the film was talked about the year it appeared—for example, at the seminar entitled “The Treatment of the Child in Films,” held September 7, 1944, in Los Angeles, where The Curse of the Cat People was the center of discussion.78 But in another sense Oliver Reed is right. Amy’s fantasies are mor-

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bid, and a closer look at the film shows how its conception of the little girl came straight from the most melancholic resources available for how to show the child’s mind at work. The introduction of Amy in the script specifies: “There is a haunting quality about her childishness; almost a feeling such as Wordsworth expressed, that her youth still keeps her in touch with the memory of another world, a memory which fades with each passing day, and whose fading leaves a sense of emptiness and loss.”79 Youth and childishness are precisely not the places to find innocence, as Amy’s character is conceived. The free play of the imagination always comes weighted with the recollection of somewhere else. Wartime lends a special melancholy to this idea. In one sense, the plot establishes the loneliness of Amy’s play in relation to a lost mother. Imagination is a diaphanous realm superimposed in Wordsworthian fashion on the lost intensities of a first pleasure: the child’s relation to the mother. This is diagrammed in Amy’s relation to Irena, who on some metaphorical (if not actual) level is her mother. Just as Ann Carter played the daughter of the witch Veronica Lake in the last scene of René Clair’s I Married a Witch (1942), she and Simon’s character have a clear mother-daughter relationship forged along supernatural lines. The Variety reviewer who mistakenly assumed that Irena is the girl’s real mother was not totally off base.80 In Irena, hugged and clasped by the little girl, imagination and death combine perfectly in a singular phantasm of the mind, at once pleasurable and sad. Spending hours playing with this maternal ghost, Amy embraces a fullness as empty as air. But in another sense Amy’s melancholy betrays the child’s intuition of a more encompassing deadness, that of the war. Death haunts her in a way that goes beyond the realm of mothers and into a more expansive sorrow. The original script was clear about this. It includes scenes omitted from the film in which the girl sees a doe, “its great mild eyes look[ing] out” at her, followed by “a shrill scream of anguish” coming from the woods offscreen. Later that night Amy and the servant Edward walk through the woods, and the beam of Edward’s flashlight falls upon a ghastly sight: “The camera pans along the ray to where it discloses lying upon the snow in a pool of blood the mangled body of the little deer.” Says Edward, “Bad luck to see death in the snow.”81 This confrontation with the sudden and inexplicable death of a vibrant living being—“I can see its breath in the snow,” Amy had said when she first spotted the creature—becomes still stronger, and more explicit, in the script’s original conception of Amy’s relation to Irena. The little girl

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comes to her friend, distraught at the death of Mrs. Farren, and this is their dialogue: Irena: Amy, listen to me. Death isn’t such a terrible thing. Amy: Oh, it is, it is! Death’s terrible. Irena: But, Amy! Amy . . . I’m dead. closeup of Amy as she looks at her friend. closeup of Amy’s friend as she smiles at the child. two shot of Amy and her friend. Amy: Irena: Amy: Irena:

(in a whisper) You? Yes, Amy. But why? (quietly) Death’s like life. Death’s a part of life. It isn’t frightening. It isn’t the end of everything. It isn’t quiet and nothingness. It’s a part of all eternity.

Amy looks at her friend, and a slow smile forms on her face. Irena bends down beside her and brushes the tears away from the child’s smiling face.82

Fortunately this scene was omitted, and as a result the film changes its entire portrayal of the child. Instead of being educated by well-meaning adults, even led to death so that it might flash upon her consciousness as a “mangled body” recalling those that haunt Alex Sablin’s wartime memories, Amy intuits the presence of death on her own. It is the adults who do not perceive it. The film retains the original script’s emphasis on the need to address the topic of the child and death during the war, but shifts from a heavy-handed allegorical treatment in which the child alone is innocent and uncomprehending to a more complex and subtle portrayal in which she alone knows. This intuitive perception structures some of the eerier moments in the film. In an early scene Amy tilts her head to hear an otherworldly voice coming from offscreen, anticipating her response to Irena’s song (fig. 12). It is the sound of Julia Farren, the elderly actress, beckoning her from the upper stories of her Victorian mansion: “Little girl, little girl.” Photographed in close-up in strong light as disquieting music plays, Amy in this scene anticipates the children of The Bad Seed, The Omen, and other films in which the otherworldly child answers a summons no one else can hear. The scene aims for that kind of uncanny effect. Mrs. Farren’s call introduces Amy into a parallel mother-daughter plot involving the actress and the embittered adult daughter she disavows and enacts a haunted-house story like the inoculating effects of pretend horror that Wilson wrote about in the New Yorker two

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Figure 12. The Curse of the Cat People: Amy hearing the voice of Julia Farren.

months after the film came out. But the depth of the scene’s eeriness— it generates an intense visual effect that helped establish a whole cliché-bound formula of horror in later years—implies that it drew its power from the most potent source a filmmaker in 1944 could possibly find: the death and dying all around. In the film’s setting of Tarrytown, New York (shot at the RKO studio and ranch), not even a whisper of the war could be heard, and the whole point of the story was to afford an escape from bloodshed. Yet this scene acknowledges the ghosts offscreen, and we hear them through our emissary, the only one who can sense them, the little girl. The film’s most intense realization of the war, however, occurs onscreen, in the relationship of Amy and Irena. Its sweet sadness owes not just to Wordsworth but to Robert Louis Stevenson, and it is from Stevenson’s special image of childhood that Amy’s character derives its most powerful wartime pathos. One of the characters explains Amy’s imagination by reciting lines from Stevenson’s poem “The Unseen Playmate”: “When children are playing alone on the green, / In comes the playmate that never was seen.” Like other poems from Stevenson’s book A Child’s Garden of Verses (1885), the sentiment is both charming and

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frightening—the unseen playmate is a delightful companion and a visitor from other, inexplicable, worlds. The combination is never clearer than in another poem from Stevenson’s book, “My Shadow,” in which the child proclaims: “I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me, / And what can be the use of him is more than I can see. / He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head; / And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed.”83 The child constantly attended by the shadow, joined at the heel to this phantom double, corresponds to “Amy and her friend.” The war lurks in the movie’s Stevenson-based conception of childhood, giving it its special pathos and disquiet. Amy’s “unseen playmate” is emblematic of death in this larger sense, and the same intuition of other worlds shows up elsewhere in the film. Farber, reviewing The Curse of the Cat People in March 1944, admired the aura of “warm enchantment” often surrounding Amy but also singled out a scene in which the camera focuses on her hand as she dips and waves it in a pool of water to make a wish upon a magic ring (fig. 13): “The symbolized view of her arm in and out of the water produces a very strange, almost macabre, visual impression.”84 This is not surprising, since the scene recalls the last five death-recognizing stanzas of Stevenson’s “LookingGlass River” in A Child’s Garden of Verses: Sailing blossoms, silver fishes, Paven pools as clear as air— How a child wishes To live down there! We can see our coloured faces Floating on the shaken pool Down in cool places, Dim and very cool; Till a wind or water wrinkle, Dipping marten, plumbing trout, Spreads in a twinkle And blots all out. See the rings pursue each other; All below grows black as night, Just as if mother Had blown out the light! Patience, children, just a minute— See the spreading circles die; The stream and all in it Will clear by-and-by.85

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Figure 13. The Curse of the Cat People: Amy’s hand in the water.

In both poem and film, reverie is not innocent but a gentle disturbance of the calm, and within the wishing pool one can behold enchanted other worlds tinged with dark. In Stevenson’s pool, the child’s image is blotted out, extinguished like a light, and even the circles that must disappear for the child to become visible again must die to do so. In Lewton’s pool, Amy’s submerged hand seems almost to belong to another person, so “strange, almost macabre” is its image. Ophelia-like, it floats beneath the water as though pushed softly by tides. Dreaming produces the momentary recognition of other worlds, as Stevenson recognized, and the hand that casts the spell becomes the hand of another. The scene is the visual equivalent of Julia Farren’s faraway voice: a mysterious beckoning of the Elsewhere, responding to Amy’s wish for a friend, an unlikely passage of war poetry channeled through Stevenson’s verse and available only to the conjuring child and, through her, to the audience. The water fills the screen, coinciding with the shimmering illusiveness of the filmed image, transforming it into a pool in which we, too, can sense something unseen from another world, something fulfilling Agee’s ideas about the power of motion pictures—that they should provide an imagery “radiant” and “illimitable,” “clear of urging or comment,” that haunts our own fantasies.86

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Lewton was not the only one in those years to use Stevenson in the portrayal of a sweet but mysterious little girl empowered to see the world darkly. The effect might be described as the Temple-O’Brien axis, a shift from Shirley Temple to Margaret O’Brien as the reigning Hollywood model of the little girl during the period roughly from 1930 to 1945. As late as 1941 one finds Temple-style cuteness and sharp-witted innocence in the performance of Carolyn Lee as four-year-old Pretty Elliott in Virginia, Edward Griffith’s Technicolor apologia for plantation life. And even at the end of the war, in Lewton’s Body Snatcher, Sharyn Moffett played the would-be tragic crippled little girl Georgina as the young Temple might have played her, ringlets bobbing to the movement of her wheelchair. No question, too, that Temple’s own performances were sorrowful in some ways, but overall this type of innocent childhood fell out of favor during the war, and a newer kind of kid—wiser, darker, or both—came into vogue. For A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, “Kazan understood that the child [Peggy Ann Garner] was playing demanded a radical departure from the roles Shirley Temple had played at Fox, so he downplayed ‘performance’ and concentrated on ‘look.’ ”87 In such cases the best filmmaking could portray otherworldliness in, and as, childish naïveté. Garner, O’Brien, and Carter all brought this type of acting to a high level, and the charming/frightening conception of childhood developed by Robert Louis Stevenson was the source, especially for O’Brien and Carter.88 Consider O’Brien’s performance in Roy Rowland’s Our Vines Have Tender Grapes, released in 1945, just after V-J Day. O’Brien’s character, Selma Jacobson, learns difficult lessons in this drama set in rural Wisconsin during the war. A girl on a nearby farm dies; a likable local man enlists and prepares to go to an unknown fate; and a neighbor’s huge new barn burns in a spectacular nighttime conflagration, with Selma’s father, Martinius (Edward G. Robinson), racing into the fire to shoot the tormented cows. The adults tell Selma and her friend Arnold Hanson (Jackie Jenkins) about death: “Don’t think about funerals, Selma; they’re only for grown-ups to worry about, not children.” But the children think about them anyway, and Selma and Arnold look like nineteenth-century daguerreotypes of dead children when they sleep side by side in a coffinlike metal bathtub as it bobs down a churning river in spring flood season—the result of childhood play (a quick “sail” in the bathtub) gone disastrously wrong. On one level a cautionary tale about home front child care—what’s to prevent children from getting into danger when their parents work all the time?—the event also matches the eeriest lines

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in Stevenson’s poem “My Bed Is a Boat”: “I shut my eyes and sail away / And see and hear no more.”89 Child’s play communes with dreams and deep sleep and journeys to strange other worlds. Stevenson was one of O’Brien’s favorite authors during the war,90 and her preference informs her roles, especially in this scene showing the children taken away as if inevitably by the currents of their own play. One finds the dark Stevenson child in many places during the war, not just films. Norman Rockwell’s Voyeur (fig. 14), the cover for an August 1944 issue of the Saturday Evening Post, shows a little girl staring intently at necking lovers on a wartime train. Its portrayal of the little girl goes back to the turn of the century, when Stevenson-inspired illustrators such as Elizabeth Shippen Green and Jessie Willcox Smith portrayed little girls and boys in states of reverie (fig. 15). Many of these pictures are soft and sweet—they must have been a basis for Temple’s persona of a generation later—but others contain currents that tap into Stevenson’s uncanny side. Rockwell’s achievement in The Voyeur was to transport this turn-of-the-century child from the type of picture he studied as a boy into a convincingly lascivious modern-day context. Now the little girl no longer inhabits a room of blocks and toys or a garden pastoral but a transient space of dangling straps and buckles that evoke unfastened belts and brassieres even as the lovers’ legs remain crossed. No wonder she is fascinated, and no wonder there is a note of almost scurrilous impiety to her fingers and face on the edge of the seat, like Raphael’s despondent cherubs in The Sistine Madonna: the world aboard this train is no holy place. The little girl’s bold curiosity is about sex, but more broadly it represents the Stevensonian difference between her thinking and that of everyone else, seeing other things, other worlds. She is presumably next to her mother, but visually she is all by herself: Rockwell emphasizes her uniqueness by framing her face with the expanse of empty seat and pointing the couple’s shoes in her direction. We are to see that even though she rides the same train as everyone else, the little girl does not belong to their world. Alone she faces the wrong way, and alone she does not mind her own business but stares brazenly, inquisitively, at what she is not supposed to see, her hat pointing in the direction of her gaze, intensifying her stare. She may not understand exactly what she is watching—her seat back divides her from what she sees, and her wide-eyed stare is like the window shades pulled up to afford only a perfect view of the darkness—but her intense fascination is akin to an intuitive perception that there are mysterious other worlds out there. Amid weary and

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Figure 14. Norman Rockwell, The Voyeur, cover for the Saturday Evening Post, August 12, 1944. Printed by permission of the Norman Rockwell Family Agency, copyright 1944 the Norman Rockwell Family Entities.

dreamy adults, people looking away or looking into each other’s eyes, the child is the only one examining her surroundings, even if she cannot say precisely what is going on. Rockwell’s image appeared midway between the release of The Curse of the Cat People and of Meet Me in St. Louis, in March and November of that year, and its conception of the little girl accords perfectly with that of both films. In each movie, snow is the ultimate sign of the child’s cold world of wartime play. In the famous Christmas Eve scene in Minnelli’s film, Tootie tearfully destroys the snowmen representing her family in her backyard. The war and the Smith family’s impending move to New York have made the imagined vision of a perfect clan frigid and lifeless. Tootie’s outburst takes place after she hears her sister Esther, played by Garland, sing the impeccably sad “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christ-

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Figure 15. Jessie Willcox Smith, Mother and Child, 1908. Cover illustration for Aileen Cleveland Higgins, Dream Blocks (New York: Duffield and Company, 1908). The Eisenstat Collection of American Illustration.

mas.” Even without its famously omitted dark lyrics (“Have yourself a merry little Christmas . . . it may be your last”), the song is the film’s attempt to summon the kind of wartime grief that would be the subject of Minnelli’s and Garland’s next movie, The Clock (1945). Garland sings it with a ruby-lipped gloom encompassing disasters beyond those of the Smith family’s relocation. She sings like the trouper that she was—her aim seemingly to summon the dead, wounded, and missing in action from every atoll, ravine, and malarial jungle, from Anzio to Saipan, to bring them together as an invisible host incarnated in an anthem of sadness that she alone shoulders the responsibility of singing. Tootie’s destructive response is understandable: it is a cathartic out-

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burst, enacted only in pitiful symbolic form but potent nonetheless, that demonstrates to the audience, in a hopelessly inadequate way, that people are dying. It makes clear—at least as clear as a child can make it— the backyard presence of death that official American home front culture kept at bay. If the method of demonstration is a tantrum, and if the symbolic means are impoverished—Agee wondered what they were making Hollywood snow out of, whether it was “cornflakes or pulverized mothballs or heroin”91—the very crudity is excusable, since a point of view suppressed almost completely during the war would probably not look neat and clean and elegant, or even believable, in the release of its pentup energies from repression. Play in the snow takes a more subdued form in The Curse of the Cat People, though its wartime meaning is the same. When Amy ventures into the backyard to confront Irena on Christmas Eve, the scene is structurally close to Tootie’s demolition of the snowmen. Amy shows the audience the way to what no one else will bother to acknowledge. But Amy’s imagination of death is tragic and sympathetic, not angry and absurdly heartfelt. We see this best in another scene. Amy has wandered into the snow in search of Irena later that Christmas Eve and has fallen, exhausted, beneath a tree (fig. 16). The snow begins to blanket her, and she sleeps, looking almost warm, as in the scenes in the film when she gets under the covers in her own bed. But the dreamy play of snow falling all around is lethal, as the script specifies: “The snow has drifted down over her until her body is partially covered by it. Her head is fallen forward and to one side. She seems to be sleeping a sleep of death.”92 Lying there, she calls to mind the war victims Sablin encounters in the snow in This Fool, Passion. To dream of other worlds in The Curse of the Cat People is not a matter of “escapism” but a means of perceiving, even sharing, the chilled universe beyond the snugness of one’s own home. The image, like Tootie’s outburst, is directed at wartime audiences. Lewton and Minnelli were similarly dark, and it is no surprise that Minnelli’s film The Bad and the Beautiful (1952) is one of the clearest Hollywood tributes to Lewton’s movies. But in the two films of 1944, Lewton’s visual style is different. Amy is still, as immobile as Irena. The film stops on her as she halts on her journey into the cold, and the stasis makes a demand for contemplation, suspending the cinematic flow of plot and image for the examination of something more grave. The look of the image is not iconic—Amy lies there like the forlorn, wounded, or sleeping child in a nineteenth-century picture such as John Everett Millais’s

Figure 16. The Curse of the Cat People: Amy asleep in the snow.

Figure 17. The Curse of the Cat People: the wheel of the truck.

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L’Enfant du Regiment (ca. 1854–55, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Conn.), a reference in keeping with her character’s roots in Stevenson and Wordsworth. But her stillness is as intense as Irena’s. And earlier on this same journey Amy is the center of the most self-reflexive statement Lewton ever made about the antinarrative power of stasis in his films. Amy hears the loud, onrushing sound of something unfamiliar. She remembers Julia Farren reciting lines from Washington Irving’s “Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” and she believes the sound is that of the headless horseman coming to get her. As she huddles by the side of the road, the cause of the sound is revealed—a rickety truck passes her by, and we see a close-up of one of its wheels with the rattling snow chain attached (fig. 17). The wheel, shown close-up and parallel to the lens, is about as forceful an image as one is ever likely to see of the cinematic reel itself, endlessly going around and around. The clattering noise is almost that of the projection booth, as though for just that moment the film wanted us to witness the reel’s own unfurling. Against that loud demonstration of cinematic machinery—its constant rush to get somewhere, its endless revolutions, its plots of headless horsemen on their own ceaseless rounds— Amy holds still. At the movies during the war, the scares came and went. They came from run-down vehicles on a set path, and the frenzy of their urgent commotion was harmless. But out of their flow Lewton carved moments of lonely stillness meant to remain.

c h a p t e r t wo

The Power of the Minor Actor Skelton Knaggs in The Ghost Ship

There is an extraordinary scene near the start of The Ghost Ship (1943), Lewton’s fifth RKO film. The movie’s protagonist, a young third officer named Tom Merriam, has just spoken with a blind street singer and now strides up the gangway to board the ill-fated ship Altair. At the top of the ramp he confronts a little man sharpening a long knife. The music is eerie and the lighting stark, bringing out the crevices and pockmarks on the man’s face, and a jet of mysterious steam rises steadily beside him. The little man, a sailor, says nothing and barely moves when Merriam asks where he can find the captain. He only motions over his shoulder with the glinting knife, and the shadow of the gesture projects on the officer’s chest (fig. 18). Merriam departs, and the camera closes on the little sailor, played by Skelton Knaggs, a ubiquitous bit actor in 1940s films. Knaggs remains silent, tilting his head slightly upward as a watery soulfulness comes into his eyes (fig. 19). We then hear the sailor’s voice over the sound track, dreamy and lonely, narrating his thoughts directly to the audience in a scene that stands out in the film, and in a home front culture stressing unity and optimism, for its memorable portrayal of sadness and isolation: “This is another man I can never know—because I cannot talk with him, for I am a mute and cannot speak. I am cut off from other men, but in my own silence I can hear things they cannot hear, know things they can never know.” What are the dynamics of this scene? How does it achieve the effect it does, and how is it exactly not what one would expect to find in the 58

Figure 18. The Ghost Ship (1943): the Finn (Skelton Knaggs) responding to the question of Tom Merriam (Russell Wade).

Figure 19. The Ghost Ship: the Finn alone.

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midst of home front visual culture? Much depends on Knaggs’s special qualities as an actor—and Lewton’s ability to bring these qualities to their most exquisite pitch. Knaggs had “the gift of transforming physical dissonance into spiritual beauty,” wrote the London theater critic James Agate in 1937 after seeing one of the British actor’s performances in London’s East End. Watching him, “you feel that, just for one moment, you have had a glimpse of that old-fashioned Victorian thing—the soul.”1 Agate voiced this opinion in a long Sunday Times article about Knaggs during the East End run of a play starring the actor called Climbing: A Comedy in Three Acts. A program illustration shows Knaggs (fig. 20), then twenty-five, fresh from a stint at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts and yet to establish the Hollywood career during which he played bit roles in some twenty-five films between 1939 and his death in 1955. In Climbing, Knaggs played the role of Willie Baker, a retarded or “backward” young man (as the stage directions call him) with a fondness for climbing trees and sitting in them for days at a time. His family and others cannot understand his motives—they view him as a simpleton—but Willie is a character of psychological depth, as both Agate and Marten Cumberland, the playwright, saw. “He has an esoteric, inner life,” Cumberland wrote in the stage directions, and even though Willie is mostly “ ‘inarticulate’ concerning these strange forces that work within him,” he knows he wants to be, as he says in the play, “alone with the clouds, the wind and the stars.”2 These were the spiritual moments Agate found extraordinary. “Whenever the boy talks of climbing his face becomes transfigured,” Agate wrote, “so that it takes on something which the flesh unwillingly makes beauty, like an angry chord resolved.” The actor’s ability to transform his “gargoylish or goblinesque” appearance into beauty separated him from all manner of blandly attractive leading men: “I do not know any young stage Adonises toying with cigarette cases or stage Ganymedes coquetting with siphons who in the twinkling of an eye can change from idiocy to ecstasy: their ecstasy is changeless and untwinkling.” Knaggs transforms “through the fluidity of his temperament, which is loose about his actor’s surface in the sense in which the soul of the poet was ‘divinely loose’ about George Herbert.” Knaggs could swiftly galvanize a dormant soulfulness, summoning it as a scene demanded. In his article, subtitled “A Remarkable Actor,” Agate even felt moved to quote Ernest Dowson’s late Victorian poem “To One in Bedlam,” as a fit description of Knaggs’s depth of face: “Know they what dreams divine / Lift his long, laughing

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Figure 20. Skelton Knaggs as he appeared in the program for Climbing: A Comedy in Three Acts, 1937. Photo printed by permission of the Raymond Mander & Joe Mitchenson Theatre Collection, London.

reveries like enchanted wine, / And make his melancholy germane to the stars?”3 This is what we see in The Ghost Ship scene. The little sailor called the Finn transforms “physical dissonance into spiritual beauty.” The change from menace to soul, from shining knife to shining eye, transfigures the mute sailor just as Willie Baker’s face must have altered on the stage of the Embassy Theatre in London in 1937. The sailor’s soliloquy, with its claims of a special knowledge born of sadness (“know things they can never know”) even echoes Willie’s explanations of his lofty apartness: “Climbing up there . . . with the clouds . . . and the stars . . . and the whispering things . . . you don’t understand. You don’t understand why I climb. None of you do.”4 The sailor’s uplifted eyes, his po-

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sition at the top of the gangway, the ladder behind him, the rising steam—all establish his transcendence. The qualities of the leading man intensify Knaggs’s transformation. Russell Wade, who played Tom Merriam in The Ghost Ship, graduated from Van Nuys High School in 1936, one year after Knaggs enrolled in the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts.5 Wade registers the third officer’s emotions—fear, uncertainty, repulsion—within a stiff and narrow range. Change comes across Knaggs’s face, on the other hand, vastly, sublimely, like dawn spreading across a desert floor. In his Hollywood and British film careers, however, Knaggs rarely got to show these transformative powers. Often cast in uncredited roles, he usually appeared in films for only three or four scenes, and sometimes in just one, his total screen time rarely amounting to more than three or four minutes, and sometimes to as little as twenty seconds. His role in these movies of varying quality and ambition is sometimes that of messenger: in John Brahm’s Jack the Ripper mystery The Lodger (1944), he plays a costermonger telling of an upcoming concert and then screaming “Police! Police!” after finding the body of the Ripper’s latest victim; and in The Invisible Man’s Revenge (1944), he is the cabman Al Perry, with one line: “Ay, and I set him right down slap here at this door.” At other times he is a crooked or evil figure: a mobster in None But the Lonely Heart (1944); Sands, the killer in the Sherlock Holmes murder mystery Terror by Night (1946); Steinmuhl, the sweaty-faced leader of the angry mob of villagers in The House of Dracula (1945), fomenting violence in a dimwit drawl (“He killed my brother”); a highwayman’s accomplice in the Restoration melodrama Forever Amber (1947); and the outlaw Pete in The Paleface (1948), in which he shows up, looking malevolent, only to be shot in the face in a women’s bathroom by Jane Russell, who wears only a Colt .45 and her underwear. (The scene sounds like noir but is actually played for laughs, a matter of Technicolor flounce and folksiness in keeping with the tenor of this Bob Hope comedy western.) At still other times, Knaggs is merely a freak—the curiosity of a scene or two—in his brief credited role as Reg Aythorne in the British film South Riding (1938), in which, grinning, he repeats the phrase “That’s right” five times in response to his domineering wife’s questions at a Yorkshire fair; and in his twenty-five-second part as a greasy-haired barroom waiter in The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945). His two other roles in Lewton films—as the Cockney traveling salesman Henry Robbins in Isle of the Dead (1945) and the servant Varney in Bedlam (1946)—are not especially soulful either. (It is odd that Knaggs was not cast in Bed-

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lam as an inmate of the asylum commemorated in Dowson’s poem.) All these other performances have their own interest and at times include glimmerings of melancholic transfiguration, nowhere more so than in such London films as The Lodger and Dorian Gray, where Knaggs gets to play down-and-out avatars of the fog and cobblestones, the black puddles and polluted nights. But in none of them do we consistently see “dreams divine.” The reason we do see them in The Ghost Ship is Lewton, who had a special investment in soulful figures of this kind. But “soul” alone does not make the scene. Immediacy matters, too. And we feel ourselves in the actor’s presence, as if the film were one of his stage performances. He fills the screen and addresses the audience directly, as Irena would do in Lewton’s next film, The Curse of the Cat People. André Bazin’s words about the “live” qualities of film come to mind here, as they did with Irena: “Everything takes place as if in the time-space perimeter which is the definition of presence.” Knaggs’s stage roles ranged from his part in Climbing to other performances in London and New York—as Cloten in Shaw’s adapted Cymbeline in 1937, for example, and in the wartime drama Heart of a City in 1942, where, as the stage manager George, he played one of his two roles on Broadway. But it is the other Broadway role that sheds most light on the immediacy of The Ghost Ship scene. In late 1944 James Whale cast Knaggs as the lead in the Broadway murder mystery Hand in Glove. Whale, the famous director of Frankenstein (1931), chose Knaggs for the role of Hughie Roddis, a mentally retarded young man wrongly accused of a series of sex murders in a grimy Yorkshire industrial town during the war. The role was thankless. The script describes Hughie as “a squat fellow in his early twenties, his movements uncoordinated, his wits very slow, his mentality that of a three-year-old.”6 The role was a reprise of Knaggs’s performance as Willie Baker, except dumbed down even more. He spoke lines such as “breadcheese?” and “shadders of night,” and publicity photographs of him as Hughie (fig. 21) show just how excruciating the play must have been to watch.7 “Let me come right out and tell you that ‘Hand in Glove’ is an unpleasant play,” wrote the theater critic Robert Garland. “It’s pretty hard to take for an entire evening supposed to be given over to entertainment.”8 The intensely realistic portrayal of social isolation was to blame. “It’s in me to complain that Skelton Knaggs is too good, too realistic, as the dim-minded Hughie,” Garland wrote.9 Others agreed: “The most au-

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Figure 21. Hughie Roddis (Knaggs) and Auntie B. (Isobel Elsom) in Hand in Glove, directed by James Whale, New York, 1944. Billy Rose Theatre Collection, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations.

thentic stage-idiot I have ever seen”; “the final stage of realism”; “Knaggs . . . seems too real for comfort and his is something of a protean feat rich in tragic pathos”; “Hughie is portrayed with disquieting aptitude by Skelton Knaggs”; “Skelton Knaggs makes Hughie look so idiotic that it’s painful for sensitive people to even look at him. It’s a masterpiece of realism.”10 In the publicity photograph of Knaggs and costar Isobel Elsom, we see two universes: Elsom, as Hughie’s aunt, plays the solicitous relative, a generalized theatrical role, but Knaggs, with his bulging eyes and idiot stare, plays Hughie with relentless and appalling specificity. The veracity was too close for comfort. “The notion of placing on the stage a wild-staring, inarticulate imbecile as a key character in the story is a grave mistake, to say the least,” wrote one reviewer. “It is a dis-

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tasteful touch that makes the whole play an uncomfortable experience.”11 Hughie prompted inappropriate laughter, especially on opening night.12 Whale himself sensed that the play was deeply flawed. “The job, after you have finished with it, may be rather poor,” he told the New York World-Telegram just prior to opening night.13 Hand in Glove closed after forty performances.14 But maybe Whale knew what he was doing. The character of Hughie gave him a great chance to repeat the primal alienation of Boris Karloff’s monster in Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein (1935). Hughie was the same scapegoat—an innocent but reviled monster—but unlike Karloff’s roles he would be played live. When Hughie came onstage alone in the middle of the second act holding a makeshift cross, the rain dripping from his face as he silently admired it before muttering his simpleton’s line “Lord’s work done, and all!”15 the effect must have been strikingly similar to that of the monster’s moments of crude speech and sacrificial pathos, his connections to Christ and wounded animals, all of them flavored with the ridiculous. Each was a subject of social revulsion, except that Knaggs’s live performance as Hughie produced alienation in the round, as a three-dimensional disquiet of murmurs and laughter. The monster is a figure demonstrated or shown to an audience,16 and in his Broadway role Knaggs made that demonstration unnervingly immediate. There are links in all of this to The Ghost Ship. The Finn’s soulful transformation owes as much to Karloff’s precedent as to Knaggs’s gifts, just as Lewton’s choices in the scene show his debt to Whale’s classic films of the previous decade. When the monster is hunted down by villagers in The Bride of Frankenstein, we see him for a moment “in a beautiful close-up, lit from the left,” writes Alberto Manguel, in which his “face becomes young, frightened, almost angelic”—an apt description of Knaggs’s own facial transformation as the Finn.17 Beyond that, Whale’s way of using the actor onstage shows just how present, or at least quasipresent, Knaggs is in Lewton’s film from the year before. The Finn aspires to the same effect of three-dimensional isolation, immediate and intense, that Whale would produce in the play. In both cases, the aim was to show not simply the glove—the mimetic but empty copy of flesh and blood—but the hand itself. Maybe this is why The Ghost Ship, like Hand in Glove, received so many bad reviews. Clearly something in the film was out of step with the wartime moment—it satisfied neither as patriotic lore nor as engrossing distraction. Instead, it gave audiences only a gratuitously unpleasant portrayal of social isolation, with Knaggs’s character singled out for its un-

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appealing quality. “Strange and philosophical maxims are wafted from the ‘dummy’ in a ghostly, off-screen voice every once in a while,” wrote a Variety reviewer in 1943. “This helps not at all in making the vague yarn any clearer.”18 A reviewer for Film Daily alluded to Knaggs when he wrote that “some of the talk has psychological implications that are not particularly interesting.”19 The New York Times reviewer Bosley Crowther dismissed The Ghost Ship, referring to its “B movie big talk,” and so did PM’s John McManus.20 Howard Barnes of the Herald-Tribune disliked both The Ghost Ship and Hand in Glove, though in neither case mentioning Knaggs.21 The film was not even that scary. “If they call this a thriller, I would hate to see a dull picture,” wrote Jay G. Williams, the manager of the Liberty Theatre in Sharon, Pennsylvania, on March 4, 1944. “I billed this one as a chill, thrill show. I should have said a sleep, leave show.”22 When the film was pulled from circulation in late 1945, the result of a specious but successful plagiarism lawsuit against Lewton, its disappearance was perhaps for the best.23 Its downbeat energies fit the spirit of neither the war years nor their exuberant aftermath. This depressed spirit does make the Finn’s scene a surprisingly good match, however, for some of the most stridently critical rhetoric to emerge during those years. The Marxist art critic Clement Greenberg could hardly have been thinking less of any film, let alone one of Lewton’s, when he wrote his essay “The Situation at the Moment” in 1948, but what he said there applies equally well to the postwar and war years and to Knaggs in the way that Lewton and Whale used him. “Isolation,” Greenberg wrote, “or rather the alienation that is its cause, is the truth— isolation, alienation, naked and revealed unto itself, is the condition under which the true reality of our age is experienced.”24 In a wartime environment stressing “national uniformities,” as Paul Fussell has written, “a drab culture of anonymity and uniformity,”25 the Finn’s dramatically immediate “I am cut off from other men” stood out against the virulent homilies of togetherness. Lewton and Whale, in their critically reviled efforts of 1943 and 1944, used Knaggs to give chirpy home front audiences an unpleasant, in-your-face sense of social isolation “naked and revealed unto itself.” But soul and immediacy alone do not equal alienation. It matters, too, that in The Ghost Ship the loneliness came from a conspicuously minor actor. Other wartime movies, after all, made a point of showing mournful isolation, even of elevating it to a guiding principle, as in Clifford Odets’s None But the Lonely Heart, released in late 1944. This movie

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also received terrible reviews (“positively the worst chunk of film I have ever seen,” wrote the manager of a theater in Westby, Wisconsin; “Complaints galore and many walkouts. Pass it up,” wrote another from Herminie, Pennsylvania),26 but it also featured stars (Cary Grant and Ethel Barrymore) and eventually won an Oscar. This made its depiction of alienation unconvincing, according to Manny Farber, writing in the New Republic. He sensed something a little too glitzy, a little too “major,” and therefore false in the movie’s sadness. “Cary Grant’s consciousness of his own acting and posing,” Farber wrote, made it impossible to believe his role as Ernie Mott, a down-andout resident of London’s East End. “No doubt [Odets] would have preferred actors who looked more like slum people than Barrymore, Grant, Jane Wyatt or June Duprez, but the studio undoubtedly didn’t. Nor will studios countenance the ridding of people like Grant or [Barry] Fitzgerald of their stereotyped screen personalities.” These people, Farber wrote, “are so nice, folksy, exotically talented, strong and wise that it is impossible for them to be inhabitants of a barren world.” The review’s perfectly chosen title, “Rich Creamy Lather,” evokes the slickness of the studio’s uniform product and the soapy, unstubbled smoothness of the actors. The close shave referred less to the danger of the slum than to the beautiful face of Grant, beheld as though in a Barbasol advertisement. By contrast, Farber felt one of the only good things in the film was the minor role of Konstantine Shayne, who played a brutalized pawnbroker “with a very exact kind of unbowing dignity, goodness and melancholy.”27 For Farber, a minor actor could portray unimportance in a way that a major one could not. Knaggs fits this category. The role given him in The Ghost Ship is one of many in Lewton’s films accentuating the symbiosis between minor player and a state of lifelike sorrow and pain. No wonder Farber singled out Lewton’s Cat People as “the best Hollywood film in about three years” in a review written three months prior to his notice of None But the Lonely Heart.28 Like James Agee, his counterpart at the Nation, Farber found something believably unimportant glimmering in Lewton’s characters, enough so that, also in 1944, he claimed The Curse of the Cat People was “the least Hollywood-like film from Hollywood this year,” a point echoed by Agee that same year in praise of Lewton’s decision to cast unknown actors in Youth Runs Wild: “You are seeing pretty nearly the only acting and directing and photography in Hollywood which is at all concerned with what happens inside real and particular people among real and particular objects—not with how a generalized face can suggest a generalized emotion

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in a generalized light.”29 Though neither Agee nor Farber reviewed The Ghost Ship, Knaggs’s particular face seems a classic instance of their point. Lewton was less alone than Agee implied, however. In his preference for memorable minor characters he matched many other filmmakers during the forties, the golden era of the bit actor in Hollywood. Alfred Hitchcock, Vincente Minnelli, Preston Sturges, and Billy Wilder, among others, all knew exactly what to do with them, and their films contain sharp snippets of wartime disaffection. “The great strength of the movies in the 1940’s was the subversive power of the bit player,” Farber wrote in his later article “Pish-Tush” (1966). The era’s movies were “never more savage and uninhibited than in those moments when a whirring energy is created in back of the static mannered acting of some Great Star.” These were moments “when a supporting player hit his peak and managed to dry out whatever juicy glamour and heroics were in the film so that it took on a slatelike hardness.”30 The subversive potential of the bit player most often took the form of a contest between minor and major actors in the same scene, a competition visible now thanks to the literary historian Alex Woloch’s theory of the jostling between minor characters and the protagonist in the space of the novel.31 The title of Wilder’s film The Major and the Minor (1942) allegorized this constant struggle in forties films. The stakes were the “slatelike hardness,” the sense of life itself, that might intrude its irreducible singularity into the otherwise generalized worlds of stars, glamour, and conventional plots. In Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt (1943), Janet Shaw plays a frowsy waitress in a Santa Rosa dive bar who takes center stage between the two stars, Teresa Wright and Joseph Cotten. “Yes, I’d die for a ring like that; I’d just about die,” she drawls, as a character so abused and filled with self-loathing that the bar’s smoky atmosphere seems the exhalation of her bored sorrow. Similarly, in a memorable scene in Minnelli’s film The Clock (1945), an unknown minor actor takes a seat at a table near that of the stars, Robert Walker and Judy Garland. Increasingly coming between them, he chomps his food and eavesdrops on their excruciating conversation. (They have just gotten married but hardly know each other.) The cafeteria would not feel so slovenly or the lovers so isolated if the minor player had not taken center stage, exerting his anonymous power to transform the scene from within, fomenting discomfort and division. Knaggs made the most of the chance to upstage on those rare occasions when a filmmaker other than Lewton gave it to him, as in his brief role

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as the slum bar waiter in Albert Lewin’s Picture of Dorian Gray. There he comes between high-gloss actors of a more polished sort, filling the screen with a shambling sadness sufficient to make it seem that the Beethoven sonata in the background plays for him and no one else—not the other actors, not their characters, not the plot—and that the chiaroscuro of the bar and the entire bleak Thames-side surroundings are not so much a setting as an emanation of his own melancholic and invincible triviality. At other times an intuitively sympathetic film editor helped Knaggs achieve his upstaging power. In Roy William Neill’s Terror by Night, a Sherlock Holmes mystery set on a train from London to Edinburgh, Knaggs’s appearance as the killer coincides with the sudden insertion of remarkable stock footage showing trees and houses flowing in silhouette on dusky hillsides, an effect magically engineered by the film editor Saul Goodkind to show scenery hurtling by the train.32 As Knaggs appears, trying to kick Basil Rathbone’s Holmes off the train, these breathtaking images are like noirish bursts of his character’s not unbeautiful consciousness, as though even in his murderous role he still had about him the inchoate potential for “soul” mentioned by Agate and accessible to any alert producer, director, or editor, here Goodkind, who might conjure around the actor the signs of a dormant melancholic depth, no matter what the part. Goodkind’s editing envisions Knaggs in the guise of his old poetic self from Climbing, as the maker of mysterious and forgotten mental worlds—the conjurer of in-between spaces of no importance, neither London nor Edinburgh, just anonymous territories traveled through, somehow elevated to an artful centrality and saturnine poetry the likes of which none of the film’s cosmopolitan stars achieve.33 At many other times, however, the contest between minor and major actors ended differently, with the star prevailing and the bit player shunted to the sidelines or worse. The minor actor was merely a stooge, divested of any critical power, and Knaggs was a veteran of these scenes. In None But the Lonely Heart, he moves to one side as Grant takes center stage at a penny arcade shooting range and pumps eight bullets into the bull’s-eye, leaving no doubt that the star is at the center and all others in the scene are peripheral, like the outer rings of the target. At other times Knaggs cedes the stage outright to the star. He dominates the opening minute of the World War I submarine movie The Spy in Black (1939), playing a German sailor looking for Captain Hardt in a hotel lobby in Kiel. But when his search is unsuccessful, Knaggs’s sailor leaves just as Hardt himself, played by Conrad Veidt, enters through the hotel’s re-

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volving doors. As Knaggs exits, the notably handsome Veidt, dashing in a leather coat, strolls into the film, his stride set to a triumphant sound track. As the star appears, filling the scene, the minor player disappears; there is not space for them both. The same happens even in Lewton’s films. In Isle of the Dead, Knaggs’s character, the traveling salesman Robbins, makes a brief speech but is taken ill and retires to his hotel room. As he mounts the stairs, he falls down and disappears from view just as the film’s female lead, Ellen Drew as Thea, walks down the same flight. Robbins soon dies of his affliction, and the star comes to life as he vanishes. The tension between minor and major players is acknowledged and smoothed over by eradicating the minor player after his brief moment at center stage, so that a star can take pride of place. (Knaggs’s disappearance also comes soon after Boris Karloff enters the room.) The words of another character in this same scene, a superstitious peasant woman played by Helen Thimig, express the minor-major logic: “There’s one who’s pale and weak,” she says of a sickly character named Mrs. St. Aubyn, “and upstairs there’s one who’s rosy and red and full of blood”—Thea. The major character gained in strength as he or she sucked the life from the minor players. This happens again to Knaggs in more elaborate and comic form in Headin’ for God’s Country, released the same year as The Ghost Ship. The action is set in 1941 in Sunivak, Alaska, where the townsfolk are played almost exclusively by diminutive male character actors, including Knaggs, who has a credited bit role as the bartender Jeff (“Right-o”; “Blimey”). These fellows are perfectly happy as the film begins, each of them gnomelike and wizened, and all adoring the town’s one young woman, Virginia Dale as the beautiful blonde meteorologist Laurie, the Snow White to their Seven Dwarfs. Then the film’s male star, big, broad-shouldered William Lundigan, trudges through the icepack, appearing out of nowhere, and nothing is ever the same again. “Why should a stranger be comin’ in to town from the inside?” asks one of the minor players suspiciously. “Yeah, why didn’t he come in by boat?” asks another. This is the end of their world as these minor players know it. Now an imposing figure is in their midst, and despite their warnings (“This ain’t exactly a hospitable town,” cautions one), Lundigan’s larger-than-life character, named Michael Banyan, is soon flashing his wealth, ordering them around, tricking them into thinking that a war is on, and seducing the girl. Even the fantasy of winning the sexy meteorologist is now denied to these hapless minions of the sludge. No wonder they get angry

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when they discover Banyan’s ruse. “When we get him, we’ll string him,” says one. “Hangin’s too good for Banyan,” proclaims another. Soon they do hang him in effigy and march around the body in a circle, chanting slogans and pelting it with snowballs. Eventually Banyan and the locals come together to defeat a small Japanese invasion, but the film’s inspiring genius—the constant animosity between minor and major players, their innate conflicts of interest—remains its most entertaining and memorable quality. Knaggs’s other screen appearance in 1943, in The Ghost Ship, is vastly different. The Finn’s intense singularity shows how a minor actor could dominate a particular scene and even threaten to take over an entire film. He speaks his first monologue prior to the appearance of the film’s star, Richard Dix as Captain Stone, whose first scene follows Knaggs’s soliloquy. As in The Spy in Black, Knaggs is allowed space to express himself before the star claims the screen. Whereas the minor player’s freedom in the earlier film is a matter of little import (“Captain Hardt to report to headquarters immediately,” the sailor says, among other straightforward lines), in The Ghost Ship it acquires its tragic monumentality. Knaggs swells to fill the space in direct relation to the star’s absence, controlling the scene in words and appearance. The movie’s power relation between minor and major characters uses a conceit as old as storytelling itself, except now in a wartime context. The Finn’s monologue recalls a famous scene in the Iliad, as described by Woloch in his study of the minor character in literature. In Book 2 Achilles is gone, and Thersites, “perhaps the first truly minor character in Western literature,” appears in his absence. Thersites takes center stage in a potentially anarchic way, becoming aggressive in the power vacuum, threatening to speak endlessly, since no one is present to challenge his command. “The collapse of authority signaled by Achilles’ withdrawal seems to produce this narrative intrusion, this disruptive character,” writes Woloch.34 Seemingly because of the hero’s absence, the minor character also acquires an intense physical presence, accorded him in a more detailed description than anything said about Achilles: “This was the ugliest man who came beneath Ilion,” notes Homer. “He was bandy-legged and went lame on one foot, with shoulders stooped and drawn together over his chest, and above his skull went up to a point with the wool sparsely grown upon it.”35 The minor character’s physical and verbal domination signals a disruption of established order, an absence of authority in which he attains a powerful realization. This happens in The Ghost Ship. Agate wrote that Knaggs “should

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play Lob and Thersites and the Fool in ‘Lear,’ ” and in The Ghost Ship he does threaten to co-opt the entire movie, Thersites-style, in the preliminary absence of the star. Remarkably for an actor who was paid a daily contract wage of $66.66, Knaggs dominates the film while the $1,000-a-day star Richard Dix remains in the wings. (Knaggs’s total salary for fourteen days of work on the film was $933.33; Dix’s for eighteen days was $18,000.)36 True, Dix’s best leading man days were long past him by 1943—suffering from a heart ailment, slow of movement, he was still a star but not a Greek hero, no longer able to liken himself to Ulysses, as he did convincingly in his Oscar-nominated role in Cimarron (1931)—“Ah, Penelope, strange lady, standing thus aloof, thy husband has come home to thee,” his character says, returning to his wife after a five-year absence. True as well, The Ghost Ship was more a seafaring yarn than a nautical epic, more Jack London than Homer, so that both star and film might seem meager entities not even worth overthrowing, but the contest of major and minor characters in Lewton’s film retains its Homeric punch. The structural principle of the minor character’s anarchic potential is similar in both works. When the Finn kills Dix’s diabolical Captain Stone at the end, the plot twist fulfills the promise of the minor player’s dominance at the film’s outset. It also echoes the minor character’s aggression toward the protagonist in Lewton’s fiction, as when the gangster Jack Minor (anglicized from Giacomo Minorca) kills the heroine Dawn Loyall in The Fateful Star Murder (1931).37 Putting Thersites at center stage during wartime was not a hopeful gesture. During the war, as Fussell notes, “fiction, memoirs, and plays swarm[ed] with bizarre individualists,” and wartime films were populated with “flagrant egocentrics” such as George Amberson Minafer in Orson Welles’s Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and Waldo Lydecker in Laura (1944). But these were lead roles, and the purpose of their idiosyncrasy was redemptive. The characters were all “doubly welcome as lost ideals in this drab culture of anonymity and uniformity” because they dramatized a resistance—if perhaps a specious one—“ ‘to the new facelessness’ required by ‘military expediency.’ ”38 But what of a flagrantly individualized figure who was himself one of the mass, just an anonymous bit of scenery, the perfection of nobody? Such a figure, like Knaggs, would merely turn his obscurity into a central principle for a few moments—becoming a star only, perversely, so that his features could cave and shrivel before our eyes into the emptiness they were supposed to transcend, so that epiphanies of selfhood would drop like a mask deflated and sunk to the floor. His was the “appearance of a disappear-

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ance,” to quote Woloch on the minor character’s sudden fleeting centrality.39 The memorable minor actor would be like the “Capt. Hulin” of whom Lewton wrote while researching the French Revolution for Selznick’s Tale of Two Cities—a man “who appeared on the pages of history for just one day and then was lost to sight,” fascinating and puzzling Lewton enough that he contemplated writing a book about him.40 In the case of Knaggs, it was not fair, it was not right, it was not patriotic, to flout one’s specific face as the emblem of facelessness. He and Lewton turned the whole hopeful wartime discourse of individuality inside out, making the actor’s momentary prominence into a rich and trenchant parody of the star’s redemptive excesses of personality. Knaggs’s minorness is the sign of wartime alienation in another way as well. This one concerns The Ghost Ship’s debt to the novels of Charles Dickens, the most famous inventor of minor characters. Woloch notes the tension in Dickens’s fiction between protagonists and ancillary figures, the haves and have-nots, as they all compete for narrative space. The competition has its roots in Thersites’ speech in the Iliad but by the mid–nineteenth century it had become an inescapable political fact, woven so tightly into the social fabric Dickens tried to evoke that it became a structuring principle of his fiction.41 There, as an oblique representation of a culture governed by enormous class inequity, major characters require the use and subordination of minor characters in order to develop, but the minor characters hardly remain secondary. With their extravagant, unforgettably odd appearance and their sheer numbers they constantly threaten to disrupt the plots and upstage the protagonists. This “over-significance of minor characters,” as Woloch puts it, shows how the social world marks Dickens’s fiction.42 The abundance of memorable subordinates at the sides and feet of his main characters constantly asserts inequity and conflict in the social world. Knaggs’s mute sailor comes straight out of this Dickensian universe. When Lewton started as Selznick’s story editor at MGM in the mid1930s, he contributed substantially to Selznick’s productions of David Copperfield and A Tale of Two Cities, and there is a story of him “poring over” the pages of Oliver Twist in the expectation that Selznick would ask him for “some obscure piece of information” about the novel.43 During the filming of Tale he dispatched a nineteen-page critique of the script to Selznick, constantly referring to Dickens (“Let me quote Dickens’ description of the scene”) and wondering why the screenwriter had downplayed the important minor character of the mender of roads, whom Dickens describes as “abid[ing] at a little distance” from the pro-

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tagonists, “like an outer satellite who was not to speak until required, or to offer an opinion until invited.” Counseled Lewton, “The road mender is a useful character to have in the script. More than any other character, he symbolizes, as Dickens uses him, the great mass of the people of France and in this way makes the revolution understandable.”44 It is no surprise that Youth Runs Wild includes a minor character named Dickens. Other filmmakers of the time, notably Sturges, clearly found inspiration for their minor characters in Dickens—Farber wrote of “that looney Dickensian spirit that was Sturges’s trademark”45—but the opening of The Ghost Ship and other moments in Lewton’s films show that he too was deeply aware of the master of minor characterization. Knaggs was equally a product of this Dickensian spirit. Agate likened Knaggs’s quick shifts of mood to those of the mid-Victorian actor Frederick “Little” Robson (1821–1864) and found himself thinking of Dickens’s era again when he wrote of “that old-fashioned Victorian thing— the soul.”46 The actor’s frail appearance and act of sharpening a knife conjure the bleak social conditions of his native city of Sheffield, especially as described by Friedrich Engels in his treatise from Dickens’s era, The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), where “by far,” Engels wrote, “the most unwholesome work is the grinding of knife blades and forks.”47 It would be difficult indeed to find a more Dickensian name among Hollywood actors than Skelton Knaggs—enough so to make one suspect that it was the actor’s chosen stage name, though the Sheffield city records indicate that he was born to it.48 Among the names of Dickens’s characters, Skelton Knaggs most resembles Newman Noggs, the name of the hero’s quirky sidekick in Nicholas Nickleby (1839), and this coincidence shows how clearly Dickensian the Finn’s role is. Noggs, like his filmic counterpart, is a man of odd appearance, “with two goggle eyes whereof one was a fixture, a rubicund nose, [and] a cadaverous face.” Though not mute, Noggs “rarely spoke to anybody unless somebody spoke to him,” and consequently when he is introduced, early in the novel, he falls into a “grim silence.” He is also eccentrically preoccupied with his hands, rubbing them “slowly over each other: cracking the joints of his fingers, and squeezing them into all possible distortions.”49 Knaggs’s role in The Ghost Ship—his scene-stealing intensity of appearance, his role in the plot—descends directly from Dickens’s minor characters. So does the portrayal of social alienation that accompanies the most vivid of Dickens’s minor figures. Like the best of them, the Finn stands out, obdurate and strange, instead of retiring into the background. The “first impact” of a Dickens minor figure, wrote George Orwell in 1939,

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“is so vivid that nothing afterwards effaces it.” Such characters stand apart as inert, autonomous objects even in the midst of the stories they help tell. Dickens “was constantly setting into action characters who ought to have been purely static. . . . They start off as magic-lantern slides and they end by getting mixed up in a third-rate movie,” but “the monstrosities that he created are still remembered as monstrosities, in spite of getting mixed up in would-be probable melodramas.” Dickens’s novels feature “rotten architecture but wonderful gargoyles.”50 The effect is similar to E. M. Forster’s account of the “flat character” in Aspects of the Novel (1927): “It is a convenience for an author when he can strike with his full force at once, and flat characters are very useful to him, since they never need reintroducing, never run away, have not to be watched for development, and provide their own atmosphere—little luminous discs of pre-arranged size, pushed hither and thither like counters across the void or between the stars; most satisfactory.”51 Knaggs’s character arrives complete with atmosphere and never develops, retaining his static autonomy even as the plot goes through its smoothing machinations. Like a piece of sculpture, he can be moved around and placed between the stars as needed. He can stand out, if used properly, as a sign of alienation. An indelible sign, too. Ultimately Knaggs’s character is a loyal supporter of Third Officer Tom Merriam, saving his life by killing the wicked Captain Stone, just as Newman Noggs protects his young and kind master Nickleby from the wickedness of his Uncle Ralph. And near the end of the film the Finn stands next to Merriam on the bridge, proclaiming, “All’s well,” just as the conclusion of Nicholas Nickleby features Noggs loyally by Nicholas’s side at the master’s country estate. But nothing can erase Noggs’s intense physical oddity and isolation in the novel: he is an instance of that “deeper Dickens” described by the literary critic Irving Howe and sought by Woloch, “an ur-Dickens more anarchic and free,” Howe wrote, “who thrusts his way past the Dickens who manufactures those tiresome plots.”52 In the same way, the plot of The Ghost Ship cannot erase its first moments, frozen on the “gargoylish or goblinesque” Knaggs, which bring the story to an iconic stop. There is another reason that this is so. The Finn is not even The Ghost Ship’s first dominant minor figure. Though he appears barely two minutes into the film, Knaggs is second to Alec Craig, who plays the blind street singer Merriam encounters in the opening minute (fig. 22). More established than Knaggs, Craig was a seasoned character actor who had appeared in more than seventy films by the time he played a role in The

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Figure 22. The Ghost Ship: the blind street singer (Alec Craig).

Ghost Ship and would go on to do another thirty. Invariably these were incisive performances of but a few seconds’ duration: the porter in And Now Tomorrow (1944), the butcher in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (1945), and the zookeeper in Cat People (1942), for example, his one other Lewton role. The Ghost Ship bit is no exception to these brief but memorable performances, and it carries its own sharp charge of isolation. As the film opens, we hear and then see Craig’s blind street beggar cranking a music box and singing the ominous sea chantey “Blow the Man Down.” He then detains Russell Wade’s character, Third Officer Merriam, warning him about the ship he is about to board. Merriam chats pleasantly for a moment, having given the blind man a coin, before dismissing his advice and encountering the Finn in the next scene. Superficially the structure of this entire opening is that of the bildungsroman. With Merriam walking past two stationary social outcasts on his way to meet the captain, and eventually become a man, the sequence seems to favor the hero. “Many first-person novels begin with an encounter between the protagonist and an egregiously minor character,” writes Woloch, citing the opening of Gil Blas (1715), in which the hero Gil meets and leaves behind a beggar. These scenes push “the central

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protagonist forward . . . leaving the minor character behind.”53 As the one develops, the other stays put, a stationary landmark whose dead-end existence measures the hero’s progress. The opening of The Ghost Ship, in this sense, constitutes a kind of tour in which the main character passes two “egregiously” minor characters—each a figure of deprivation, one blind, the other mute—to emphasize a mobility, a capacity for change, that he possesses and they do not. Yet really it is the minor players who have the power in these scenes. Their visual and psychological “over-significance” gives them an intensity greater than anything Wade’s character can muster. Craig’s street singer is another Thersites, perhaps more so than the Finn. With his lengthy song of a captain’s hubris, consisting of a full fifty-six lines in the lyrics sheet submitted by Lewton for Hays Office approval, he is like Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, an early-nineteenth-century instance of the crabbed minor figure threatening to detain the bystander endlessly with the retelling of his ghastly story.54 Like the Mariner, he co-opts space and attention, in the absence of an authority that would dictate otherwise. And when the blind singer desists, his music trailing off, “He whistles all day when he’s praying for a breeze, gimme some time . . . ,” we immediately see the Finn, in long shot, at the top of the gangway, as though a baton of resonant minorness had been handed off, the first bit player disappearing only to take the form of a new one. The film takes pains to link the two players: each is a standing and mostly stationary figure of eerie power. Each is a manipulator of glinting silver objects—music box, cup, and long knife. Gangway and song nicely bridge the two characters, one deprived of sight, the other of speech. Meanwhile, the young ambulatory hero, Tom Merriam, is far from the man going places, as in Gil Blas. Instead, Russell Wade’s character is reduced to a go-between, a glorified messenger, between Craig and Knaggs. His main purpose is to take us from one memorable minor figure to another, emphasizing their connections and even their cross-fertilization. They control Wade as two flowers control the action of a bee. Even at the end of the film, Wade is going nowhere. In The Ghost Ship’s last minutes Craig’s street singer again appears on the same dock where we first saw him. Ostensibly the conclusion marks the hero’s development—he returns a wiser man to the place from which he started— but Merriam’s renewed encounter with the blind street singer, standing there still singing his same song (fig. 23), tells us that little has changed. Craig was employed on the set for only one day, on August 24, 1943— understandable enough, since there would have been no need to pay him

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Figure 23. The Ghost Ship: Tom Merriam (Wade) reencountering the blind street singer.

his contractual daily wage ($150) for two days on the set when his scenes could be shot in just one.55 Thus the opening and closing scenes of The Ghost Ship, filmed on the same day (likely even back-to-back), show the near synchronicity between the two moments on-screen. The exigencies of scheduling reinforced the minor player’s immobilizing powers. Disrupting the wartime bildungsroman was no small thing. The story of the man or woman (more often a man) who goes from Nothing to Everything was especially important then. As Farber noted about war films, “The central character, whether he is a bombardier in a Flying Fortress or the captain of a United Nations ship sailing supplies to Murmansk, has by the end of the picture become a hero of the war no matter how he started—as a sulker, the brother of the captain’s hated rival, or an idiot.”56 Russell Wade knew the concept well, having spent the war years playing boys-become-men. His other film of 1943 was RKO’s Bombardier, in which he plays a trainee who overcomes his scruples about bombing other human beings in order to perform flawlessly, like the other cadets, in a climactic attack against the Japanese city of Nagoya. Even his personal life was cast as a success story. “The Wades . . . have created for themselves the kind of American home we all

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treasure more than ever these days,” noted a Los Angeles Times article on December 19, 1943, a week before The Ghost Ship opened in Los Angeles and New York.57 At the climax of Lewton’s film, however, Wade’s character is back where he started. The frozen isolation of Knaggs and Craig connects their roles to the best minor performances during the forties—Janet Shaw’s in Shadow of a Doubt, for example. But it also separates them from well-played but less alienated minor parts at the time. Wilder’s Double Indemnity (1944) includes a rich array of nicely realized minor players—the elevator man, the car washer, and Mr. Jackson, the Medford, Oregon, man wonderfully played by Porter Hall—but in all these cases the brief roles contribute so precisely to the murder plot that their quirky individuality becomes just another smooth part of the narrative rather than an intense block of plot-stopping Dickensian grotesquerie. The film’s opening moment, in which Neff’s car races through a stop signal, praises speed and an aversion to halting for anything. So does the well-known repartee between Neff and Phyllis Dietrichson about exceeding the speed limit. The only end the film and the players know, as they acknowledge, is the “end of the line.” Lewton’s films, however, reach the end of the line all the time, often in moments of visual stasis involving hyperbolically realized minor characters. It is difficult to believe the Finn’s claims at the end of the film that “all’s well” and that Merriam’s “faith in man’s essential goodness is restored” when they come from a figure whose sad, scarred face plainly shows that everything is not well and never has been. In itself, the plot-stopping grotesqueness of both the Finn and the blind street singer signifies alienation. Woloch notes that in Dickens’s fiction, “making people minor produces more and more distortion and flatness, until that distortion becomes so extreme that it begins to call attention to itself. . . . The stunning array of comic and grotesque minor characters” in Dickens’s novels, their “highly distinctive speech patterns, emphasis of an eccentric gesture or habit, [and] concentration on specific physical features or body parts” all signify that they must make their mark quickly, since their lack of space, their lack of importance, means that they must come into view intensely and memorably if they are to be seen at all.58 Lewton’s minor character Sally Minor, in the novel 4 Wives, “was so trim, so perfectly groomed, so completely the smart woman of fashion that her one imperfection, an absurdly large nose, drew Lilith’s eyes like a magnet.” “Don’t look at my nose, Lilith,” is Sally’s first line.59 Pinched faces and squashed features, clipped speech, peculiar nervous habits, and outrageous acts all signify the constrained space in which

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minor characters must operate. In Lewton’s film The Leopard Man, Kiki Walker, a second-tier nightclub performer, tries to upstage the star, CloClo, by entering the club with a black leopard during her rival’s castanet dance. As her agent puts it, Kiki can gain some notoriety of her own only by making a vivid impression.60 The scene is Lewton’s most explicit allegorical statement about the aggressions minor players must display if they are to steal scenes from the stars. In The Ghost Ship the appearance of Craig and Knaggs, especially Knaggs, fits this model. His physical strangeness fills the frame not only because he is given anarchic control over the screen in the absence of Richard Dix but also because he and Lewton understood that Dix soon would appear, himself filling the screen, and that there was no time like the present to make an indelible impact. All of Knaggs’s Hollywood roles take into account this need to make a fully drawn characterization in the few seconds generally allotted him, and he can often be seen emerging full-blown, his first and often only appearance demanding the quick stab of memorable realization. Nowhere in his film career was that principle of a few seconds in the gray sun taken to such vivid and Dickensian extremes as in the Finn’s soulful speech. There the sense of being constrained, of being unimportant—of having to strum up a hyperbole of gargoylish effects all in an instant that somehow still comport with the idea of “soul,” of having to lay down intimations of depth across the flat signatures of sudden triviality—makes it Knaggs’s most poignant and socially meaningful moment as a screen actor. But whom does this alienated figure represent? What specific home front experience does it show at odds with official depictions of optimism and determination? In July 1993 the Film Forum theater in lower Manhattan ran a two-week Val Lewton film series, screening all eleven of the producer’s RKO films. The number of times each picture was shown is instructive: Cat People I Walked with a Zombie

8 10

The Leopard Man

6

The Seventh Victim

4

The Curse of the Cat People

8

Mademoiselle Fifi

4

Youth Runs Wild

4

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The Body Snatcher

6

Isle of the Dead

6

Bedlam

4

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As Caryn James of the New York Times put it, “The series’ major rediscovery is ‘The Ghost Ship.’ ”61 No doubt this had to do with the film’s return to life after a long period when it was rarely shown even on television because of the lawsuit against Lewton. But it featured so prominently in Manhattan in the early nineties for another reason. “In its mild way,” wrote Michael Feingold of the Village Voice, The Ghost Ship is “one of the most homoerotic films Hollywood ever made.” Feingold read the captain’s violence and the crew’s paranoid exchanges as “a parable on the danger of closeting gays in the military.”62 Captain Stone’s Altair, for Feingold, was a doomed ship around whose every corner one could find rebuffed advances, furtive dalliances, and a spasmodic sexually motivated homicidal rage. Lewton did indeed refer to gay men periodically in his films and books. Knaggs plays Varney in Bedlam as a gay man, and in one of Lewton’s novels, 4 Wives, the aesthete Martin Moncure discovers he does not desire his wife, tries to work up a passion for another woman, realizes he is in love with his best friend (a big, simple, garrulous polo player named Robin), and kills himself.63 This ferment is present in The Ghost Ship, opening up an aspect of home front culture not typically explored, yet it is not the film’s whole story. The Ghost Ship’s representation of the other home front is both more specific and more general than Feingold’s commentary suggests, and all in ways shown in the opening three minutes. Farber provides the key insight. In his essay “Underground Films” (1957), Farber notes that the B picture, including films by Lewton, reproduces the shabby ambience of the theaters in which it was shown. Such a movie “finds its natural home in caves: the murky, congested theaters, looking like glorified tattoo parlors on the outside and located near bus terminals in big cities.” In this “nightmarish atmosphere of shabby transience,” the spectator comes to feel that “the cutthroat atmosphere in the itch house is reproduced in the movies shown there.”64 The start of The Ghost Ship perfectly illustrates Farber’s point. The credits dissolve to show us the shop window of Rubin’s Seamen’s Outfitting Co. (fig. 24). The window features two rows of knives mounted so that the tips of the blades confront each other in grisly counterpoint.

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Figure 24. The Ghost Ship: Rubin’s Seamen’s Outfitting Co. shop window.

The window display anticipates the climactic knife fight between the Finn and Captain Stone, but it also alludes to a movie theater’s street-side advertisements for its current feature. The display for Lewton’s Bedlam at the Rialto Theater in Times Square in 1946 is an example (fig. 25). Commenting on the hyperbole of these sidewalk come-ons, Farber noted in a New Republic column in 1945 that “this advertising creates the illusion that the movie will keep you in an unending state of the most violent emotion, that the show won’t have one slow scene and that you won’t see a better picture anywhere, any time.”65 It all sounded like the “chill, thrill show” falsely advertised by the Sharon, Pennsylvania, theater manager, now extending up and down the Broadway movie district, so that pedestrians on those blocks, according to Farber, found them covered “with posters of people with guns and people running from them or from some nameless horror.”66 The Ghost Ship’s opening showcase of knives refers to this sidewalk advertising. The imagery is not intentional, but it must have been striking in 1943 to walk past a window display promising mayhem, buy a ticket, enter the theater, and watch a film whose first scene depicts a window advertisement promising mayhem. The script specifies that we also see in the shop

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Figure 25. Street display for Bedlam, the Rialto Theater, Times Square, New York, 1946; printed originally in the Motion Picture Herald 163 (May 18, 1946): 56. Photo courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, California.

window “an enormously enlarged photo of Rubin himself, in his prime, fighting Joe [Jim] Jeffries,” an image that conjures the action-packed conventions of movie posters and their focus on the portrait likenesses of performers (like Karloff and Knaggs in the Rialto’s Bedlam display).67 Though the photograph does not appear in the movie (the knives show up instead), it too suggests that the parlance of street-side movie advertisement lurks all about in this opening scene. Alec Craig’s blind street singer plays an important role in this representation of the space in front of the theater. A colorful character strolling around before the window display, he calls to mind the “street ballyhoo” that was an essential part of theater promotion during those years. Surviving press books for Lewton’s Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, Leopard Man, and Curse of the Cat People all suggest that theater managers employ a person to parade the sidewalk in front of the theater in some attention-getting guise (fig. 26). The instructions for these stunts show how close Craig’s character is to their roles—for example,

Figure 26. Street ballyhoo suggestion in I Walked with a Zombie press book, 1943. The Cinema-Television Library, the University of Southern California.

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“Have a man wearing a cat mask and carrying a picket sign march up and down in front of the pictorial display. . . . This is a swell stunt to attract attention to the front of your theatre.”68 Like these figures, Craig’s blind man walks up and down performing a stunt or shtick—in this case, a personification of the wizened old doom-foretelling salt—and sure enough, it is not long before the singer draws the attention of a passerby, Third Officer Merriam. Even his warning to the young officer—“she’s a bad ship”—fits the ballyhoo artist’s role to promote attendance by cautioning people not to attend, because the show was too terrifying.69 When Wade’s character walks down the gangway at the end of the film to find the street singer still there, we get confirmation that The Ghost Ship’s start and finish truly are about moviegoing—the film shows a man entering a structure from the street and then, sixty-eight minutes later, at the conclusion of the movie, exiting onto the same street to find the same blind singer still there, exactly as if the man were a person entering a theater and then leaving it at the film’s conclusion to find the ballyhoo artist still at work. Like the allusion to movie advertising in the shop window, The Ghost Ship’s ballyhoo is not deliberate, yet it is palpable all the same. The Finn adds another layer to these front-of-the-theater effects. In one sense he is part of the drama specifically evoking the movie house and its personnel. After the references to street-side posters and ballyhoo, the little man standing at the top of the ship’s gangway reads as an usher, a ticket taker, a cashier—some figure, at any rate, poised at the threshold between the street and the voyage on which the customer we have seen plunking down a coin is about to embark. The sailor’s glinting knife would be just another name for a flashlight motioning the theater patron vaguely back into the interior, and his mute response to the innocent customer’s earnest inquiries would be strangely true-to-life, judging by Farber’s June 1943 column about the difficulties of communicating with the unhelpful staffs of New York movie theaters: “The cashier, who doubles in Information, never hears your question because she is cut off from the world on all sides by glass, and either you are forced into sign language or that right-angled stance that goes with talking up through the ticket slot.”70 In a more important sense, however, the Finn conjures the person Lewton imagines one might find outside a lowbrow movie theater (besides its own employees): a man of unknown intentions, possibly malevolent, yet above all sad and alone. The street singer functions in the same way—as a reference to ballyhoo but also a sign of an indigent man in front of a the-

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Figure 27. The Ghost Ship: Tom Merriam and the silhouette girl.

ater, waiting for the customers to enter and exit. Each suggests that the film somehow identifies the space outside the theater as a key site of alienation. Even Wade’s character is not exempt from the film’s wish to portray the sordid space in front of the movie palace, for so the final scene shows Merriam and a girl in silhouette, the two having just met (fig. 27). Though nominally part of the plot and treated tamely, in compliance with the Production Code, the scene conjures a shady and fragile world of anonymous street liaisons, in keeping with the film’s condensed images of urban dereliction. The effect of all this is startling. Depicting a sleazy sidewalk atmosphere like that outside an urban theater, the film creates a strange specificity out of improbable and utterly forgettable materials, matching Farber’s grandest claim for the underground movie—namely, that in it can be found the “unheralded ripple of physical experience, the tiny morbidly lifeworn detail” that savors of the real. The plot did not matter next to these moments: “Time has dated and thinned out the story excitement, but the ability to capture the exact homely-manly character of forgotten locales and misanthropic figures is still in the pictures.”71 In such moments there was no damning generality and no neat and tidy starstudded “rich creamy lather,” only the dirty specificity that sharply ap-

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proximated lived experience. And as Farber recognized, “The cutthroat atmosphere in the itch house” and its environs were the richest sources of down-and-out iconography and therefore bound to be reproduced in the films themselves. “The screen image is often out of plumb, the house lights are half left on during the picture, the broken seats are only a minor annoyance in the unpredictable terrain,” he wrote of certain Manhattan theaters. “Yet these action-film homes are the places to study Hawks, Wellman, Mann, as well as their near and distant cousins,” including Lewton.72 Several factors about Lewton’s career support this idea. First, in the early 1920s Lewton worked as a reporter at various Manhattan newspapers including the New York Morning World, where he had become good friends with the hard-bitten journalist Donald Henderson Clarke, who went on to write the script for The Ghost Ship.73 Clarke’s autobiography, Man of the World (1951), is filled with accounts of the sleazy Manhattan he relished covering for many years—the town of “poor, struggling thieves, dope peddlers, loft burglars, truck looters, smalltime gamblers,” of prostitutes who “swarmed along Broadway, Sixth Avenue, Forty-second, Twenty-third, and Fourteenth streets.”74 Lewton’s brief experiences alongside Clarke as a reporter clearly inform his fiction, since so much of it is set entirely or almost entirely in New York (The Fateful Star Murder, No Bed of Her Own, 4 Wives, A Laughing Woman, and This Fool, Passion) and since so much of it describes sordid situations: in The Fateful Star Murder, for example, sex in a taxicab and in a cheap Thirtieth Street hotel room “with a worn spot on the rug, the grayish pillow cases, the cracked water basin with dust caked inside.” No wonder the tawdry tale features an obvious homage to Clarke in the character of Henry Deal, “one of the best newspaper reporters in the city.”75 Lewton’s portrayal of lurid Manhattan extended into the unseemly insides of the city’s movie palaces. In the best-known of his novels, No Bed of Her Own (1932), dedicated to Clarke, the heroine, Rose Mahoney, decides to give her feet a rest by going to a Columbus Circle theater to watch films. She buys a fifteen-cent ticket for the top balcony and heads upstairs, where she soon becomes bored by the movies and starts looking around her: Two usherettes, trim in their tightly-fitting uniforms, were gossiping. She watched them idly as one girl nudged the other, indicating the stairway with a nod of her head. A sailor, his little white cap perched over one ear, his hands buried deep in the breast pockets of his watch jacket, was climbing the last step.

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The Power of the Minor Actor Rose watched the two girls and tried to overhear what they were saying. She caught the word, “mine,” and then watched one of the girls, a little, thin creature with carroty red hair, as she strolled up to the sailor, flashing her light before her. “This way please,” she ordered, and began to lead the way to the extreme left of the theatre, her light flashing on and off as she walked across the back of the auditorium. The sailor, rolling his shoulders, followed her. The light went off as the girl reached the dark corner where the last aisle and the back of the auditorium formed an angle. Rose tried to peer into the darkness and see what was going on. It was too dark. She could imagine, however, and it amused her. That was one way of making an extra dollar.76

The description, which extends to an account of the argument between the usherette and the sailor about payment, shows how the New York City “itch house” was as much a part of Lewton’s imagination as Farber’s. All this makes its way into The Ghost Ship’s opening. Clarke and Lewton aimed to conjure the gritty dock of the fictitious town of San Pedro, but to do so they drew on their copious experiences of down-andout Manhattan, including its movie theaters. There is another reason to think so. The Seventh Victim, another of Lewton’s films from 1943, literally represents the space outside a theater as the domain of brooding and fear, a direct contrast to the frivolous entertainments taking place onstage. Near the conclusion of the movie, which Lewton filmed just three months before The Ghost Ship, Jacqueline Gibson (Jean Brooks) flees through the darkened alleys of Greenwich Village, pursued by a killer. Just as her assassin is about to strike, a stage backdoor opens, and a crowd of actors still in costume bursts into the alley, accompanied by laughter and bright light (fig. 28). The would-be murderer flees, and Jacqueline is escorted to safety by a jolly man clad in armor who the script says is “Gambrinus,” Roman god of fecundity and good humor.77 The frame reproduced here shows Jacqueline at far left as she accosts this actor, pleading for help. The scene not only makes explicit The Ghost Ship’s interest in the space outside a theater. It also explains why this exodus would be desirable in a home front culture of vapid entertainments. The scene in The Seventh Victim comments on comedy and tragedy—Jacqueline is a doomed figure, the chiaroscuro that gathers about her a contrast to the buoyant light of Gambrinus and the other carefree players. This division makes clear Lewton’s inchoate but powerful wish to escape the boisterous amnesia of the theater to discover and represent a more intense form of lived experience. The theater door may feature the masks of both comedy and tragedy, but the frolicsome actors and the laughter we hear in-

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Figure 28. The Seventh Victim (1943): Jacqueline Gibson (Jean Brooks) encountering actors leaving a theater.

side, not to mention the lighthearted music, define it as essentially a space of fun and entertainment no matter what the subject matter. Meanwhile, Jacqueline personifies the sordid, dangerous streets just outside. In this way the Gambrinus scene alludes to theatergoing during wartime. On the home front, as many commentators have pointed out, the theater was a place to forget trouble, to escape into, not out of, even if a movie’s subject was supposed to be grim or violent. As Farber recognized, the tragic deaths of servicemen and civilians in the era’s numerous war films were precisely not the moments to experience anything like pathos. “Death and destruction in war are diluted almost out of sight by various devices,” he wrote in “Movies in Wartime,” his New Republic column of January 3, 1944.78 Self-deprecatingly, Lewton felt the same way about his horror movies. “We all have war jitters,” he told a Collier’s reporter on January 29, 1944, a few weeks after Farber’s column, “but you come to my movies, have a fine time killing people for me, then go home, worn out, tired and relaxed.”79 Edmund Wilson agreed in May 1944, when he published his New Yorker article about “injections of imaginary horror, which soothe us with the momentary illusion that the forces of madness and murder may be tamed and compelled to

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provide us with a mere dramatic entertainment.”80 Lewton’s Gambrinus is the god of this wartime theater. He is there to make us feel good, to assuage our troubles, and (no small thing) to save us from despair. But finally he is a frivolous type, a flashy god “in sportive mood” (as the script says), and so unaccustomed to sadness and evil that he cannot even appreciate the life he has happened temporarily to save.81 “I’ll help you to a beer and a sandwich,” he tells Jacqueline, boisterously putting his arm around her. “Come along, babe, come along.” The characters of Craig and Knaggs are the antidotes to the jovial definition of wartime theater Gambrinus offers. Like him, they bring the actor out onto the street. Like him, they evince Lewton’s desire to get beyond the confines of the theater to discover where something more intense and real might reside. And like him, they find that location just outside the theater: tragedy unfolds as soon as one opens the theater doors. But unlike Gambrinus, these figures now blend the god’s commanding presence with Jacqueline’s saturnine fear. Out on the street, they are the sullen deities of a more meaningful world, a tragic space one cannot often find onstage or on-screen. Lewton’s definition is odd—who is to say that a Hollywood movie or Broadway play automatically could not articulate the horrors of the age? And if one’s aim was to get out into the real world, who was to say that a theater and its surroundings necessarily provided the best glimpse of loneliness? But Lewton and Clarke subscribed to this view, Farber recognized it, and the opening of The Ghost Ship brings it to an intense realization. These opening scenes may even offer an imaginary glimpse of a specific locale in Manhattan and even a specific theater—the Rialto in Times Square, at the northwest corner of Seventh Avenue and Forty-second Street, where all of Lewton’s films premiered in New York, and still the theater with which his films are most closely associated. We have already seen a typical Rialto street display for one of Lewton’s films—the array of customer come-ons for Bedlam (see fig. 25). A New York City tax photo shows the Rialto as it appeared in 1940 (fig. 29). This was five years after it had been built on the site of a previous Rialto movie theater (1916–35) that had in turn been constructed on the site of Oscar Hammerstein’s Victoria, which opened in 1899 and had become the most celebrated vaudeville house in America before succumbing to the new medium.82 The Rialto was never a highbrow place, not even close. Lewis Mumford wrote in the New Yorker in 1936 of the new Rialto’s “unspeakable

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Figure 29. The Rialto Theater, Times Square, New York, 1940. Photo permission of the New York City Municipal Archives, Department of Records and Information Services.

marbled blue glass” and “the milk-of-magnesia white of the bulging glass-tile columns that flank the windows,”83 but what made him speechless and queasy a great many moviegoers found exciting. They flocked to the 750-seat theater to pay anywhere from twenty-five to fifty-five cents to see horror, mystery, and action films from RKO, Universal, and other studios.84 The hellish content of the films matched the subterranean depths of a venue where the men’s room was at the bottom of a stairway so extensive that “it somehow connects with the subway,” Farber reported in June 1943. “I heard a little boy, who came dashing up to his

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father, say, ‘Daddy! I saw the subway!’ The father went down to see for himself.”85 The Ghost Ship premiered that year at the Rialto on Christmas Eve. The Times Square of that era was not as rough and sleazy as it would become. The key event in its history was the opening of the Port Authority Bus Terminal at Eighth Avenue and Forty-first in 1950, which, as Thomas F. Brady described it in a New York Times article of 1969 (“Times Square, New York: ‘Cesspool of the World’ ”), “began to pour potential victims of petty crime into the area along with sharp new victimizers.”86 (Farber’s point in 1957 about “the murky, congested theaters . . . located near bus terminals in big cities” probably refers to the Rialto and other theaters in the Port Authority area.) The Rialto changed with its surroundings, and by the 1970s it showed X-rated movies—a trend stopped in 1980 with a brief and failed attempt to turn it into a respectable Broadway theater before the building was razed in 1988 as part of the joint city-state Forty-second Street Development Project.87 There was no question that from the 1960s to the 1980s, Times Square was associated with the “cesspool,” but even in the pre–Port Authority days, back during the war, the area was hardly quaint. It was home to many burlesque houses, one of them commemorated in Edward Hopper’s painting Girlie Show (1941).88 It was a rendezvous for servicemen and servicewomen, to judge by pictures taken on October 19, 1942, by amateur photographers during a Metropolitan Camera Club Council competition to show Times Square at night (fig. 30).89 Maybe it was like parts of downtown London during the war, where servicemen and servicewomen gathered and prostitutes prowled, all too willing to “take you into one of the parks or vouchsafe you a ‘wall job’ or ‘knee trembler,’ standing up in a not so dark street around Picadilly.”90 The famous photograph of the sailor kissing the nurse in Times Square on V-J Day is the capstone of an entire war’s worth of uniformed encounters on those streets. Al Hirschfeld’s drawing in the May 23, 1943, New York Times suggests how the Square looked during the war, and offers an unexpected connection to Lewton’s film of the same year (fig. 31). Hirschfeld puts a vibrant spin on the place, depicting soldiers and sailors flirting with pretty girls, and many others milling beneath assorted lighted signs promising mostly wholesome gratifications of one kind or another. But at the lower left corner of Hirschfeld’s drawing a solitary blind man walks with a cane and holds a sign reading “I Am Blind.” And at the lower right corner a lone sailor leans against a lamppost, a cigarette dangling from his mouth.

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Figure 30. Anonymous, View of Three Sailors and One Woman, Times Square, October 19, 1942. Collection of the Museum of the City of New York.

These two men, the only two figures so clearly separated from the crowd, imply the lonelier and more sordid aspects of the place. The Times caption notes that “the street is one continuous stream of people all hurrying somewhere,” but the blind man and the sailor are in no rush.91 Amid the home front bustle and exuberance, they remain apart, like flanking saints of an altarpiece whose religion they do not share. These same outsiders appear in the opening of The Ghost Ship, too, and it is not surprising that Lewton also depicts them as a blind man and a sailor. He and Hirschfeld could both spot figures who did not belong. The script even calls for us to see the reflections of “sailors, merchant jacks, and one rolling drunk” in the window of Rubin’s shop before we see the street singer, as though the original intention were to portray a broader social mix in which the blind man would be a part but also stand out, alone.92 But thanks to the realities of a low budget, no extras mill

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Figure 31. Al Hirschfeld, Broadway on a Saturday Night, illustration in the New York Times, May 23, 1943, sec. 2, p. 1. Photo copyright Al Hirschfeld/ Margo Feiden Galleries Ltd., New York. www.Alhirschfeld.com.

about in Lewton’s scene, and as a result we can concentrate on his isolation. Here, as in so many other instances in his films, Lewton made a virtue of limits. He extruded the carnivalesque happiness Hirschfeld portrayed to state the facts of isolation as plainly as possible. His Times Square theater front is improbably deserted, but only so that the film can realize a No Bed of Her Own–style loneliness that for Lewton, Clarke, and others attuned to the city’s grime must have been the heart and soul of the place. The only additional loneliness besides the roles of Knaggs and Craig is the concluding shot of Tom Merriam and the “silhouette girl” (as the script calls her), which asserts the same street-side anonymity by alluding to the Times Square trysting captured by the amateur photographers. With its Forty-second Street connotations, the film’s opening depicts a home front different from the one we are accustomed to seeing, and Knaggs is its most powerful figure. His lined, pockmarked face, his general air of appearing beaten down by the world, are signs of symbiosis between screen and downtrodden social ambience. Knaggs’s characters were usually associated with the ground beneath their feet, the grime and muck and suffering of the abject and pathetic. As the reviled Cloten in Cymbeline in the 1937 London production, he played a figure whose name suggests clods or clots of earth. A publicity photograph from the production shows Knaggs as the murdered Cloten lying facedown on the ground, an apt position for the figure with this base name.93 The novel

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Hughie Roddis, on which the play Hand in Glove was based, opens with an epigraph from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure: “The poor beetle, that we tread upon, / In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great / As when a giant dies.”94 In one scene Hughie is savagely beaten until he falls “into the rubbish and grit” alongside a dock and passes out from the pain.95 The novel nears its conclusion with Hughie putting the finishing touches on a cross he has made by embedding thousands of pieces of broken pottery and shards of glass in the earth.96 Even as Knaggs’s character carried a smaller version of this cross upright in the stage production, and even as in the play (unlike the novel) his life was spared, his intimations of soul, of elevation, came always like reflections off the beetle’s back, and The Ghost Ship scene is no exception.97 His soulful gaze, coming from that face, is like the glint of moonlight on empty whiskey bottles—Glory in a scintillating gutter of broken glass. His genius for contextual acting was brought out beautifully in this scene—his ability to depict in his face, as his face, the gritty Rialto-style venues in which he would appear: he makes you think of the gum under the seats. Other Lewton icons produced this effect: Farber noted the “burleycue discordancy” of Simone Simon’s clinging gown in The Curse of the Cat People’s summer scenes, alluding to the burlesque houses all around the Rialto, as if Irena too were a live performer in this one other way as well.98 More than that, her tight-fitting summer gown, aura of otherworldliness, and direct address to the audience conjure even now the vaudevillians who played live on the site of the Rialto at the old Hammerstein’s: Lallah Selbini, the bathing beauty; Eva Fay, the mind reader; Flossie Crane, the singer from Coney Island; the “resurrected” Carmencita; and Vesta Victoria, who sung “There Was I, Awaitin’ at the Church,” all of them performing almost exactly where a film audience, later, would see Simon’s image.99 But none of Lewton’s players matches Knaggs’s depictions of shabbiness. To look at him is to feel that the empty atmosphere in which he poses does not signify a curiously absent social reality so much as a social world gathered and condensed into his person. An elaborate depiction of the sleazier home front would only be so much stage play, at best redundant, next to the damage embodied in this man’s face. There is one final way to see this. More than thirty years after The Ghost Ship premiered, Martin Scorsese directed Taxi Driver (1976), a film set in Manhattan. Robert De Niro stars in the role of Travis Bickle, the cabdriver violently obsessed by a vision of New York City’s filth and scum. In one scene, shot on location, we see, as they appear from the

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window of Bickle’s cab, the Rialto and its marquee advertising “Anita Nymphet.” De Niro’s character pulls up directly in front of the theater, so that we see the illuminated window display for “Anita Nymphet.” Scorsese has noted at least twice how much he enjoys watching Lewton’s films, in one instance recalling that he had seen a rerelease of Isle of the Dead when he was growing up in New York in the 1950s. “I like looking at old Val Lewton films a lot,” he told an interviewer. “They’re so beautiful.”100 Having Travis Bickle pull up in front of the Rialto itself seems an homage to Lewton and the other B filmmakers whose “slatelike” street realism informs that of Taxi Driver itself. But there is a more telling Lewton moment in Scorsese’s film—one borrowed from The Ghost Ship, and the richest confirmation of that picture’s own concern with the dark side of New York and thus the home front. The opening of Taxi Driver shows clouds of steam rising in slow motion from under the street as Bernard Herrmann’s tense, ominous score plays. A taxi, seen very close, drives through the steam and out of the picture before the steam again envelops the frame, at times covering the entire screen. The credit sequence of The Ghost Ship likewise shows billowing fog, at times covering the entire screen, through which we see the ship, a conveyance as ominous as Bickle’s taxi though shown at a far greater distance. The resemblance between these two openings is unmistakable to anyone who has seen both films, right down to the echoes in Herrmann’s music of Roy Webb’s score for Lewton’s film. Herrmann, who began his Hollywood career in the early 1940s at RKO scoring Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons, seems to have recalled Lewton’s film from the same era and same studio. The Ghost Ship could not be screened legally in theaters in the 1970s, but Scorsese and Herrmann, to judge by the opening of Taxi Driver, must have had access to a print of the film just as the Lewton scholar Joel Siegel did when writing his 1973 book.101 It does not matter that we see Bickle sharpening a knife, or that Taxi Driver ends with Bickle, like the Finn, rescuing an innocent person during a bloody fight against the forces of evil, or that the Finn’s isolated speeches anticipate Bickle’s voice-over monologues about being cut off from other men. All of this is to draw too precise a connection between separate roles. What does matter is that Scorsese’s film reads The Ghost Ship as a portrayal of urban space and urban loners, of sudden violence and welling eyes, that it sees the ocean fog as really so much steam rising from a manhole cover, and that it lays bare the earlier film’s commitment to show a similar type of underworld city as it existed during the home front era.

chapter three

Stillness and Recollection Darby Jones in I Walked with a Zombie

To anyone who has looked for the minor actor Darby Jones in certain films of the late 1930s and early 1940s, his appearance in Lewton’s I Walked with a Zombie (1943) is bound to be a surprise. As the giant zombie Carre-Four (fig. 32), he stands motionless in a sugarcane field, dividing the screen, a monumental presence cast in shadow facing the audience. As he awaits the nurse Betsy and her catatonic patient Jessica on their walk to the voodoo compound, or houmfort—probably the single most beautiful passage in all of Lewton’s films—we see him from a vantage shared by no character. He is presented directly to viewers in a way that suspends the narrative with one of Lewton’s trademark moments of iconic stasis, and indeed his attenuated form corresponds to the elongated bodies favored by many Russian icon painters. In Jones’s other roles, in contrast, he often appears in rapid motion. Consider his performance in the Marx Brothers’ film A Day at the Races (1937). There he is a prominent extra playing a trumpet during the Kentucky plantation number “All God’s Chilun Got Swing,” sung by Ivie Anderson and the Crinoline Choir. At one point Jones appears to the left of Anderson in medium close-up as she belts out the tune (fig. 33). The song makes it clear that the best way to be happy and forget your troubles is to move rapidly. It starts out slow, with Anderson singing: I gotta frown, you gotta frown— All God’s chilun gotta . . . frown on their face. 97

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Figure 32. I Walked with a Zombie (1943): Carre-Four (Darby Jones) in the cane fields at night.

Then, as the script puts it, “Ivie cuts loose”: Take no chance with that frown A song and a dance turn it upside-down Ho-ho-ho. Za-zu-za-zu. All God’s chilun got rhythm All God’s chilun got swing Maybe haven’t got money Maybe haven’t got shoes All God’s chilun got rhythm For to push away their blues—Yeah! All God’s chilun got trouble Trouble don’t mean a thing When they start to go ho-ho-ho de-ho All your troubles go ’way-say— All God’s chilun got swing.1

We then see four black teenage couples jitterbugging and smiling, with zany sound effects accompanying their moves, showing just how carefree it is to swing. Their dancing is fast enough on its own, but the film speeds it up so that we cannot mistake the kinship between acceleration and joy.

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Figure 33. Sam Wood, director, A Day at the Races (1937): Jones among the players behind Ivie Anderson in the Kentucky plantation song “All God’s Chilun Got Swing.”

Paul Robeson would criticize such scenes several years later, saying that pictures like this one show the black person “solving his problems by singing his way to Glory . . . as a plantation Hallelujah shouter,”2 but in 1937 the motion of the dancers and that of the film conspired to produce a snappy forgetfulness, and the blackface the Marx Brothers wear is just the engine grease on this locomotive of fun. Through much of it we can see Jones, wagging his trumpet, swinging it, tapping his feet as he and the other musicians take directions from musical conductor Harpo. Or consider Jones’s role in L. C. Borden’s all-black film Broken Strings (1940), starring Clarence Muse. The story is a tragedy—Muse plays the violin virtuoso Arthur Williams, who loses the use of his left hand after an automobile accident—but Jones is there for laughs and slapstick action. As a banjo-strumming yokel named Stringbeans Johnson, he performs a remarkable dance at a nightclub, executing four midair splits among other moves as he listens to swing music (figs. 34–35). His long legs coming perilously close to the seated diners all around him, Jones is again the fast-action entertainer, even as his slow, countrified drawl is meant to have its own comic appeal: “Mister, this is the first time I’ve been in one of these shows,” he tells Arthur Williams after hearing him perform. “I think you’s a pretty good fiddler. . . . I mean it, you sure

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swings a wicked bow.” In Borden’s production, as in A Day at the Races, Jones is a carefree dancing man who tunes out his troubles. In each case his character equates frantic motion with entertainment and an amazing lack of gravity. Against this, Muse’s line readings in Broken Strings, together with his compact physical presence, provide the stout, middleclass tragic dignity that Jones’s Stringbeans character lacks. The lifeless hand of Muse’s embittered violin player is the film’s ultimate sign of the connection between rage, sadness, and stillness—the injury that stays his hand is one trouble that simply cannot be forgotten—but Jones is all laughs, and his toes must be about three feet off the ground in his dance. Then, three years later, there he is standing still in the middle of a plantation. The difference does not concern merely the change to a catatonic role. Zombies do not dance like Stringbeans Johnson, but when Jones was recast as a zombie named Kolaga in Zombies on Broadway, Sid Rogell’s 1945 knockoff of Lewton’s picture, he staggers rapidly after his victims. Instead, the change to stillness in I Walked with a Zombie had to do with shifts in Hollywood racial politics during the early 1940s. Once the war had begun, the studios came under increasing pressure to portray blacks in roles other than happy-go-lucky slaves and dutiful porters, butlers, and maids. Walter White, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), went to Hollywood in late 1941 and for much of the next year met with sympathetic studio executives to discuss how to put “a new African American on the screen,” according to the film historian Thomas Cripps in his detailed account.3 There needed to be more roles like Clarence Muse’s Arthur Williams, and less use even in the all-black films of Hollywood Negro stereotypes such as Stringbeans Johnson. The war, as many historians have noted, was a considerable point of leverage: a conflict about democracy and freedom made clear the facts of racial discrimination at home. Walter White’s friend, the Hollywood-connected liberal Republican Wendell Willkie, put it concisely in his book One World (1943): “The defense of our democracy against the forces that threaten it from without has made some of its failures to function at home glaringly apparent.”4 Even after President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802 authorizing the desegregation of defense plants, white workers staged walkouts protesting the employment of blacks, and factory managers often evaded the intent of the law by consigning black employees to menial, low-paying jobs off the production line. And the routine prejudice of day-to-day life in America continued during those

Figure 34. L. C. Borden, producer, Broken Strings (1940): Stringbeans Johnson (Jones) dancing at a nightclub.

Figure 35. Broken Strings: Stringbeans Johnson performing midair splits.

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years, when, according to the historian David M. Kennedy, Jim Crow persisted mostly unchanged from the immediate aftermath of the Civil War.5 In Hollywood, as a result of White’s lobby and supporting pressure from Willkie, roles for black actors began to alter slightly. Established mammy- and porter-playing actors such as Hattie McDaniel and Willie Best felt threatened by the change, and though the old stock types remained—enacted sometimes by Jones himself—the fitful switch to a “conscience-liberal” portrayal of African Americans, as Cripps puts it, is palpable.6 Lewton took part in the shift, transforming his earlier portrayals of blacks. As late as 1940 he was still in the old mode, writing a neverfilmed screenplay called “Sergeant Mammy” especially designed for McDaniel, with a hope that the Aunt Jemima Company might sponsor a radio spin-off.7 McDaniel had just won an Oscar for her role in Selznick’s Gone with the Wind, and though Lewton felt at most a reserved personal pride in his boss’s epic spectacle, clearly McDaniel’s critical success as the loyal mammy impressed him. The image of the fast, happy, and loose Negro also affected him, to judge by a scene in one of his novels, A Laughing Woman (1933). A group of white characters has headed uptown to a Harlem nightclub, where they see “the spectacle of Negroes abandoning themselves to the rigors of the Lindy Hop.” A contest is taking place, and one of the black couples lurches, grinning and drunk, over to the whites’ seats to ask for their vote. The couple “had been slipping and sliding with drunken awkwardness through the intricacies” of the dance, but they are nowhere near as talented as another “couple who were performing prodigies of semi-sexual agility to the jazzed cadences of ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band.’ ” Lewton goes on: “The woman, a deep brown verging on ochre in complexion, and dressed in white satin, and the man, a stout buck weighing almost three hundred pounds and dressed in a suit the color of vanilla ice cream, were the cynosure of all eyes.” In the final lindy hop contest, twenty couples dance to the “Tiger Rag,” “going through the maddest convolutions in their efforts to attract the crowd’s attention and receive the most applause as they danced past.”8 The scene rivals A Day at the Races for its portrayal of madcap, carefree movement. But ten years later Carre-Four stands motionless. Even the scene that soon follows his appearance, a voodoo dance that echoes the nightclub description in important respects, casts movement in a substantially different light (as we will see). In one sense, the change from mad convolu-

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tions to dignified grace springs from Walter White’s initiative. Lewton may not have liked Willkie as a political candidate—“We’re all hot for Roosevelt,” he wrote in 1940, “whereas Mr. Willkie is just a charm boy put forward by the heavy industries to regain control of the government”9—but the change in his films shows the effect of White and Willkie’s crusade. I Walked with a Zombie, Cripps writes, was one of many movies in those years that “emitted little organic wisps of new racial meanings” thanks to the new conscience-liberal agenda in Hollywood.10 The roles of the calypso singer Sir Lancelot in this film and as a dignified servant in The Curse of the Cat People exemplify the change, with the latter performance singled out by Agee as especially refreshing.11 In the case of Jones, casting a black man as a zombie was by no means a liberal gesture, but showing him in a position of dramatic importance, composed and grave and alone on camera, was. Once he got the message about Hollywood’s revised racial conventions, however, Lewton took it in directions other than just a liberally administered Better Portrayal. Jones’s character is a disturbing figure—a sign of slavery past and present and of threats in the future. The command to portray the Negro more sensitively became an occasion for Lewton to do what he did best: dwell in the past, dredge up pain and loss, and turn them toward the events of the present day. The means of this ominous grief in Carre-Four’s case would be filmic stillness, and it would extend even to the portrayal of motion itself. Stillness is the film’s metaphor for slavery, in ways that center on CarreFour. He is visually linked to Ti Misery, an arrow-filled sculpture of Saint Sebastian (fig. 36) that was once the figurehead of the slave ship that brought the first blacks to the Caribbean island bearing the saint’s name. The sculpture has become part of a garden fountain at Fort Holland, the residence of the wealthy white sugar planter Paul Holland, and with the water pouring down over him, Ti Misery always bears “a sorrowful weeping look on his black face,” as one of the black characters puts it. Holland, played by Tom Conway, points at the sculpture and tells the nurse Betsy, a newcomer to the island: “That’s where our people came from, from the misery and pain of slavery. For generations they found life a burden. That’s why they still weep when a child is born and make merry at a burial. I’ve told you, Miss Connell, this is a sad place.” Carre-Four, like the slave ship’s figurehead, is a static and insentient figure of Misery. Solitary, clad in rags in the plantation field, he embodies the links between slavery and zombies noted in Haiti by the anthro-

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Figure 36. I Walked with a Zombie: the sculpture of Ti Misery.

pologist Wade Davis: “Zombis do not speak, cannot fend for themselves, do not even know their names. Their fate is enslavement.” Because zombies are made to work in the fields in Haiti, they suffer “a fate that is literally worse than death—the loss of physical liberty that is slavery.”12 As Zora Neale Hurston wrote in Tell My Horse (1938), perhaps one of the background sources for Lewton’s film, a zombie toils “ceaselessly in the banana fields, working like a beast, unclothed like a beast, and like a brute crouching in some foul den in the few hours allowed for rest and food.” He does so “without consciousness of his surroundings and conditions and without memory of his former state.”13 Carre-Four and Ti Misery also conjure the lynching of a black man. The image of Carre-Four alone and shadowed in the field borrows from 1930s antilynching imagery such as The Lynching (1932), by Julius Bloch, and The Fugitive (1935), by John Steuart Curry (figs. 37–38). Both pictures emphasize the static elongation of the black victim, turning him into an icon of suffering. Both connect the lynched figure to Christian martyrdom by showing him pinned to a crosslike tree with his arms spread wide. Bloch’s painting is especially clear about the lynching victim’s Christlike innocence. Both works were included in the exhibition

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Figure 37. Julius Bloch, The Lynching, 1932. Oil on canvas, 19 x 12 in. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Purchase 33.28.

An Art Commentary on Lynching, organized by Walter White and held at the Arthur U. Newton Galleries on Fifty-seventh Street in New York City in early 1935, part of White’s attempt, the art historian Helen Langa writes, to revive “the NAACP’s legislative campaign against lynching.”14 Some eight years later, in the era of White’s influence in Hollywood, with the sought-after law still not on the books, Carre-Four’s appearance strikes this antilynching note with surreptitious power. He is an attenu-

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Figure 38. John Steuart Curry, The Fugitive, 1935. Lithograph, 13 x 9 1⁄2 in. Smithsonian American Art Museum, Gift of Adelyn D. Breeskin.

ated dead black man alone in the fields. His very name (Crossroads) denotes the sacrifice of Jesus in the Christianized religion of voodoo. (This is why the nurse Alma refers to him as a “god” when she tells Betsy how to find him in the fields.) He is linked to Christian sacrifice also through the figure of Saint Sebastian, and in the saint’s arrow-filled ebony likeness, “a sorrowful weeping look on his black face,” we see an almost literal appearance of the lynched body of a black man. Still further, CarreFour is identified with bodies hanging from trees. As Betsy and Jessica walk through the sugarcane on their way to the houmfort, they pass several ominous objects, including a dead goat suspended from a nearby branch. Like the other objects—a horse’s skull, a perforated gourd through which the wind plays, a human skull set on the ground within

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a circle of stones—the goat refers to voodoo rites, but it just as intensely refers to American racial violence. Bodies hanging from trees and symbolic figures of blame combine into one sign: “When [national] affairs go wrong,” Willkie wrote in “The Case for the Minorities,” an article published in the Saturday Evening Post in June 1942, “the public, by ancient custom, demands a scapegoat, and the first place to seek one is from the minority.”15 None of this is direct, of course. Carre-Four is dead, but he is not hanging or fleeing. He is not bound and gagged, and he is hunted by no gang of white men and their dogs. Yet the lynching content is there all the same, chiefly because Lewton’s film, like other images from the early 1940s, is a sublimation of Depression era social protest art into putatively more universal, psychological forms in which, nonetheless, that original social content is still discernible. Consider Jackson Pollock’s painting Guardians of the Secret (fig. 39), which he completed in New York in August 1943, four months after Lewton’s film premiered there. Like other paintings from those years—Wifredo Lam’s Malembo, Deity of the Crossroads (1942), for example16—Guardians of the Secret shows a figure remarkably like Carre-Four: the vertical sentinel or guardian on the far right, with its face at the upper right corner of the picture. Pollock’s guardian figure is part of an ostensibly psychological picture concerning the unconscious, all the rage in a wartime New York art scene dominated by the exiled European surrealists. More striking, however, is how the guardian recalls the social art of the thirties, not just the pictures Pollock knew well (those of his teacher Thomas Hart Benton and the Marxist muralist José Clemente Orozco), but also images like Bloch’s and Curry’s. The Africanized sentinel is but the form of a lynch victim transmuted into a surrealist, Picassoid register. The elongation of the body and the jerking up of the head, with the rounded chin and mouth pulled up and to one side, so that the mouth is not centered but below the figure’s right eye, owes as much to Depression era pictures of the noose as to Picasso. I Walked with a Zombie and Guardians of the Secret go together as incomplete sublimations of political content. Like Pollock, Lewton lived in New York in the early 1930s, when antilynching pictures were a staple of the political Left. And like Pollock, Lewton made a psychological imagery in the early 1940s: the dreamlike houmfort journey in I Walked with a Zombie, with Betsy and Jessica wandering through the mysterious fields at night, the latter in her nightgown, shows the same interest in Freudian psychology motivating Lewton’s preceding film, Cat People,

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Figure 39. Jackson Pollock, Guardians of the Secret, 1943. Oil on canvas, 48 3/8 x 75 3/8 in. San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Albert M. Bender Collection, Albert M. Bender Bequest Fund purchase.

as well as many other Hollywood pictures during those years. There are huge differences between Lewton and Pollock, to be sure, even beyond the obviously separate media. Pollock, according to the art historian T. J. Clark, directs his fury in Guardians less at the social world than at the inconsequence of a mere painting presuming to comment on that world, so that rage at the limitations of art drives the picture’s histrionic gestures and ludicrous jumble of imagery,17 whereas Lewton’s graceful sequence strives for a pristine coherence. But despite the different affects and different media, each work reveals the holdover of 1930s lynching scenes, with the social content of this earlier art obscured but still recognizable in 1942–43. The final scene of the movie shows how much Ti Misery, even more than Carre-Four, is a sign of lynching. I Walked with a Zombie ends with the camera closing in for an isolated view of Carre-Four’s double, the savagely assaulted figure of Saint Sebastian, crying his copious tears (fig. 40). A black man’s voice has just enjoined the audience to “pity those who are dead, and wish peace and happiness to the living”—a statement meant to encompass the white characters Wesley and Jessica (who have drowned) and Paul and Betsy (who survive). But the decision to end with the sculpture of Ti Misery and the voice of the black man directs these sentiments back to “the misery and pain of slavery.” In a wartime con-

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Figure 40. I Walked with a Zombie: concluding shot of Ti Misery.

text, the film’s final words and image implied a Willkie-style acknowledgment of injustice at home. I Walked with a Zombie stands out in this respect. Slavery and lynching show up in other wartime films, though never so directly. Even so, these other pictures also portray racial hatred in a rhetoric of stillness and speed, and turning to them helps us appreciate Lewton’s imagery all the more. Consider Preston Sturges’s comedy The Palm Beach Story, released in December 1942, four months before I Walked with a Zombie. The plot concerns passengers on the Florida Special train from New York to Palm Beach, among them the drunken, gun-toting millionaire members of the Ale and Quail Club, a group of hunters played by Sturges’s stock troupe of character actors, including William Demarest and Jack Norton. At one point their two characters, both drunk, decide to fire live ammunition inside their private car, and they order the black bartender (played by Snowflake) to toss crackers like clay pigeons for them to shoot. Soon the other club members join the shooting, and then one of them takes aim at the comically bewildered bartender, whom the film historian John Pym calls “a slave.”18 It is the next scene, however, that portrays slavery with a clarity so

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stunning it could only have been the product of the film’s complete misrecognition of its own energies. The train comes to a stop, and the Ale and Quail car is uncoupled. It is night, and we are somewhere in the South along the route from New York to Palm Beach. From the car we see the bartender emerge, screaming and fleeing for his life, pursued by the gun-firing huntsmen and their baying hounds. This is the most direct representation of a fugitive slave hunt in the deep dark South in a Hollywood film of the 1940s, down to the last detail. It can exist as such, however, only by being played for laughs, only by being so profoundly misrecognized by its creators. Only the certainty that all is fun filled and innocent can produce the perfected form of an amnesia that actually remembers. These matters of racial forgetting and remembering are all connected to speed and stopping in Sturges’s film. Farber notes that Sturges was the only 1940s filmmaker to realize fully the silent era’s Keystone Kops’ connection between frenetic motion and satire. As things go fast for Sturges, they are funny, and his movies feature all manner of “graceful accelerations,” as Farber puts it, including the madcap playing of the Ale and Quail Club actors.19 Sturges was sending up the American penchant for speed—for rush, rush, rush at any cost—satirizing its excesses. Yet the satire required him to share and love the momentum he joked about. And when the dialogue and the vehicles and the actors stop moving, as they do when the train comes to a halt, something more disquieting sets in: the insect murmur of the recollecting world. In the gun-firing sequence, Sturges perhaps sensed his plot running up against a mysterious, blunt object, some unseen disturbance that was not terribly funny, because with this scene he chose to detach the Ale and Quail Club characters not just from the train but also from the movie itself, in which they never again appear. Once they are dropped off, we do not follow them in their abandonment in the southern woods but return to the train, or what is left of it, so that we can pick up speed and merriment again. Perhaps the residuum Sturges sensed was a holdover from the explicit content of his preceding film, Sullivan’s Travels (1941), with its studiously grim portrayal of black and white members of a chain gang guarded by men with guns and dogs in the deep South. The taboo social content that brings The Palm Beach Story to a stop, whether Sturges recognized it or not, forced the plot, like the train, to cut off a part of itself to move forward. Another excellent example of this quasi treatment of slavery and its aftermath—again organized around a question of stopping—is William

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Wellman’s Ox-Bow Incident, released in May 1943, one month after I Walked with a Zombie. The film is based on Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s novel of 1940 about the lynching of three innocent men (two white, one Hispanic) in the West in 1885. Like the novel, the film comes close to being an explicit allegorical condemnation of the modern-day lynching of blacks. References to slavery and white vigilantism abound in both. Tetley, the leader of the lynch mob, is an allegorical southerner in the novel: “He wore a Confederate field coat . . . and a Confederate officer’s hat,” along with “gray trousers,” has a “gray-looking face,” “even gray” hair, “thin sideburns of the same gray,” “a still thinner, gray mustache,” and overall “he was a small, slender man who appeared frail and as if dusted all over, except his eyes and brows, with a fine gray powder.” That “damn reb dude,” one character calls him. Meanwhile, the doomed men sleep in “the kind of blankets the Union had used during the rebellion.”20 In the film Tetley appears wearing his Confederate uniform and in front of his southern-style four-column mansion, and below the hanging tree his face looks satanic in the light of the campfire. The movie also includes Clark’s one black character, the preacher Sparks, and, like the novel, turns him into a slow, solemn figure who knows the truth about lynching.21 In Sparks, slowing and stopping are signs of conscience. The novel’s narrator, Art Croft, introduces him as a “queer, slow, careful nigger,” a man who talks “slow but cheerful” and sings “slow, unhappy hymn tunes.” Says Croft, “He was anything but a fast worker,” and later we read of him “slowly singing something about Jordan to himself.” When he walks, parts of him remain still: “Sparks came across the street in his slow, dragging gait. He didn’t swing his arms when he walked, but let them hang down as if he had a pail of water in each hand.”22 In the film the light-skinned actor Leigh Whipper plays Sparks, and in a true testament to the influence of Walter White, who had published a book on lynching in 1929, Sparks voices some of the lines from Clark’s novel about the lynching of a black person: “I seen my own brother lynched,” he tells Gil Carter, played by Henry Fonda, as they ride along with the posse. “I warn’ nothing but a little fella, but sometimes now I wakes up dreamin’ about it.” Carter asks Sparks if his brother really committed a crime. “I don’t know. Nobody ever did know for sure.”23 In the film Sparks is the first of seven posse members to vote against lynching the three men (in the book no one does). When the hanging is complete, only Sparks stays behind to pray for the dead men, and their shadows sway on him as he kneels. Farber noted that in The Ox-Bow Incident “even

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the place society has given [the black man] inside the noose of a lynching party is given to whites,” but in an era when lynchings of blacks were still occurring—one in Sikeston, Missouri, in 1942, for example—Whipper’s character implicitly brings the blackness of the mob’s victims to the fore.24 In this way Sparks, like Carre-Four, was a wartime political sign. Willkie’s subject in his Saturday Evening Post article was the racial paranoia of “war psychology”—the “threat to individual and minority rights inherent in every war and its aftermath.” The result, he warned, could be “the revival under emotional strains of age-old racial and religious distrusts,”25 and his warning proved prophetic when race riots took place in Detroit, New York, and Los Angeles during the summer of 1943, when both I Walked with a Zombie and The Ox-Bow Incident were playing in theaters. Carre-Four must have confronted audiences that summer as an especially charged figure, even if his exact significance requires after-the-fact interpretation. An iconography of racial violence haunts his scenes even amid the erasure of rope-and-gun specifics. Alone, dead, beautifully and self-consciously staged, facing the audience directly and meant for its inspection alone in a story explicitly about a people’s long memories of slavery, he is disquietingly insisted upon. But Carre-Four’s beautifully immobilized figure is more complex than that. He suggests the violent subjugation and the emergent power of blacks during the war. This is because stillness gives Lewton’s figures more meaning rather than less. If Agee complained that The Ox-Bow Incident was an “arteriosclerotic” film, full of “stiff overconsciousness . . . of the excellence of each effect,” so that nature becomes cold and allegorical, “stiff,” “steady,” and “jammed,” frozen into portentous motifs such as “the phonily gnarled lynching tree,” producing an effect of “rigor artis,” the same cannot be said of Lewton’s figures.26 As beings and objects in his films become cold and slow, stiff and sculptural, they do not congeal into the frozen thickness of a Statement. Instead they gain in flexibility and mystery, and Carre-Four’s simultaneous portrayal of strength and victimization is one example. Carre-Four’s power, which I now turn to, does not arise from Lewton’s political beliefs. He had no recorded interest in the empowerment of American blacks during the war. Instead it owes to the ideological effects unloosed by his exaltation of minorness. Darby Jones, like Skelton Knaggs, was a minor actor granted extraordinary importance in a Lewton film. Once the bit player is as enshrined on-screen as Carre-Four, the possibilities of power—autonomy, strength, revenge—emerge like Furies

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from an opened box, whether or not the producer cared about black civil rights. This visual dominance in I Walked with a Zombie is breathtaking, for example, compared with other filmmakers’ meager, ancillary use of Jones, and the comparisons heighten our sense of Carre-Four’s strength in Lewton’s film. In Paramount’s Swing High, Swing Low (1937), starring Fred MacMurray and Carole Lombard, Jones plays a black Santa Claus in a Panama café, his white beard askew as he lounges indolently on a chair, waving a leaf fan as he tries to rouse himself into the role of a tropical Saint Nick: “And at nine o’clock,” the café owner says, “down with the whiskers.” Jones responds, in his one line, “Yes, m’am, but it sure is hot.” In another Paramount film starring MacMurray, Edward Griffith’s Technicolor Virginia (1941), Jones plays Joseph, a loyal servant on a modern-day plantation, appearing at least fifteen separate times but never visually prominent. He either crouches to listen to another’s words or lopes through the frame as a bit of rustic ambience. Sometimes he has a line or two (“I’m sure glad we don’t have to fix that damn fence”; “Here’s a rabbit foot for you, Miss Charlie”), but always in deference to the direct commands or implicit wishes of white characters or the chief black character, the maid Ophelia, played by Louise Beavers. In I Walked with a Zombie Carre-Four takes orders from many people, white and black alike, and in fact he does nothing on his own, but his visual presentation is elegant, independent, and nondeferential. This is all the more striking because even after Walter White went to Hollywood, Jones’s roles did not change appreciably, with the exception of his performance for Lewton. In the African drama White Cargo (1942) he has a credited role as the loyal houseboy, Darby, but all we see him do is respond to the requests of his quack-doctor master (Frank Morgan): “Get me the alcohol, Darby. . . . No, no, no—that white bottle.” Even Jones’s great height is minimized in this film, since we see him crouching, probably on one knee, his chin almost touching the bottom of the film frame, in deference both to Morgan’s character and to the famous actor himself. When Jones stands, his head rises above the frame, out of the picture: clearly the film is not interested in him, and it is not clear why he received a screen credit for his role. The very year of I Walked with a Zombie, Jones continued his menial roles, with plenty of throwback to the days before White arrived in Hollywood. In André de Toth’s Passport to Suez (1943), he has a one-scene comic role as a fez-wearing, white-clad bellhop in an Egyptian hotel. Bearing a telegram, he knocks at the room of Llewellyn Jameson (Eric

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Blore) but is frightened away when Jameson, frightened himself, aggressively opens an umbrella upon opening the door. Jones’s character screams and runs down the hall, his arms and legs splaying wildly, having lost the competition for the hallway’s limited space to the major actor. The entire thirty-second sequence is like a diptych of the black actor’s menial roles of 1943: either polite or absurd, either knocking at the door or flailing the elbows and knees. Jones’s great height, compressed into a narrow hallway and a few seconds, makes the limitations properly claustrophobic.27 But that same year in Lewton’s film, Jones’s mad convolutions are stilled, and his fan-swaying and pitchfork-carrying indolence is set aside. He gets the greatest role of his career. Like Thersites, he encroaches upon the space of the stars, upstaging them with the unwonted intensity and oddity of his appearance, gaining a breathtaking ceremonial isolation, and ruling the film when they are not around. It was one thing to give Knaggs a strange prominence, but it was another to bestow the same singularity on a black minor actor in 1943. Jones received a total of $225 for his work on I Walked with a Zombie, a rate of $75 a day for three days based on his weekly contract salary of $450; Frances Dee, who plays Betsy, earned $6,000 for her performance.28 Yet Jones is granted a far more memorable visual presence, and with it a political platform. This is because during the war, Jones’s intense minor role equaled the performances of far more famous black actors in the depiction of a charged conceit: the black man standing alone. Even as the “Double V” campaign emerged among many American blacks, with its rallying cry of triumph over fascism abroad and racism at home, the continuing racial prejudice in America left many other blacks indifferent or even hostile to the war effort. “ ‘Fight for what?’ the Negro is asking,” reported a Harper’s article. “ ‘If we win I lose, so what?’ ”29 This standalone isolation was the subject of South Pacific, a short-lived play that appeared on Broadway in late December 1943, starring Canada Lee as the disaffected black serviceman Sam Johnson. Lee’s role helps us see how Carre-Four carried the same connotation. South Pacific (originally titled New Georgia) was not the famous musical but a drama about the black sailor Johnson, whom a Japanese attack has left shipwrecked on a South Seas jungle island. Johnson looks around the island, realizes he can blend in with the natives, and vows to sit out the rest of the war. “I don’t give a damn who wins it. Just don’t try to drag me into it,” he tells his fellow survivor Captain Dunlap, an earnest white man. “That’s all I can say. Don’t try to tell me I got to fight

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for something I never had—and never going to get.”30 Eventually Sam is galvanized into patriotic action when the Japanese kill Dunlap and several innocent islanders and he feels himself partly responsible because he had stayed out of the fighting. The PM theater critic Louis Kronenberger summarized Sam’s realization: “He sees at last that no man can stand alone and that no man can stand aside.”31 What is most interesting about South Pacific, however, and what most ties it to Lewton’s film of that same year, is that it offered the spectacle of a black man continuing to stand alone even amid a plot dictating otherwise. Howard Barnes of the New York Herald-Tribune wrote that “Lee is properly embittered in the early scenes, when he finds himself happy with South Sea natives and a Japanese garrison, and justifies his attitude by remembrance of past wrongs, but he quite fails to resolve the character into a champion of democracy, whatever the color of his skin.” As Barnes put it elsewhere in the review, “Even though Canada Lee stalks through the scenes as a rebellious black man, [the play] never comes to grips with its rather fascinating thesis.”32 Perhaps there was no resolution because in 1943 the idea of staging and then containing the black man’s bitter isolation seemed impossible for the playwrights Dorothy Heyward and Howard Rigsby, and especially for Canada Lee himself. The play closed after just one performance. The conventional wartime plot of the “individualistic tough guy acquiring a social sense,” as Kronenberger put it, was not quite believable in the hands of a skilled black actor like Lee, fresh from his role as Bigger Thomas in a long-running stage production of Richard Wright’s Native Son, and himself no stranger to discrimination.33 Lee was understandably more adept at portraying “smoldering resentment against the world” than miraculous epiphanies of patriotic fervor.34 The result, the critics recognized, was that the early part of the play was the most convincing, with the alienated black man raging against the war: “Just don’t try to drag me into it.” Lee was not the only black man alone on a New York stage that fall and winter. Just two months earlier, Paul Robeson, in the title role of Othello, cast the Moor’s pain and paranoia in a sharp new wartime light. Wolcott Gibbs put it clearly in his review in the New Yorker on October 30, 1943: “The scene in which suspicion is first implanted in Othello’s mind—almost completely implausible when the Moor is portrayed as a man proudly sure of himself and the devotion of his wife in a society of equals—is murderously convincing when he is shown as a Negro mercenary, aware of the scorn and hatred that surround him, already suspecting that the morals of Venice are not his morals, and seeming almost

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to welcome the proof of what he dreads.”35 These lines illuminate the home front significance of Robeson’s role: his capacity to suggest the alienation of the black man in a society supposedly on his side—a society, Gibbs adds, “whose values to him are both mysterious and corrupt.” Though another reviewer felt that Robeson’s race did not affect the play at all, there could have been little doubt that he stood out onstage—separated, alienated—amid the cast, and this is one reason Gibbs called Robeson “ideal pictorially.”36 Every line was a soliloquy giving voice to an inalterable isolation. As Lee’s Sam Johnson remained alone to the last, even as the play tried to bring him into the national fold, Robeson’s Othello began alone even amid the plaudits of the Venetians. Darby Jones, of course, was nowhere near the actor that Robeson or Lee was, but his dominant screen presence in I Walked with a Zombie is the visual analogue to their formidable racial separations of 1943. He too stands alone, no matter how much he is brought under the auspices of the plot and other characters by film’s end. In large part this is because of his very minorness. Like Knaggs, he is one of E. M. Forster’s flat characters who never need development—who remain static and fully resolved at each moment they appear—so he is always vigorously separate from the story that would frame and contain his solitary authority. Whereas Canada Lee’s character must undergo at least the charade of development, of learning to be part of the group, if only so that we can see, like the critic Barnes, that he has never convincingly budged from his initial angry solitude, Jones is spared these narrative perambulations. First and last, no matter how involved in the plot, he appears in the way that audiences first beheld Sam Johnson alone on the jungle island as the curtain rises on South Pacific: “Slowly appears the head of the Negro Sam. He looks and listens carefully before rising to his full height. He is tall and powerfully built. His only garment is a pair of torn and faded dungarees. He stands motionless studying the house.”37 Perhaps South Pacific was never better than in that first wordless moment, before it became fatally ensnared in the skeins of its conversionary plot, but Carre-Four is that moment and that moment only. No matter when he appears, he recalls George Orwell’s words that “the first impact” of a minor character “is so vivid that nothing afterwards effaces it.”38 Carre-Four is a figure of power also because, more than any other role at the time, he states the question of black civil rights. He shows “America again at the crossroads,” to quote Gunnar Myrdal’s famous work of wartime sociology, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and

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Modern Democracy, a best-seller published in 1944. “What will be the Negro’s economic lot in post-war America?” asked Myrdal, a Swedish economist commissioned in 1937 to study the situation of American blacks. “There is no definite answer to the question, of course, since it will depend on happenings yet to occur and policies yet to be decided upon. . . . The American Negro is again watching for signs of what war and victory will mean in terms of opportunity and rights for him in his native land.”39 Carre-Four’s presence on-screen takes the form of this urgent question. Jones’s character was never intended to carry such significance, but as a figure of rising power and impoverished pain, motionless at their nexus, he epitomized just how much the war was indeed a crossroads in American racial policies. He symbolized another turning point as well. The war years, as the historian Richard Dalfiume notes, were the forgotten beginnings of the Black Power movements of the 1960s. It was during the war that blacks first learned the effectiveness of mass protest, as when the union leader Asa Philip Randolph threatened to organize an all-Negro march on Washington unless President Roosevelt allowed the desegregation of defense plants. The tactic resulted in Executive Order 8802, which led to the northward exodus and economic betterment of thousands of blacks, even as widespread discrimination continued. As Dalfiume put it, “A mass militancy became characteristic of the American Negro during World War II.” For the first time, it occurred to many blacks that America was no longer purely “a white man’s world”; this is what the novelist James Baldwin meant when he called World War II “a turning point in the Negro’s relation to America.”40 Carre-Four, again, is the literalization of that crossroads, one of several startling intimations of the change, including the insinuating public song of Sir Lancelot, the calypso singer who advances threateningly on two white characters, Wesley Rand and the nurse Betsy, revealing secrets about Wesley’s family as he sings. “There can’t be many Hollywood movies of the early Forties in which a colored character is permitted to make sly, malicious fun of whites who are neither comic nor villainous— with the film’s at least partial endorsement—and get away with it,” wrote the film critic Robin Wood in 1972.41 Lewton, it is true, was far from a political leftist. Sablin-like figures of nostalgic sadness were always more his specialty than conquerors of the future, and Carre-Four is no exception. Even in the midst of his power, he commits no violence, and ironically it would be left to Rogell’s vulgarly racist film of two years later, Zombies on Broadway, to show Jones as a black man seeking and

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getting revenge for his enslavement. (As Kolaga the zombie, he responds to his master Bela Lugosi’s urging to “Kill, Kolaga, kill” by striking Lugosi’s character on the head with a shovel and throwing him dead into a grave—a deed that goes unpunished.) Yet Carre-Four still embodies the shift outlined by Dalfiume. Strong and imposing, blocking the path, he confronts the audience with a strength that anticipates images of heroically defiant black men in the 1960s and 1970s even as he also harks back to the imagery of lynching. No other figure in the history of American visual culture stands so perfectly at the crossroads between the Scottsboro Boys and the Black Panthers. Carre-Four, free and lynched, is also startlingly immediate. His placement in the scene makes it seem as if we are seeing him in a live performance, and his freight of meaning becomes even more direct as a result. Betsy and Jessica’s encounter with him takes place just prior to their arrival at the voodoo houmfort, where they stand at the edge of a crowd of black men and women watching a musical performance. The crowd is singing “O Legba,” one of the Haitian voodoo songs provided to the film by the folklorist Leroy Antoine: “O Legba O marche donc / Marche donc Papa Legba Marche Donc / Papa Legba qui sortie nan la tournin / Marche donc” (Papa Legba walk quickly / Papa Legba has come from a journey).42 Entranced, a black woman (Jeni Le Gon) emerges from the crowd to dance with the voodoo impresario, the sabreur (Jieno Moxzer). Then the song stops, the playing of tom-toms begins, and this woman and another (Rita Christian) emerge to dance around the lone drummer. The sequence reflects the research on voodoo by Lewton and his staff, but it is also structured like the entertainment at a Harlem nightclub: the black audience, the different musical “numbers,” the atmosphere like that of a secret rite at which the two white women are tolerated interlopers. The eerie journey of Betsy and Jessica from the safety of Fort Holland to the houmfort is like the trip from midtown to uptown that Lewton wrote about in A Laughing Woman. As one historian notes of such white visitors, going uptown to one of the clubs “was an experience, almost an expedition,”43 and that is the quality of Betsy and Jessica’s quest. Once they arrive, the two women find a strong connection between the musicians and the audience, indeed barely a distinction between the two, just like in the actual clubs. “When the band gets pretty well into it,” noted Otis Ferguson, the cultural critic for the New Republic, in 1936, “the whole en-

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closure, with all its people, beats like a drum and rises in steady time, like a groundswell.”44 Showing black entertainment in this fashion, I Walked with a Zombie was current with its time, and in ways that bring us to Carre-Four’s immediacy in the Harlemesque sequence. By the early 1940s in Hollywood film, the nightclub began to replace the slave shack as the site of Negro song, even when the scene was actually set in a slave shack. The film historian James Naremore notes that the director Vincente Minnelli, in another movie of 1943, the all-black Cabin in the Sky, “promoted an uptown face of jazz, tied to contemporary fashion and big-time entertainment” in the film’s musical numbers even though they are set in rural locations. This accounted for the film’s “strong feeling of urbanity and sophistication” despite its countrified setting, not to mention its “chic, upscale ‘Africanism,’ redolent of café society, Broadway theater, and the European avant-garde.” According to Naremore, “ ‘savage’ urbanity” was replacing “ ‘childlike’ pastoralism” as the leitmotif of Hollywood portrayals of black music at that time.45 The clublike houmfort of I Walked with a Zombie is no exception. The difference from the Kentucky plantation song in A Day at the Races six years earlier is startling, even as Ivie Anderson’s performance at least somewhat evokes the nightclub. And this new urbanity lends a special significance to Carre-Four. Guarding the path to the houmfort, he stands between the white women and the secret performance they wish to see, and in that respect he is strangely like a doorman or bouncer. True to his minorness, his role as sentinel places him outside the main act. He is a peripheral figure, someone to pass by on the way to the real entertainment. Because of this separation, however, he becomes autonomous and, like a true doorman, powerful. He gets to decide who may enter and who may not. As it happens, he lets both women pass him after failing to notice that one of them has lost her ticket, a voodoo badge pinned to her shirt, but Carre-Four’s imposing power is apparent all the same. When the black maid, Alma, instructs Betsy on how to get to their destination, her description of Carre-Four as a “god” sounds almost like “guard,” and the two words combine not only to define his voodoo role, guardian of the crossroads, but also to assert the importance of his triviality: like the doorman at an actual club, he is a guard who holds godlike power. The Harlem connotation also helps account for Carre-Four’s striking presence in the scene. Betsy and Jessica encounter him in the rustic setting of the sugarcane fields, but the scene’s nightclub quality means that they

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are also seeing him on the street, standing outside the club. Like the opening of The Ghost Ship, I Walked with a Zombie portrays the world outside a type of theater—introducing audiences to something more real than performance, with the street becoming a privileged place to show this more elemental sphere of American life, where people and events are less staged. Jones is much like Knaggs and Craig in the later film, an ominous figure at the threshold between sidewalk and place of entertainment. Appropriately, the script for The Ghost Ship originally called for Craig’s character to be black: “At the left-hand corner of the window can be seen the reflection of a Negro singer, a blind man, with a zither suspended from a strap around his neck.”46 Carre-Four’s role as doorman lends an aura of streetlike immediacy to the actor’s depiction of a powerful minority. This power was threatening during wartime, especially as it related to black nightclubs such as the one conjured in Lewton’s film. A coincidence shows how this is so. On April 22, 1943, the New York Times movie critic “T. M. P.” published his review of I Walked with a Zombie, which had opened the previous day to a “packed house” at the Rialto. The reviewer hated the film, calling it “a dull, disgusting exaggeration of an unhealthy, abnormal concept of life.” He urged that such movies be better policed by Hollywood, especially when “purposeful” war films such as In Which We Serve and We Are the Marines were censored for the occasional foul word.47 That same day, the New York Police Department closed the most popular and famous club in Harlem, the Savoy Ballroom. Mayor Fiorello La Guardia cited evidence of prostitution and pimping, but others, like the Harlem city councilman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., felt the club was padlocked because it was a threatening place of black racial pride. According to the dance historian Russell Gold, “The ballroom was like the glorious capital of an autonomous territory within the dominant cultural nation.” At a time when “national unity was demanded by the government,” Gold notes, “the Savoy, as an incubator of the Harlem youth subculture, was too great a transgressor to be ignored by the authorities.” That summer, during the Harlem riot on the night of August 1, “the militant racial pride and group identity forged at the Savoy (and elsewhere) helped shape the collective response.” The closing of the ballroom helped produce the “definite, bitter cynicism” one journalist noted in Harlem in June of that year.48 The Times reviewer wrote quite apart from the Savoy controversy, but his opinion of Lewton’s movie is like the city’s criticism of the ballroom as immoral and unpatriotic. Finding the film repulsive and un-American, he voiced the same disgust that led to the closing of the famous club at

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140th Street and Lenox Avenue. Mayor La Guardia wrote in a letter to Walter White that the city fathers would not be “shutting our eyes to immorality and disease-breeding violations of the law.” White had tried to prevent the closing and then urged the reopening of the Savoy; and the mayor’s office extracted a promise from management that the new Savoy, when it reopened in October 1943, would focus on “building morale for the war effort” instead of shirking the call for national unity.49 I Walked with a Zombie, as a “disgusting” film that opened just as the Savoy was closed, came under the same attack as the famous ballroom, perhaps because it based its view of black Caribbean life on the threatening independence of the Harlem nightclub that was then deemed un-American. And at the center of that independence is the film’s most elaborately isolated figure, Carre-Four, in our faces, and presiding at the gateway of “the glorious capital of an autonomous territory.” Carre-Four’s elaborate stillness has one other power. It confers on him a quality of permanence, even immortality, in keeping with Lewton’s sense that the frozen picture outlasts the fleeting one. In Carre-Four the question of black subjugation and power is made enduring as well as intensely immediate. André Bazin wrote that in the iconic painting and sculpture of the Egyptians the most primordial function of image making “was the preservation of life by a representation of life.” Bazin noted further that this magical conception of images did not disappear in the twentieth century, when we could still “discern man’s primitive need to have the last word in the argument with death by means of the form that endures.” For Bazin, photography was that form—the modern era’s own means of mummification—since a photograph “embalms time” by putting us in “the disturbing presence of lives halted at a set moment in their duration.” Cinema, for Bazin, is photography in which duration is frozen: “change mummified as it were.”50 Lewton’s films emphasize this mummification in their repeated still ikonas, such as Carre-Four, matching Bazin’s description of photography’s goal: “to preserve the object, enshrouded as it were in an instant, as the bodies of insects are preserved intact out of the distant past, in amber.”51 Maybe this is why Farber wrote that Lewton films sometimes have “the strange authenticity of a daguerreotype,”52 and maybe this is why Lewton’s films concentrate so much on atavism. The persistence of superstitious belief is less a narrative theme than his definition of the filmic image. With their penchant for the icon—a prerational, magical conception of the image—Lewton’s films present the medium itself as atavistic.

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This predilection for immortal stillness extends even to the portrayal of motion in Lewton’s films, and Carre-Four is again the key figure. He walks slowly at various points in the film, for example, at the beach, where he stalks Wesley and Jessica across the sand. He walks at the houmfort, to Fort Holland, and even for a moment from his post in the cane fields. His movement is always stately and grave—he is not the indolent figure of Swing High, Swing Low, Virginia, and White Cargo or the stagger-trotting character of Zombies on Broadway. His slow motions match those of the white zombie Jessica, played by the tall, slender actress Christine Gordon, who matches Darby Jones’s stateliness and silence, moving gracefully through various scenes, always wearing the same flowing gown (fig. 41), and her movements explain the stillness of Jones’s actions. Jessica glides with such stylized grace, her gown obscuring the actual motion of her legs, that she stands out at first as a celebratory sign of the very motion of motion pictures—the elegance of movement considered for its own sake, and the wonder of the camera’s ability to record it. Between her gliding and the unfurling reel there is a symbiotic relation, as if she were the visible expression of cinema’s primal power to render action. She is like a 1940s version of the turn-of-the-century dancer Loie Fuller, whose remarkably cinematic “Serpentine” dance of flowing robes created effects like early cinema’s celebration of motion for its own sake.53 The more Jessica glides, however, the more tension she exhibits between her movement and that of the film. If we imagine ourselves in the projection booth, with the reels winding and unwinding as the metaphor of narrative film’s relentless impatience to keep things moving along, Jessica’s glide begins to read as a drag, a pull, against this ambience of speeding continuity. It is as if her real purpose were to slow down the film—or at least to contest its perpetual unreeling, even as she is beholden to that unreeling for her walk itself. The same could be said of Lewton’s other “people moving in a penitential, sleep-walking manner,” among his “favorite images,” as Farber noted.54 Many examples come to mind: Amy trudging through the snow at the end of The Curse of the Cat People; Craig’s blind street singer at the start of The Ghost Ship, with his fragile few steps; the parched desert stumble of Sam Leeds and the Reverend Griffin in Lewton’s last film, Apache Drums (1951); the girl Marian in the never-filmed Ticonderoga, whose walk through a field of tall grass on a foggy night the script describes this way: “Her grey cloak, the tiny tendrils of mist that still hang in the air above the grass, the very

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Figure 41. I Walked with a Zombie: Jessica Holland (Christine Gordon) approaching the gate.

grass itself, which conceals her feet, all combine to give her a wraith-like, floating appearance.” Marian “doesn’t walk,” says one of the characters, and the same is true of Jessica.55 The iron gate impeding her progress visualizes the stasis of her every motion. The same is true for Carre-Four, Lewton’s other arrestingly somnolent personage in the film. In these two figures, he tried to slow movement down enough so that, almost impossibly, it too might take on the quality of stillness. In a more limited sense, the slowing down fits the film’s conscienceliberal wish to show the gravity and dignity of black people.56 Yet a deeper force at work in these characters is a fear of forgetting—specifically, a fear that histories of racial violence would be forgotten. The freezing of motion disputes the flow of images that makes a movie frame ephemeral. It turns the stream of picturing into a kinetic sculpture as solid and memorable as stone. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, writing in Los Angeles in 1944, condemned Hollywood films for the way “life flows away unheard” within them.57 Lewton, in his passion for stillness, seems to have equated this “flowing away” with the very flow of narrative cinema, as if the mere idea that a film consists of thousands and thousands of

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briefly seen pictures meant that even the most vivid of these images was automatically relegated to a forgotten blur. As a result, he slowed down the pictures—relying on characters’ standing still (like Carre-Four in the field) but also rendering even their movement as a form of stasis. The impulse is striking, since other filmmakers of the time, such as John Farrow, were audaciously experimenting with how to do the very opposite—how to show stillness as action, as in the still image seen during the opening credits of Farrow’s Commandos Strike at Dawn, which shows four silhouetted raiders suspended in midair, all flying knees and elbows and guns. For Farrow, static figures should bristle with activity. But for Lewton moving figures should be still. Lewton’s commemorative aim—and its relation to histories of racial violence—comes to the fore in The Leopard Man, the movie he made immediately after I Walked with a Zombie and the last of his three collaborations with Tourneur. At the end of the film, set in New Mexico, a procession of penitents moves slowly through the desert to the accompaniment of a dirgelike monastic chant (fig. 42)—the ultimate example in Lewton’s films of “penitential, sleep-walking” movement and, not coincidentally, one of the greatest of all Lewton’s scenes, one that draws attention to the memorial power of Carre-Four’s own motionless movement. Many factors keep The Leopard Man marchers still. They appear to be going nowhere even as they trudge onward, not just because they move slowly but because the scene must have required them to walk across the set several times to give the illusion of constant motion on the relatively small soundstage. The set, moreover, with its petrified landscape based on photographs that Lewton’s assistant Ardel Wray took in New Mexico, suggests that the designers worked, consciously or not, to copy the enchanted impersonal stillness a snapshot imposes on the space it ostensibly vivifies.58 Even a close-up showing the three men who join the procession—the murderer Galbraith and his two accusers, Jerry Manning and Raoul Belmonte—freezes motion. The call sheet for the day of the penitent march requests that a man should be on the set to operate a treadmill. The viewer knowing this easily sees that during one scene Galbraith and Jerry walk while standing in place.59 Treadmills were an accustomed part of a Hollywood set—convenient for showing figures in motion without a tracking shot or the trouble of a mobile camera—but rarely was the machine more consonant with the taste of a filmmaker than in this scene. These slowed movements are explicitly about commemoration in The

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Figure 42. The Leopard Man (1943): the penitents’ procession.

Leopard Man. The penitents’ procession, explains Galbraith, is “to remind people of the great tragedy that took place here—so that they won’t ever forget that a peaceful village of Indians was wiped out by the Conquistadores, back in the seventeenth century. A band of monks buried the dead and prayed for them and did penance for their deaths—that’s what this procession is supposed to be.”60 The penitents’ march links frozen movement to commemoration, tragedy, and guilt. It also contrasts with more superficial forms of memory, such as those of the museum where Galbraith is curator, overseeing a collection of neat, tidy relics whose original cultural power is lost on visitors. (“Don’t look like a leopard to me,” says one bored visitor about a prized artifact.)61 When Galbraith flees his pursuers, he runs from the museum out into the procession, where he finds himself in a more intense realm of remembrance, the world of living stillness. This world of profound recollection, in turn, is all about racial violence. The procession that marks the conquistadors’ destruction of the Indians’ peaceful village also, curiously, connotes black-white violence. The script says that “some of the participants are hooded, wearing black hoods very much like those worn by the Ku Klux Klanners.”62 When Gal-

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braith arrives in their midst, pursued closely and accosted by his two accusers, the structure of the scene conforms to social protest imagery showing a black man led to his lynching by hooded members of the Klan and their business-suited followers (fig. 43). The narrative has no relation to anything like this: Galbraith is white; the “Klansmen” wear black, not the more typical white; the hooded executioners and their followers are not evil men but people doing penance for the evil of others; and the scene takes place in New Mexico, which had its own history of racial subjugation but was not a likely stage for the conflict of white and black. (Most of the processors appear to be Hispanic.) Yet none of this obscures the fact that here again, as in the case of Carre-Four, racial crime animates the tragic stillness of Lewton’s slow-moving figures. The lynching at the end of “Dry September” (1931), a short story written by William Faulkner, Lewton’s across-the-street neighbor and friend in Pacific Palisades, fades into obscurity: the lynch mob’s speeding cars kick up dust in the drought, “but soon the eternal dust absorbed it again,” and all is forgotten.63 Lewton’s frozen procession, however, resists this amnesia. At the end of I Walked with a Zombie, Lewton’s immortalized black man takes one last form: the downward apotheosis. Near the conclusion Carre-Four follows Jessica and Wesley to the beach but stops at the water’s edge as he watches the two of them float out to sea. We see CarreFour in one shot from slightly above, and as he stands there, motionless and defeated on the dark sand, a luminous wave crashes at his feet, spreading white foam all around him and glittering with the daylight that defies the scene’s nighttime setting (fig. 44). Carre-Four does not face the viewer, but the camera angle flattens the space, and the brief shot is clearly intended to have a special significance akin to that of the two-dimensional icons. Narratively the entire beach sequence derives from the worst racial scenarios of those years—the black man thwarted in his search for a white woman, kept from gaining the object of his lust by a white man who sacrifices his lady love and himself rather than have her succumb to the interracial desire of another. Yet out of this Lewton and the director Tourneur achieve a remarkable visual effect that makes Carre-Four a far more tragic figure than the two white people who disappear into the sea. The effect centers on the luminous wave breaking around CarreFour’s feet. Lewton and Tourneur loved this image. We can tell, because they chose to show the same wave break not once but twice, to keep the screen covered in the dramatic white foam for as long as possible

Figure 43. The Leopard Man: Raoul Belmonte (Richard Martin) and Jerry Manning (Dennis O’Keefe) accosting Galbraith (James Bell) amid the “Ku Klux Klanners.”

Figure 44. I Walked with a Zombie: Carre-Four and the breaking wave.

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during the brief duration of the shot. The wave is so dramatic because it is like the bright heavens that open around a hero, investing him and his actions with heavenly significance, transiting him to God as through an aureole in the clouds—except now cast downward. When the hero went to the sky in movies from that time, the meaning was obviously meant to be reassuring. The ascension represented the universal significance of the hero’s actions and the heavenly afterlife to which his heroism entitled him. Lewton and Tourneur knew such imagery well from their work on Selznick’s Tale of Two Cities, including their collaboration on the ending, which features one of Hollywood’s greatest moments of aerial transcendence. This scene lurks, reversed, in CarreFour’s glorious descent. Sydney Carton, having chosen to sacrifice himself so that Charles Darnay can live, mounts the steps of the guillotine as the drums of execution roll. The camera sees him safely to the platform and then begins to pan slowly up the guillotine, moving steadily as it meets and passes the suspended blade and on still upward (fig. 45), until it comes to a rest on the full heavens above Paris, with the city spreading out into the distance. We then hear Carton’s words—“It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known”—and the heavens fill with the biblical quotation from Dickens’s novel: “I am the Resurrection and the Life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.” The scene brilliantly uses the instrument of death to track the hero’s afterlife, with the guillotine the device that leads us to ponder the effect far away of Carton’s sacrifice and the eternal life he will gain. “There is no time there, and no trouble,” he reassures the seamstress on the way to the guillotine, and the movie ends with a view of that heavenly place. Out at Malibu Beach on Friday, November 13, 1942, Lewton and Tourneur undoubtedly were thinking about many other things besides A Tale of Two Cities. There were the two lifeguards who were to be on duty starting at 8:00 a.m., the box lunches for the crew, and plenty of other matters, not least of them getting the difficult scene involving Wesley, Jessica, and Carre-Four on film with the close of shooting coming up the next week.64 The important decision to film Carre-Four from above, perhaps from the vantage of some nearby rocks, may even have been just the gifted Tourneur’s spur-of-the-moment decision. For all that, however, the memory of Lewton and Tourneur’s revolutionary sequences in A Tale—their first collaboration—clearly shows in this one scene. “The last scenes in which Carton goes to the guillotine are remarkably good,”

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Figure 45. David O. Selznick, producer, A Tale of Two Cities (1935): the top of the guillotine and a view of heaven.

Lewton had written of the script, and so these scenes found an echo when he and Tourneur worked together again in 1942.65 Carre-Four is like Carton, a solitary tragic figure surrounded by vaster worlds, but he is a slave, never more so than on the beach, and that changes everything. Standing on the shore looking out to sea, he visualizes the despondency of the black men longing for their lost mother, their lost homeland, in the Haitian dirge “O Marie Congo” sung at the beginning of the film and immediately after the wave breaks past Carre-Four. Motionless, he becomes the figurehead Ti Misery breasting the sea. And as a slave, Carre-Four is presented as a sacrifice without transcendence. Glorious eternal worlds do not frame his deathly existence. The luminous apotheosis can only be below him. The heavens become a foam spreading at his feet, and the roll of drums ushering Carton into the next world is a roll of surf that explodes as abruptly as the guillotine’s loud sliding drop. Minor figures die without fanfare. They are not heroes, and their only glory is down. Their tragedy is that they expire without purpose, without angels and quotations and posthumous voices singing them to rest. His head and neck in silhouette echoing the knoblike protrusions atop the immensely tall guillotine, Carre-Four is death and death only.

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Figure 46. The Sullivans (1944): the five brothers bidding farewell in heaven.

Lewton’s potent fixation on tragedy, his eye for irremediable isolation, produced an effect at odds with patriotism. The ascendant hero—the man who died for a cause—was naturally a leitmotif of wartime. At the end of the film The Sullivans (1944), we see all five dead Sullivan brothers waving to their parents (and wartime audiences) from the happy safety of the clouds (fig. 46). This is the last of four quick reincarnations in the film’s final minute. The preceding scene shows the christening of the ship the USS The Sullivans (“Our boys are afloat again,” says their mother). It also shows dozens of sailors waving from the deck rail of the ship amid the flutter of pennants and an American flag, all of them framed against the sky in a heroic farewell/beginning that anticipates the Sullivan brothers’ own cloud-borne gesture a moment later. And it shows a group of navy officers standing behind Mr. and Mrs. Sullivan as the ship sets sail, a quiet but firm way of saying that even though the couple’s boys are gone, the brothers are still figuratively right behind their parents in the form of these duly promoted, somewhat older and more mature surrogate sons. These happy ascendancies are fair enough in a propaganda film—they follow the devastating news that all five brothers have been killed at once on the USS Juneau, and the film cannot end without asserting that the brothers now wave from heaven as they used to, as boys, from the water tower above the train tracks in Iowa.

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But all these transcendent gestures show an aerial afterlife conspicuously denied to Carre-Four in Lewton’s film released the year before. Even John Huston’s documentary The Battle of San Pietro, with its quick, brutal close-ups of dead American servicemen zipped into bags, fashions regeneration out of its very groundedness, since it closes with a metaphorical play between the digging of graves and the sowing of fields. But Carre-Four’s beach scene offers not even this hope. In memorable terms it asserts the black man’s lack of a higher cause. Frank Capra and the War Department would address this propaganda problem in 1944 in their film The Negro Soldier, which portrayed black men as fervent patriots eager to help their country. Even in the month Lewton and Tourneur filmed the scene at Malibu, the black writer J. Saunders Redding noted that despite his misgivings, “I believe in this war. . . . I believe in what America professes to stand for. . . . I will take this that I have here” in the hope that it might one day be better. “To die in these duties is to die for something.”66 But Carre-Four sends another message. As a black man told a Harper’s reporter earlier in 1942, “This war doesn’t mean a thing to me.”67

chapter four

This Pretty World Glenn Vernon in Bedlam

The three minutes in Bedlam featuring Glenn Vernon as the Gilded Boy are the best known in the film, Lewton’s last for RKO. Shooting was completed on August 17, 1945, three days after V-J Day. The movie, set in London in 1761, depicts the infamous mental hospital Saint Mary’s of Bethlehem, run by the evil warden Master Sims, played by Boris Karloff. The scene focuses on one of Sims’s inmates, a young boy who has been painted gold and brought out from the asylum to recite a speech in honor of Lord Mortimer, host of a dinner at London’s Vauxhall Gardens. The Gilded Boy holds an orb and scepter as he stands upon a small stage to personify Reason (fig. 47). Responding to Sims’s prodding, he tries to speak but finds that the paint makes it more and more difficult for him to breathe. The camera moves closer as he struggles to talk (fig. 48): “To this pretty world . . . pretty world . . . To this pretty world, there came . . . came . . . heaven sent, divinely inspired, the . . . blessing . . . blessing of . . . our age . . . . A man set like a jewel . . . this . . . this prince of men”—here the camera moves still closer (fig. 49) “—this paragon . . . Lord . . . Lord . . . Mortimer.” The Gilded Boy then collapses and dies, asphyxiated. The Vauxhall dinner party finds his death amusing, with the exception of one guest, Nell Bowen (Anna Lee), who stands up, conscience-stricken, and begins a crusade to reform the hospital’s treatment of its inmates. How could this scene and the whole film be about the war? Despite its eighteenth-century setting, Bedlam is more concerned with the con132

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Figure 47. Bedlam (1946): the Gilded Boy (Glenn Vernon) performing at Vauxhall.

flict than any of Lewton’s other movies. More precisely, it is about the end of the war and what that would mean for Lewton. When Bedlam was released in April 1946, his personal source of the tragic was drying up, obscured amid the new opulence of a blossoming consumer culture, and his last RKO film makes that transformation its subject—particularly in the Vauxhall Gardens scene. How this is so begins with the actor playing the Gilded Boy. Lewton turned Glenn Vernon into a tragic wartime icon by playing off the connotations of his previous performances. Vernon often played war roles after signing with RKO as a twenty-year-old in 1943. He was a babyfaced marine sending a recorded message home to his mother from a stateside concession booth before shipping out in Marine Raiders (“And mom, don’t bother sending me the cufflinks I asked for. The shirts here already have buttons on ’em. I, uh . . . I sure hope the cow gets better”); a wisecracking B-29 crewman in Anthony Mann’s Bamboo Blonde, released the same year as Bedlam; and a troubled adolescent in Lewton’s film of juvenile delinquency on the home front, Youth Runs Wild (1944).

Figure 48. Bedlam: Vernon in medium close-up.

Figure 49. Bedlam: Vernon in close-up.

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Figure 50. Jacques Tourneur, director, Days of Glory (1944): Mitya (Vernon) about to be executed by the Nazis.

But it was Vernon’s screen debut that cast the strongest wartime shadow on his role as the Gilded Boy—his appearance as a young guerrilla fighter named Mitya in Jacques Tourneur’s Days of Glory (1944). This was Tourneur’s first film after his partnership with Lewton, and not surprisingly, this movie made by Lewton’s friend and costarring the actor who would play the Gilded Boy contains a scene that prefigures the Vauxhall Gardens sequence. This is the execution of Mitya (fig. 50). The Germans, having apprehended him, stand Mitya on the bed of a truck in the falling snow, his hands tied, a noose around his neck. A German officer mounted on a white horse commands him to divulge his name, those of his fellow resistance fighters, and their whereabouts, or be killed. As a crowd of villagers looks on, Mitya triumphantly refuses, saying only, “I will answer, sir. You cannot hang a nation. Death to the German invaders. . . . Kill them, kill them.” The truck drives away, and Mitya is hanged. In many details the scene resembles Vernon’s Bedlam death scene: the doomed figure alone on a raised platform (a truck instead of a stage); the audience; the evil incarcerator demanding that the reticent boy speak. Beyond these elements, the interplay between the two scenes reasserts the importance of the Russian icon in Lewton’s representation of

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Figure 51. Days of Glory: icon of the Virgin and Child at the Russian guerrilla fighters’ hideout.

wartime tragedy. Lewton had no official role in Days of Glory, but as a native Russian near at hand, he almost certainly advised his former director on the Russian lore and imagery that Days of Glory would be expected to include. One of the characters prepares to read from Mikhail Lermontov’s Hero of Our Time (1840)—a likely sign of Lewton, who quotes from the Russian writer and soldier in his own novels This Fool, Passion and The Fateful Star Murder.1 Still more telling is the icon we see of the Virgin and Child on the wall of the guerrilla fighters’ hideout (fig. 51). A lone candle burns before it, in memory of Yelena (Maria Palmer), a fighter whom the Germans killed as she tried to deliver a message. Later we briefly see the icon again as Nina (Tamara Toumanova) consoles Mitya’s little sister Olga (Dena Penn) after his execution. These small touches match those Lewton liked to point out in his work on others’ films. He asked his mother and sister to “note some of the details, such as the harp, the parrot, and the ancestral portraits being taken out of town” in the famous evacuation of Atlanta scene in Selznick’s Gone with the Wind. They were “some of the stuff that’s mine.”2 About A Tale of Two Cities, he told his mother and sister: “I want you to note all the little details, dogs turning spits, bowling alleys of the time, wine shops, taverns, stage coaches and costumes, with a

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proud but critical eye, as your son is the gent responsible.”3 In Days of Glory the icon is a similar detail, but it has a more important role as well. It informs Mitya’s execution scene, where the screen itself is transformed into a shallow space dominated by Vernon’s ceremonially presented figure. His body is not always oriented frontally in this sequence, but the modified iconic format is apparent all the same. Tourneur borrowed the mode from Lewton, and in Bedlam Lewton borrowed it back, using it to invest the same actor with an aura of Russian-inflected tragedy. The Gilded Boy is Lewton’s most blatantly iconic figure. He is framed in a shallow stage, making a flat, picturelike space that adumbrates the flatness of the screen. Trees and a wall behind the stage block a distant view and keep his realm as flat as possible. Crouching figures at the base of the stage flank him like medieval donors, emphasizing the heraldic and pictorial qualities of the scene. The tableau is one of many moments when Bedlam declares static depiction as its driving force: the opening credits with their backdrop of William Hogarth prints; and a scene in the asylum when the inmates assume the positions of figures in plate 8 of Hogarth’s Rake’s Progress, the film’s inspiration. But in the Gilded Boy’s case this pictorial stasis is especially intense. The gold paint helps him impersonate a sculpture—the script calls for us to believe at first that he might even be a statue4—and he literalizes the connection between sculpture and immobile human figures that runs through Lewton’s films. Most important, the gilt of figure and stage alludes to the rich goldpainted surfaces of Byzantine icons and their Russian counterparts such as the one we see in Days of Glory. When the camera closes in for a halflength view and then for a close-up of his suffering features, the Gilded Boy might as well wear a crown of thorns instead of a wreath of laurel. At Vauxhall, Mitya is Jesus. He is also a figure of considerable commemorative power. None of Lewton’s icons shows better than Vernon’s character that stillness must acquire an exaggerated density, a visual thickness, if it is to stay in the mind and resist the blur of the film’s onward roll. Vernon was an actor who could move—a skillful tap dancer in a touring vaudeville show called The Hoofer, on Broadway in Best Foot Forward, and in Los Angeles in the sprightly production Junior Miss (where he was discovered by RKO). His favorite film was Yankee Doodle Dandy, and his favorite actor was James Cagney; he appeared with Donna Lee as one of the American kid entertainers in Sing Your Way Home (1945); he does a casual shuffling two-step in Lewton’s Youth Runs Wild; and he starred as a toe-tapping big-band clarinet virtuoso in Ding Dong Williams (1946),

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where his happy-go-lucky character gets his nickname, Ding Dong, because “he’s always in there swinging like a bell.”5 But that same year Lewton not only slowed the swinger down; he ossified him. Lewton presented this statue directly to the viewer. In Days of Glory Vernon himself had been a spectator, fixated as Toumanova asks him to imagine an eroticized dance she will conduct for his eyes only: “I will make a little performance for you. . . . The footlights soft, the curtain is not yet up, and in my dressing room I’m half crazy with excitement. . . . I want to look my best tonight. . . . I’m in the wings and I’m trembling. And do you know why I’m trembling, Mitya, do you? Because you are out front. And you are the most important person in the world because you are the audience.” This remarkable scene, played as a sexual initiation (Toumanova’s character is in her early twenties, Vernon’s is sixteen), plays outward to the movie-theater audience as well. At a time when movie crowds were notoriously rowdy, and teenage viewers were among the most disruptive, “slashing seats, breaking light globes and committing other acts of vandalism,” as one period account put it, Toumanova’s come-on (“My bodice in the back—do it up please? My tutu—is it fluffy?”) tries to keep the spectator, like Vernon’s Mitya, frozen in place.6 Vernon played a restless teenage moviegoer in another film of 1944, Youth Runs Wild, in which his character sneaks into a theater and leaves early during a public-service announcement about salvaging scrap materials, but in Days of Glory Toumanova’s seduction aims to keep him and the audience entranced. When all else fails, let sex appeal bolt them to their seats. But in Bedlam Vernon himself does the fixating. Acting outward, not just to the Vauxhall diners but to the actual movie-theater crowd, he arrests attention, as though his near-petrified state were meant to cue an audience’s own motionless absorption. He demands to be remembered. The close-up of Vernon’s gilded face thickens the screen, filling the image with skin, paint, lips, sweat, a layer of paint on the face as a second skin so thick, the actor said, that it took him six hours to get it all off. While he wore it, he, like his character, had trouble breathing.7 The Gilded Boy is the image trapping itself in amber, entombed in the slathered gloss of preservation at the outset, thickening and pasting itself in a golden shine whose very density cakes the flow of the film. This visual density, moreover, seems to increase in proportion to his difficulty speaking, as if struggling with words led to a compensatory hyperbole of appearance. And though Vernon’s character does not literally arrest the movie—we see his face for only a few seconds, and then he is gone—

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in another sense it does. As the film writer Gregory William Mank notes, “The powerful episode still strikes a chord in audiences.”8 The Vauxhall scene stands out within the film and in Vernon’s career, eclipsing all his other roles as the one people are likely to recall. Stillness, to survive, must be metallic, and it must have an edge. The frozen image is trying to tell us something, then, but what? The Gilded Boy is an icon of sacrifice, but his connection with wartime suffering is unclear. It is both precise and overdetermined, as we will see, but before we can understand it better, we need to consider another aspect of the Vauxhall scene, one that directly connects it to the time the film was made. Bedlam was shot between July 18 and August 17, 1945, with the war in Europe concluded and the war with Japan nearing and reaching an end. Appropriately for a film made on the verge of peace, Bedlam divides into realms of violence and frivolity, pain and pleasure. The separation is cast as the division between dark and light. The asylum inmates live in darkness amid straw beds and walls streaked with graffiti. Most of the scenes shot inside the mental hospital take place at night. Meanwhile, the London society of Lord Mortimer and his circle cavorts in gay carriages, staving off boredom in lavish clothes and powdered wigs at opulent amusements like that at Vauxhall. The contrast extends to Karloff’s character. As the head of the asylum, Master Sims wears black clothes and a black wig, a sharp contrast to the spangled frippery of Mortimer (Billy House) and his cohorts, including Nell Bowen. When Sims appears at Vauxhall, speaking to the banqueters, his dark presence stands out against the rococo fluff like a blind spot on the screen (fig. 52). The sharp split extends to Roy Webb’s wonderful musical score, with its opposition between buoyant salon music—by far the cheeriest of any featured in Lewton’s films—and an ominous refrain “built on the Aminor triad and assigned to the low brass,” according to the music historian Scott MacQueen. This recurrent dark passage, MacQueen comments, creates “in four notes a sense of raw power and overreaching authority.”9 During the opening credits the score diverts to the ominous tone when Karloff’s and Lewton’s names appear, serving as their personal musical darkness, but the salon music is also prominent. It begins with the opening frame, replacing the “V for Victory” notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony that had introduced all but one of Lewton’s earlier films. (The other exception is Isle of the Dead, released in September 1945 but filmed in July and December 1944 and thus hardly a cheery postwar picture.)

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Figure 52. Bedlam: Master Sims (Boris Karloff, in black) entertaining the banqueters.

MacQueen reads the music, with its opposition of light and dark, as “the Age of Reason smiling through its tears,”10 but we could also interpret it as Americans perceiving peacetime joy amid the still discordant darkness of the war in 1946. The idea of life and death rushing to meet one another is a staple of Lewton’s films: “I run to Death and Death meets me as fast, / And all my pleasures are like Yesterday”—John Donne’s lines open and close The Seventh Victim. “I see the white steel thirsting for blood and the blood running to meet it,” says the Finn in the original script for The Ghost Ship.11 But in Bedlam life and death, light and dark, flee in opposite directions. The postwar meaning of this opposition becomes clearer if we consider a British film released a few months before Bedlam. Alexander Korda’s Perfect Strangers (1945) is about a wartime couple, Robert and Cathy Wilson, played by Robert Donat and Deborah Kerr, whom we first see as Robert is going off to enlist in May 1940. As the film historian Antonia Lant notes, the couple is drab and boring. Humdrum routines rule their lives in the cold gray London of the war’s early months. With the end of fighting, however, all is transformed. The Wilsons renew their acquaintance at a blindingly bright pub. “Both players hold their

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hands over their eyes and search for a place to sit in a gesture curiously reminiscent of that used to cut out glare when stepping into strong sunshine,” Lant writes. The place, “an orgy of light,” is decorated with multiple mirrors in which the once-frumpy couple suddenly see their own movie star beauty. “Their hair becomes Brylcreemed and gleaming, their skin unwrinkles, their speech quickens, their posture straightens, and the camera work and lighting that make them visible shift, too, enhancing the glow of their features.” The couple is “transformed from dowdy, workaday citizens” into “radiant, eager lovers in the victorious present.”12 Lewton went to see this film in January 1946, one month after its U.S. release under the title Vacation from Marriage. “Went with Ruthie [his wife] in the evening to see ‘Vacation from Marriage.’ I thought it was an excellent picture, very well made and directed,” he noted in his diary on January 23.13 In those same weeks Lewton was still editing Bedlam, refining it for distribution a few months later. “I seem to be re-writing ‘Bedlam’ rather than writing ‘Blackbeard,’ ” he noted on January 28, referring to his planned (but never made) new film. He was also socializing with the Bedlam cast all through the month (with Robert Clarke on the evening of the sixteenth, Anna Lee at lunch on the seventeenth, and Karloff on the twenty-second).14 The point to emphasize, however, is not any direct influence of Korda’s film on Lewton’s very different production, but rather each film’s use of a split visual language to mark the transition to peacetime. What signals peace in Bedlam is the look of 1760s London. With their bright streets and fashion-conscious citizens—photographed in blond tones that come as close to pastel colors as black-and-white film can— the London stage sets differ from the bleakness and fog of the earlier Lewton films. Eighteenth-century England might seem far afield from the cheery postwar consumer economy Americans had been envisioning as early as 1943, “the capitalist dream of the postwar world as a consumer paradise,” as the historian William S. Graebner describes it.15 But as a birthplace of modern consumer culture, London in the 1760s was a logical setting for an American film made as World War II concluded. Vauxhall Gardens, the center of that eighteenth-century opulence, was an especially fitting place to show the anticipated commercial splendors of postwar America. Transformed from seedy to elegant by the entrepreneur Jonathan Tyers after he purchased the grounds in 1728, Vauxhall soon became the premier site in London for paying customers to experience an intense mixture of fantasy, luxury, and entertainment.16

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One of the buildings there was the Temple of Pleasure, a rotunda walled with sixteen mirrors in which “the spectator, when standing under the balls of the Grand Chandelier, might see himself reflected at once, to his pleasing wonder.”17 In these and other enchantments, the Vauxhall spectator could simultaneously realize and lose himself in a wondrous vision of plenty. Lewton’s Vauxhall is spare indeed, confined to a single neat set—neither the budgets nor the sensibilities of his films permitted anything like a re-creation of the gardens’ grand alleys and dramatic vistas. But the copious food on Mortimer’s table is enough to suggest the extravagance of the place—a bounty apt enough to evoke postwar prosperity. Lewton treats Vauxhall as a world of affluence done up in a lighthearted rococo style, all lace and glitter and giddiness—“a night scene from Fragonard,” says the script.18 In this respect Bedlam took its place alongside other films from those years that tried, for better or worse, to imagine the postwar consumer economy. A brief consideration of scenes from three movies of 1944–46 puts a finer point on Lewton’s portrayal of the new opulence. First is the conclusion of Minnelli’s Meet Me in St. Louis (1944). There we see Esther Smith (Garland) and her fiancé, John Truett (Tom Drake), as well as the whole Smith family, standing on a promenade at the World’s Fair, where they gaze at the unbelievably magnificent fairgrounds illuminated in the wondrous novelty of electric light. “Oh, isn’t it breathtaking, John?” says Esther. “I never dreamed anything could be so beautiful.” “There’s never been anything like it in the whole world,” says her mother (Mary Astor). “I can’t believe it,” says Esther, in the movie’s last words. “Right here where we live. Right here in St. Louis.” As she speaks, light plays off a reflecting pool, flickering softly on the young lovers’ subdued reverential faces. The magical atmosphere is unlike anything they have ever seen—a far cry from the Smith family’s Victorian house at 5135 Kensington Avenue—and their transition to this enormous panacea of brightness, this vast, splendid, artificial culture with something for everybody, implies the transitions of 1944 as much as 1904. The spectacular fairgrounds visualize the soft soak of face-deep satisfactions, the glow of postwar abundance and spectacle. As Farber noted in 1954, “We are still living among the last convulsions of the Victorian world,”19 and the Smith family’s transition from mansard roof to the midway is just such a convulsion. The fair’s electric glimmer is a pall for their nineteenth-century world and the aurora of a new time. If the Smiths cannot quite get their minds around the shift—if John Truett waxes nostalgic for the earlier days (“I liked it better when it was just a

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swamp”)—they are nonetheless in thrall to the magnificent new era transforming their lives even as they speak. The fair is a chance to be born again at a mystical initiation, a shimmering secular baptism amid endless rites of gratification. And as in all the best of Minnelli’s work, the social commentary is cryptic: the family’s automatic embrace of the new splendor is touching in its very ignorance. After what they have been through, they deserve the warm, artificial glow of feeling like royalty. Second, Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, released by RKO in 1946, comments on the transition in a less sanguine way. The famous penultimate sequence shows George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart) running down the main street of his hometown, realizing the consequences after his guardian angel, Clarence, has granted his wish that he had never been born. Because Bailey now has never been around to steer the town on a decent path, the former village of Bedford Falls has become Pottersville and looks like Times Square—a nightmare of flashing signs and slogans beckoning wastrels to come in and spend a few dollars for a moment or two of dizzy pleasures: “Midnight Club Dancing,” “Bamboo Room Cocktails,” “20 Gorgeous Girls Girls Girls Girls.” George can hardly believe what he sees. Like Rip Van Winkle, he wakes to see that America has become a thriving commercial nation. He sees that on the night of December 24, 1945 (the film is precise about the evening in question), America has miraculously been transformed from a quaint hamlet of middle-American decency into a honky-tonk hell hole infested with prostitutes and pawnbrokers and run by an irritable citizenry that relieves its collective depression only by a glad show of canine teeth. Clarence restores George to the land of the living, and the horrible new world turns out to be just a bad dream. But the film can never quite renounce its unforgettable fantasy of a sleazy postwar America. The glow of new lights mesmerizes the Smith family, but it transfixes George Bailey in its tawdry shine. The Bamboo Blonde, also released by RKO in 1946, offers a third way to envision the make-a-buck postwar United States. This time it is the war itself that provides a potentially unlimited source of revenue. A B-29 pilot named Pat Ransom (Russell Wade) meets a nice nightclub singer (Frances Langford) just before shipping out. He and his crew (including Vernon) paint her likeness on the plane, call it the “Bamboo Blonde,” and become the most successful crew and aircraft in the Pacific, earning commendations and national publicity and giving an ambitious man back home a chance to make serious money. The nightclub owner Eddie Clark (Ralph Edwards) sees that he can profit by advertising his

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singer as the original “Bamboo Blonde.” The singer does not like the plan—“If you think for a minute, Eddie Clark, that we’re going to cash in on that nice kid’s war record, nothing doing. . . . Sounds like they’re risking their lives just so I can grab a little publicity.” Langford, the actress, had entertained troops in the South Pacific, including one documented stop on the island of Peleliu, a scene of vicious fighting, where she was “the best-loved woman entertainer in this division,” wrote one private, someone “who, to most of us, personified the girl we want to return to.”20 Perhaps the experience gave Langford a sharp sense of her character’s objections. But soon the nightclub owner prevails, refuting his singer’s worries about cashing in on combat. “Why that ain’t true at all,” says Clark, noting that servicemen are already fully absorbed in a consumer culture anyway. “Look at what they paint on those planes. The names of breakfast foods, soda pop, all that kind of stuff. Do you think the guy who makes the soda pop closes his plant so he won’t be capitalizing on it? No—he sends ’em a case free.” Eddie’s business sense is dead on—his club is packed—but his acumen is even better once the war is over. That’s when he develops Bamboo Blonde Enterprises, a company whose skyscraper offices feature the following directory: Bamboo Blonde Enterprises Cosmetics Recordings Furniture Sun Suits Candy Bars Hosiery The directory appears as almost the first thing in the film, when a reporter from Career magazine interviews Clark on how he made his fortune. The story then follows in flashback, and we see strikingly that the film cannot hide its matter-of-fact glee that Clark is a business hero and that capitalizing on the war is not only perfectly decent but downright jackpot shrewd. Even as the singer maintains that “it still seems like a cheap and phony way to get ahead,” and even as we learn that the pilot with the monetary name of Pat Ransom comes from an old-money family and is worth between four and five million dollars, these attempts to erase the crude commercial spirit in a bath of common decency and irreproachable old money do not scrub the stain the movie is all too happy to reveal. At the end of the war, getting ahead is the only way to go.

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The message is reprehensible by almost any standard. Even for those who grant the B-29s their vital strategic importance, there is no way to ignore their connection to the monumental loss of human life: the incendiary bombing of Tokyo in March 1945; the atomic bombs in August, also dropped from B-29s; and the horrible fighting on islands such as Saipan and Iwo Jima in 1944 and 1945, conducted so that these tiny Pacific spots could serve as forward bases for the big bombers and their fighter escorts. But the point of The Bamboo Blonde is that it is wrong in 1946 to think of anything, even the war, as off-limits to commercial exploitation. Anything goes, as the executive producer Sid Rogell well knew, since he took the idea of a famous bomber and its pinup mascot from William Wyler’s pious war documentary, Memphis Belle (1944), jazzing up Wyler’s sermon of the flak jackets and giving it a sales angle attuned to the new world of rampant product development. Lewton’s fantasy of the new postwar world is more delicate but no less extravagant. Bedlam, shown in the same year and made by the same studio as The Bamboo Blonde and It’s a Wonderful Life, is as aware of the new consumerism as both these movies, and Minnelli’s film as well. Like Minnelli, Lewton intuitively looked to the history of bourgeois fairs and pleasure grounds for an image of what postwar America would look like. Unlike Meet Me in St. Louis, however, Bedlam portrays a more Capra-like hardening of morals. When Lord Mortimer and his guests laugh at the Gilded Boy’s fate, they are as cruel and insensitive to the suffering of another person as, say, Nick the bartender in It’s a Wonderful Life when he sprays seltzer in the face of Mr. Gower, the drunken panhandler, much to the amusement of the bar’s patrons. Lewton’s debauched banqueters are wigged and waistcoated versions of a common theme of postwar films: brute greed and the coarsening of public life in the new consumer culture. It was a rare work, like The Bamboo Blonde, that portrayed this outlandish capitalization as a decent thing. In other films such as Bedlam, the new culture was bombastic, outrageous, a desire beyond all bounds, as in the most famous portrayal of acquisitive lust in any movie from that time, Ann Blyth’s role as the “consumer vampire” Veda Pierce in Michael Curtiz’s Mildred Pierce (1945) or, as Graebner notes, in Humphrey Bogart’s maniacally greedy character Fred C. Dobbs in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948).21 In Bedlam the corpulent actor Billy House is the perfect postwar choice as the pleasure-sated Lord Mortimer, so big that his horse-drawn carriage rocks and jiggles when relieved of his great weight. Bedlam exaggerates postwar greed, but no more than it does the war

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years. The grimness of the asylum is like a retrospectively embellished view of the war’s privations and suffering, beheld from the vantage of peacetime. When the camera pulls back to reveal the sweep of misery in the hospital, the scene calls to mind not only the suffering of the wounded but also some of the war’s most famous images of citizen solidarity and fetid confinement: the civilians of London spending the night in tube stations during the Blitz of 1940. The effect is still stronger when we are treated to numerous scenes of the asylum at night, with the inmates sleeping or passing the time in idle pursuits. Again, they are shown in long shots that seem to draw on wartime photographs of those other Londoners, the ones during the Blitz, crouching and snoozing and talking in a tube station’s cramped interior. More generally, the squalor of the asylum—the sense of grievous, piteous injustice, of housing inmates in a stinking world of privation— reads as a melodramatic treatment of the war’s hospitals and wards. The cowering inmates, including young men such as Dan the Dog (Lewton’s friend Robert Clarke) and Tom the Tiger (Victor Holbrook), evoke the shell-shocked soldiers discussed in books such as The Veteran Comes Back (1944) and Psychology for the Returning Serviceman (1945) and featured in films such as Till the End of Time (1946) and The Blue Dahlia (1946).22 Anna Lee, who plays Nell Bowen, visited wounded American soldiers in hospitals in North Africa and Sicily for three months in 1943 on a movie star tour, and the resonance between her real-life wartime role and her ministrations to the afflicted of Bedlam adds to the sense that Lewton’s hospital bears the marks of the war years.23 (So does the odd fact that the last name of Lee’s character in Bedlam is also that of her character, Judith Bowen, the dutiful British servicewoman, in the 1942 war film Commandos Strike at Dawn.) Even the Production Code Office’s objections to Lewton’s original script—“thoroughly repellent and repulsive,” “completely unsuitable for public exhibition”—echo the War Department’s censorship of many photographs showing wounded, dead, or disturbed American servicemen.24 “Chamber of Horrors,” the War Department’s name for its cache of censored photographs, coincidentally matches the original title of Lewton’s film, Chamber of Horrors: A Tale of Bedlam.25 Bedlam treats the war in another exaggeratedly glum way—as a time of austere, self-sacrificing piety. Hannay (Richard Fraser), the Quaker mason, is an honest, God-fearing craftsman of measured temperament and solid morals. When we see him in prayer at the Society of Friends Meeting House, he and his fellow devotees evoke wartime depictions of

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noble, frugal piety—the atmosphere described by Fussell in which virtuous people were expected “to teach lessons in correct thought and behavior.”26 Rationing and restraint—always treated piously during the war years—are depicted even more reverentially as the war recedes. The idea of saving scrap metal and fat and buying war bonds comes to seem a matter of simple Quaker religiosity, and Hannay’s “thees” and “thous” are the language of quiet wartime moderation. Hannay wears simple dark clothes like Master Sims, and he, too, shows up black and looking out of place in the film’s pastel daytime scenes: neither ugly anger nor humble austerity has a place in the new world of rococo pleasure. With Hannay on-screen, it is as if we were back in the drab London at the start of Perfect Strangers, and no longer in the glimmer of the postwar city. Bedlam is structured around this sharp split: the chiaroscuro of self-abnegation and sadism, on the one hand, and the pastel of plenty, on the other. What part does the Gilded Boy play in this division? The answer is that he represents wartime tragedy in a peacetime world—the subject of Lewton’s next film, My Own True Love (1948), also set in London. Made for Paramount after Lewton left RKO and filmed in summer 1947, My Own True Love concerns Michael Heath (Philip Friend), an RAF pilot who lost a leg when he was shot down over Burma and spent three years in a Japanese prison camp before coming home, where his physical and mental anguish makes him an outcast. He has many reasons to be sad: we learn that he had married a Burmese woman and had a child with her before his capture, but that Japanese soldiers killed them both before his eyes before transporting him to prison. Back in England Michael’s father, Clive Heath (Melvyn Douglas), and his father’s girlfriend, Joan Clews (Phyllis Calvert), have assumed that Michael died, but when he arrives back home, embittered and symbolically emasculated, they all try to make peace. In many ways My Own True Love echoes Bedlam. When Clive and Joan go to the Southampton hospital where Michael convalesces, they are shown into a dark hospital room full of patients, tended by a nurse. The scene in which they enter the room is like the one in the earlier film when Nell Bowen is ushered into the asylum to see the inmates. The film also reprises the strange, distant behavior of the Bedlam patients. Michael goes out to dinner one night with some of Joan’s French friends, resistance fighters during the war who, the film makes clear, still bear the mental scars of Nazi torture: it has made them irreverent, comical, even loony, in a sad way. “René, you’re a fool,” says one character, noting

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that the only place not on this odd Frenchman’s passport is the moon. Geraldine, another of the French friends, likes to tie knots in her macramé and confides, “I’m an incorrigibly useless person.” Each of these friends recalls Bedlam’s picturesque inmates, one of whom also plays with skeins of twine, and like the inmates, these victims of the war remain outside the understanding of the postwar world. “You must admit that his . . . chatter didn’t make a great deal of sense,” says Clive’s disgusted friend Kittredge, played by Lewton’s friend Alan Napier, as he sums up a disconcerting evening spent with René. As Kittredge fails to understand the war’s still-suffering victims, so Clive fails to understand his son’s ongoing bitterness. Only Joan perceives Michael’s grief, and her compassion for the suffering young man is like Nell Bowen’s for the Gilded Boy. “He suffered imprisonment. He suffered the loss of a leg, and he suffered . . . more than that.” Two scenes emphasize a link across the films, and especially between Michael and the Gilded Boy. Each is captured in stills that closely match the actual footage of My Own True Love. In one Michael prepares to sit next to Joan on a crowded London bus (fig. 53). Standing there in the aisle holding the metal pole, he duplicates the upright, scepter-clasping posture of Vernon’s character. Joan stands to acknowledge him in exactly the way Nell rises from her seat at the Vauxhall banquet. Almost all the other passengers on the bus remain seated, like Lord Mortimer’s guests. The second scene, at a lunchtime concert at the National Gallery (fig. 54), immediately precedes the one on the bus. It recalls the famous performances of Myra Hess at the museum during the war.27 The members of the audience are properly respectful and somber, all of them still as they listen to the music, and this is the greatest moment of immobility in My Own True Love, an ensemble curtain-call homage to the powers of poignant stasis in all Lewton’s films. At the concert, the scene is the opposite of the profligate cheer of Lord Mortimer and his wine-soaked guests, a sober remembrance that helps us see just how forgetful the Vauxhall fete is supposed to be. But it shares one key fact with the earlier scene. Michael stands in the right foreground, directly beneath a copy of Giovanni da Bologna’s bronze sculpture of youthful Mercury clutching the caduceus. The script even calls for Michael to lean against the bronze.28 The relation to the sculpture makes explicit Michael’s link to the Gilded Boy, the London statue of a bronzed youth in Lewton’s previous film. Joan meanwhile stands at left center, like Nell Bowen a solitary figure in the crowd, attuned to the quieter note of solitary suffering

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Figure 53. My Own True Love (1948): Michael Heath (Philip Friend) and Joan Clews (Phyllis Calvert) on board a London bus. Photo courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, California.

in its midst. The Gilded Boy was a dress rehearsal for the more explicit thematics of a serviceman’s alienation in Lewton’s next film. Two other factors underscore this idea. First, Lewton scripted and filmed Bedlam in the weeks and months after one of his own actors was killed in combat. Erford Gage, who starred as the poet Jason Hoag in The Seventh Victim, died on March 17, 1945, on Iwo Jima. Variety carried a notice of his death in its April 25, 1945, issue, and in December, while Lewton edited Bedlam, the RKO Studio Club News featured Gage’s name at the top of a full-page list of nine studio personnel killed during the war.29 Gage, in his last role, appeared briefly as one of the state troopers searching for Amy in The Curse of the Cat People—he enlisted in the army in October 1943, just after that film finished shooting.30 He may not have been the studio’s golden boy—his roles were mostly limited, aside from his feature performance in The Seventh Victim—but he was just thirty-one when he died, a promising young man. The Vauxhall crowd’s indifference to the boy standing at attention and following orders calls to mind the sharp division between home front and war front that Agee had noted back in 1943. But even more, it em-

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Figure 54. My Own True Love: Michael and Joan at a lunchtime concert at the National Gallery. Photo courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, California.

phasizes the division that arose at the end of the war, when the conflict and its casualties threatened to become even more irrelevant amid the promises of sparkling prosperity and the shimmer of willing forgetfulness. Gage’s death gave Lewton a nearby example of this vast gap between pleasure and pain, which the film presents as obscene. Second, one of Lewton’s novels concerns an alienated and suicidal war veteran in a time of peace, and this character, too, finds a place in the Vauxhall scene. Sablin, the former soldier who is the protagonist of This Fool, Passion, decides to kill himself once he realizes that he and his American lover, Barbara Tredwell, have drifted apart. Her world is not his, as we have seen. He is haunted by the soldier’s experience of death, but she is a frivolous, shallow sensualist. An illustration of Barbara in the book, made by one “Vincentini,” shows the young American girl à la Boucher as a negligeed nymph delighting to the play, if not quite the erogenous tickle, of a terrier.31 Sablin, meanwhile, broods on the indelible horrors of the distant battlefield. Coming back to his room, he recalls suicidal lines from a poem by the soldier-writer Lermontov,

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retrieves his black hussar tunic from the closet, hangs it carefully on a chair, and pins his military medals neatly on the fabric. “First the Cross of St. George—for gallantry under fire at the Masurian Lakes—then the St. Vladimir Order of the Nobility.” He then sits down on another chair to contemplate the meaningless medals, and shoots himself in the mouth.32 Sablin’s fate informs that of the Gilded Boy. The boy’s aura of ceremony, his recitation of lines of poetry, his ritualized demise, with no one else laying a hand on him—all these call to mind the passage from Lewton’s book. As Master Sims says to Nell Bowen, the boy’s death is suicide: “You will grant me the legal fact that this boy died of his own exhalations. You might say, he poisoned himself.” He dies, moreover, in the alien realm of a specific rococo painter, not Boucher, as in This Fool, Passion, but his contemporary Fragonard. The Vauxhall scene translates the 1934 novel of a soldier’s disillusionment into the world of 1945–46, and the film’s British setting should not mask its connotations of Russian battlefield grief and American peacetime gaiety. No wonder the Gilded Boy, like Irena in the Reed family’s backyard, stands apart from the contented crowd.33 As an ikona steeped in references to Russia and war—to Mitya’s execution, to Irena’s haunted snowbound isolation, to Sablin’s suicide—Vernon’s character is another of Lewton’s attempts to show a carefree American audience the nature of tragedy, though the film despairs that few will take notice. The Gilded Boy’s link to Sablin makes his relation to the most famous veteran imagery of 1945–46 clearer. Bedlam was released in the same year and by the same studio as the most famous of all homecoming films, William Wyler’s Best Years of Our Lives. The most intense moments in that film show the sailor Homer Parrish, played by the disabled veteran Harold Russell, struggling to readjust to civilian life with his new prosthetic hands. In one scene Homer, with his family and friends looking on nervously, tries to clasp a glass of lemonade. (He cannot.) Homer’s parents, comrades, and girlfriend support him then and throughout the film, showing the sympathy that Vauxhall’s shallow diners withhold from the Gilded Boy. But Homer’s injury alerts us to the context in which Lewton concocted the Gilded Boy’s strange affliction. Vernon’s character is the youthful but disturbed emissary of a grotesque world, placed on a pedestal, slicked with sheen, and made to look bright and pretty for the folks outside the stinking space of mats and straw—a real hero, a golden boy, come back to the bright and plenteous world only to suffocate in the splendor. Though the artistic means differ decisively in the two films—extreme realism versus extreme

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personification—both Homer Parrish and the Gilded Boy are metallic oddities with unnerving afflictions more comfortable people have never seen. The Vauxhall scene poses still another question about the tragic icon in a time of peace: what form would it take now that “the American code of light-heartedness” loomed even larger than it had during wartime? Lewton was not sure. “Future trend[s] in mystery-horror features [are] almost impossible to predict,” he told the Los Angeles Times on June 10, 1945, just as Bedlam’s script was undergoing final revisions. “Postwar conditions may or may not lend themselves to this type of film.”34 Would the icon become just another object in the shop window, just another bit of cheap entertainment—a gold-lacquered gewgaw offered up to appease the boredom of those with money to burn? Or would it be a precious jewel set apart—an untouchable saint forever remote from the baubleaddicted world of venereal brightness? Both, the Vauxhall scene answers. That scene treats the icon as a commercial product, a Bamboo Blonde– style commodification of suffering. The Vauxhall stage echoes the commercial exhibitions Lewton wrote about in the late 1920s, like one in which he focused on effective product display at a sales convention: “When the booth is finally ready for the visitor, it shows no patched-up places or hastily set construction work. The paint is dry and smooth, the literature is in its proper place, the chairs and other furniture are set and ready for use. . . . This plan makes for complete, unhurried showings of [a] company’s products.” The copy is for the Anaconda Copper Mining Company and its subsidiary the American Brass Company,35 and the Gilded Boy is displayed like another kind of metal product in his own booth. His stage, with its rich golden figure, also recalls the sumptuous shop windows that appear in Lewton’s fiction, a Fifth Avenue store in No Bed of Her Own, for example: “Behind the windows were noble displays: rich fur coats, expensive silks, crystal perfume bottles resting on pillows of satin and velvet.”36 The RKO Publicity Department urged theater managers to use the Gilded Boy’s stage as a promotion, duplicating it in the theater’s lobby “by means of drapery and dummy figures,” in part because the scene was already so steeped in the logic of commercial display.37 Indeed, the Gilded Boy is like the store window mannequins that appear in Youth Runs Wild, one of them dressed in a soldier’s uniform and examined, as it happens, by Vernon’s character in that film, Frank Hauser. Bedlam casts a critical and almost Marxist light on this commercialization of suffering. Like Irena on Christmas Eve, Vernon’s iconic char-

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acter stands apart from a convivial group of revelers, but instead of being unheard by the crowd, his pain is now the direct source of its entertainment. The film represents the shift from war to peace as a shift also from ignorance of suffering to its pleasurable consumption. The script for Bedlam says that one woman “bends forward, eager and excited by the pain she witnesses,” and that once the boy collapses, other guests “are craning forward eagerly, some still half-smiling from their former laughter.”38 Though the film omits these overtly sadistic touches, it does show the merriment of the banqueters as they watch the boy’s demise, especially the lingering, fixated grin of Lord Mortimer. Lewton supported the war, but the Vauxhall scene comes close to showing a leisured class of people not only indifferent to those who die on their behalf but scandalously giddy at the spectacle. As Carre-Four still bears the signs of 1930s lynching pictures, so the banqueting scene reads as a 1940s adaptation of the previous decade’s imagery of brutal class inequity. The critique even implicates the film itself. When he first accepted the RKO job in 1942, Lewton wrote that it “makes me feel like a fat, old profiteer, sitting back and making money . . . while other men go out to fight.”39 These profiteers would be the subject of his Franco-Prussian War drama, Mademoiselle Fifi, which elicited Agee’s praise for its portrayal of the “performance of the middle class in war.”40 They show up in a postwar context at Vauxhall, too. The banqueters arrayed against the solitary outsider repeat the prosperous businessmen and their wives grouped against the lone diminished figure of Elizabeth Rousset in the earlier film (see fig. 8). The dead boy goes even one better than that. Painted gold, he literalizes the capitalization of death that Agee lamented in his notice on the film The Sullivans (1944): “The effort to reenact and to exploit these real and vanished lives seemed to me somehow scarcely sane.”41 It was a charge that could always be leveled not only at those in Lewton’s movies but also at Lewton himself, since he had made a slick business of sitting back and turning wartime pathologies to box office gold. But the Gilded Boy is also untouchably holy. Gold, the stuff of greed, is also inviolate. The Vauxhall scene recalls an episode in Lewton’s novel Rape of Glory: Cossacks pillage the Cathedral of Saint Sophia and settle into an orgy of carousing and lovemaking before the altar, but on the cathedral walls the icons remain apart. “The faces of the ikonas, separated from the world by fret-worked screens of silver and gold, wore an air of imperturbable calm, although under their painted eyes a Black Mass was in progress. . . . In every corner, under the holy ikonas, and in

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the little chapels on either side of the nave, men and women were lying, locked in the embrace of love” while “thousands of candles flickered in the thin winds that blew hither and yon in the cathedral.”42 The Vauxhall scene partly reproduces this description: the separateness of the holy icon from the world; the icon’s calm (Vernon’s character is measured in his demise); the revelers; even the many candles. The editing of the sequence emphasizes the gap. Lewton and the director Mark Robson never show the victim and the banqueters in the same frame but alternate, in a series of sharp cuts, between the performer and his amused audience, keeping the two apart. The dead boy is holy as well as crude, his postwar stage a shrine and not just a sales booth. The holy or commercialized victim, moreover, is not just a serviceman. He is far less literal than that, despite his connections to Mitya and Michael Heath. The Gilded Boy is a universal sufferer, a generic innocent casualty. What makes this open-ended meaning possible is Vernon’s slightness and vulnerability, and the ongoing connotations of the color gold. Vernon was twenty-one when the film was made, and at 5 feet 9 inches and 125 pounds he was an actor of boyish, androgynous beauty (fig. 55).43 He calls to mind Lewton’s novelistic depictions of lovely golden women set off and displayed for the inspection of lewd audiences. Foremost is the Cambodian girl Amarah, in Where the Cobra Sings, who “stood slim, golden and naked in the lamplight” of a small room before twelve ogling natives. “Like a sheath of beaten gold—beautiful beyond the words of a poet!” says one enchanted spectator.44 The cover of Where the Cobra Sings shows Amarah golden, exposed, and poised on a stage, like the Gilded Boy in the film fourteen years later (fig. 56). Rose Mahoney, the heroine of No Bed of Her Own, joins a private strip show called “The Court of Love” and at one performance sees that “Japanese lanterns had been strung on wires and the roof was aglow with the soft light,” so that “the naked bodies gleamed seductively in this radiance.” Rose and the other performers appear in costume, recite memorized lines, and disrobe “before a crowd of women in expensive evening dress and men in tail coats.” The Gilded Boy recites lines in radiant and near nakedness before a comparably debased upscale crowd, with Vauxhall Gardens echoing the “sumptuous duplex apartment on Park Avenue” where Rose makes her strip debut.45 And he is as golden as Amarah in her own straight and still performance before a grimier but no less avid audience. Translated to an end-of-the-war context, the boy whom the

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Figure 55. Glenn Vernon, RKO publicity photograph, 1944. Photo courtesy of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, California.

well-fed spectators treat with such indifference is a feminized victim, a civilian casualty of war and not just a soldier. Strange to say, Vernon is also black in the role. He calls to mind the black maid Goldie in Lewton’s novel A Laughing Woman. The white call girls Jean and Olive “had never been able to determine whether the lean, yellow Negress was called Goldie because of her light complexion or whether the name had been suggested by the bright metal of her dental work.”46 This is the kind of callow portrayal that Lewton would renounce in the Walter White era of Hollywood, but the description of “Goldie” shows that the nineteenth-century discourse of amalgamation—the mixing of races as of metals—was fully present in his thinking. The Gilded Boy, an amalgamated man killed in a ceremony before an almost jubilant crowd, draws its imagery of wrongful death at least partly from the imagery of lynching that shows up in I Walked with a Zombie

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Figure 56. Cover of Cosmo Forbes [Val Lewton], Where the Cobra Sings (New York: Macaulay, 1932). Private collection.

and The Leopard Man. The shiny, suffering statue of the Gilded Boy in medium shot is like the figurehead of Saint Sebastian (compare fig. 48 to figs. 36 and 40), and the Vauxhall sadists are just a high-society version of the backwoods spectators in 1930s lynching scenes such as Julius Bloch’s (see fig. 37). The decision to show Vernon in this amalgamated way matches Lewton’s predilection for tragedy over progress. Racial emancipation was finally less interesting to him than racial injustice. Bedlam, as it happens, premiered in New York one day after Jackie Robinson made his professional debut in the area, playing for the Montreal Royals, part of the Brooklyn Dodgers’ farm system, in a game against Jersey City. “Not a single soul in the park had to be trapped between a social problem and home plate to know the deep significance of what was going on before their eyes,” Joe Cummiskey wrote in PM the day the movie opened. “The fans . . . had completely forgotten the color of his skin and were buzzing with the great impression he was making as a player.”47 Lewton’s movie featured another spectacle of deep significance unfolding be-

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fore another group of buzzing spectators, but his audience is less enlightened than the one on the banks of the Passaic River, and the film is less fascinated by the forward path of civil rights than the ongoing fact of cruelty. In Bedlam, faced with how to portray the death of an innocent, Lewton drew on a vocabulary of images depicting the execution of a black person. These connotations of innocence no doubt shade into the Gilded Boy’s allusions to servicemen. At a time when the age of enlistment was eighteen, to be a suffering or dead young soldier in this scene was to be black, a woman, a child—all of them. Vernon’s icon synthesizes the all-American golden boy with the lynching victim and the naked sex show performer as signs of a synonymous victimization. In Ding Dong Williams, another film of 1946, by contrast, Vernon plays a character whose perpetual happiness drives the comic plot. His friends try to make Ding Dong sad so he will write “heartbreak” music (“that’ll make him unhappy,” “that guy’s unhappy enough to play five clarinets right now”), but he remains upbeat. That same year Lewton made Vernon the figure of a universal unhappiness. Beyond that, the Gilded Boy stands out purely as a sign of civilian tragedy, in one particularly startling and unintended way. The Vauxhall sequence was shot on August 1, 1945, five days before the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima and eight before the bombing of Nagasaki.48 The scene takes place in all the stylized simplicity of a world that, however horrible, still knows nothing of the atom bomb, and in that sense it unwittingly commemorates the end of an epoch of pretty theatrics—the last week of the eighteenth century, in August 1945. But in another sense the Gilded Boy’s fate resonates coincidentally with the suffering of the bombs’ victims. Here is a boy glowing, radiant, suffering from some malady that no one has ever seen before and only one character (the Whig politician Wilkes) has even heard of. The point is laughable—the unprecedented atomic destruction brought down to this level. It is also impossible, since the scene was shot before the bombings. But when Bedlam was released to theaters in April 1946, it came into a fully atomic world. The failure of any reviewer to note the strange contemporary relevance of this radiant boy’s suffering, his succumbing to an illness no one has ever witnessed, almost confirms the point. Only after John Hersey’s famous account of Hiroshima was published, first in the New Yorker in late August 1946 and then in book form in October, would the bomb’s effects achieve a stable and memorable representation in American culture. The Gilded Boy, at the time of Bedlam’s release, is part of the obscure prehistory of Hersey’s book, the

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nebulous period between the dropping of the bombs and the publication of Hiroshima, when these catastrophes lacked vivid journalistic representation and consequently circulated in a variety of inchoate forms whose very power might have been their unrecognizability, their nearcomplete disguise as something else. The Gilded Boy is one of those disguised, inchoate forms. “Baffling cases, these atomic-bomb people,” says a doctor in Hersey’s book, sounding almost like the befuddled spectators at Vauxhall.49 In his diary entry for January 2, 1946, Lewton noted a lengthy conversation between two of his dinner guests, one of whom “seems very emotionally concerned with the atomic era and its dangers.”50 Lewton did not take part in that discussion, but the film he was editing that month gives those who suffered the bombings a memorable expression anticipating Hersey’s own compassionate portrayals. The close-up of the boy’s face, inviting the audience to scrutinize this strange affliction with a special intensity, is a post-Hiroshima editing choice that seems, all unknowing, to give some imaginative expression to radiation sickness, flash burns, and the bomb’s other terrible effects. This is why the Gilded Boy prefigures the glowing victims in atomicdisaster films of the 1950s, but with a glistening immediacy that heightens the absurdity of these later figures and their Geiger counter penumbras. The focus on the boy’s sweaty features belongs to the same moral universe as Hersey’s book. Even now the peculiar brightness of his pain exerts a half-life, glowing from the darkness of Lewton’s buried film as the one scene, the one character, that continues to demand attention, that continues to seem relevant to viewers long after all the film’s “thees” and “thous” and tricorn hats and pretty petticoats have faded to dust. Only once has the Gilded Boy been glimpsed in this atomic context: in the James Bond film Goldfinger (1964), with its famous scene culled from Lewton’s film of Jill Harrington (Shirley Eaton) shellacked in gold. Skin suffocation in that movie takes its proper place in an atomic-era plot about a threat to destroy the world. The Gilded Boy started this cold war iconography, but Lewton was out of step with the changing time, and there were no more icons. RKO cut back on horror films at the conclusion of the war, feeling that peacetime meant the genre’s popularity was at an end. As a theater manager in Rankin, Illinois, put it in May 1946 after a dismal turnout for a screening of Lewton’s Body Snatcher, “No more horror pictures for me. Enough is enough.”51 RKO assigned Lewton to scattered projects in

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1946, none of them horror movies, as Siegel notes: a musical called The Biggest Thief in Paris; murder mysteries called If This Be Known and Die Gently Stranger; a historical adventure, Blackbeard; an Edinburghbased melodrama, Father Malachy’s Miracle; and a thriller, Desirable Woman.52 Only one of these was ever made—and Lewton was not in control of it. The topics mostly did not match his talents anyway. The end of the war cut Lewton off from the visually beautiful pathos that had driven his eleven RKO pictures. My Own True Love, Lewton’s first entirely postwar film, makes this loss explicit. Michael Heath’s father, Clive, “had a cushy job with a film unit” during the war, making documentaries for the armed services. But once the war is over, he does not know what to do, and he gets a hopeful pep talk from his fellow filmmaker Iverson (Arthur Shields): “We’ve a bigger job, now. . . . To make peace more interesting than war.” Responds Clive, “Yes, that is a rather big job.” Joan and Michael share Clive’s nostalgia. “It was the war that gave me a sense of usefulness,” Joan tells Michael, and he agrees: “Strange that one should find contentment in a war. I did in Malaya . . . for a while.” Joan says hopefully that now she has “found something to work for,” and at the film’s end Michael goes to Cambridge, but these last-minute wrap-ups ring false. The movie’s title reads like Lewton’s personal confession: the war was his own true love, and now it is gone. The characters, like Lewton in 1947–48, live in a past that has vanished as completely as Michael’s Burmese wife. “There was the blood on the doorstep,” Michael recalls. “Already it was being washed away by the rain.” The war does not completely disappear in the three films Lewton made in the last five years of his life. My Own True Love transubstantiates the war into other forms—blood does not exactly vanish but becomes the rain, and it is always raining in that film, pouring on Michael’s face and hair and raincoat, drenching him in gray recollection. There is also something of the war in Apache Drums (1951), especially in a scene in which a young man avid to fight the enemy is found dead at the bottom of a well. But largely the end of the war meant the desertion of Lewton’s special source of visual grief—the real-world situation that enabled his own amorphous melancholy to hit up against something and gain, from time to time, a resonant, memorable clarity. The romantic comedy Please Believe Me (1950), which Siegel correctly calls the worst of the producer’s fourteen films, shows how completely lost Lewton was in films that barely mentioned the war, in this case only as a flimsy comic pretext.53 The English girl Alison Kirbe (Deb-

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orah Kerr) inherits vast ranchlands from an elderly American army official she had met during the war, and she travels to America on an ocean liner to claim her property as three bachelors (Robert Walker, Mark Stevens, and Peter Lawford) pursue her and her supposed riches (which turn out to be negligible). All the hallmarks of Lewton’s wartime films have reached the vanishing point in Please Believe Me. There are major stars galore and no important minor roles—the bit actors now play only for forgettable laughs. There is much talking and no profound imagery, as though the end of the war had relieved Lewton’s images of the intensity they had been required to carry. There are distant echoes of the RKO films’ most powerful scenes—the swimming pool of Cat People becomes the deck pool on the ocean liner; an ersatz palm tree on deck calls up the scenery of I Walked with a Zombie; the ship itself is a passenger liner, a sleek reincarnation of the old Altair from The Ghost Ship—but these are vaporous repetitions summoned without enthusiasm from a bygone bag of tricks. Even the film’s one instance of motionless motion—a gangster boss exercising on his rowing machine—sacrilegiously turns this tragic leitmotif into a bit of empty shtick. Please Believe Me is almost fascinating in its badness because it shows Lewton losing his gifts and trying halfheartedly to resuscitate their magic in a changed world. As his wife told Siegel, “His heart wasn’t in it—it was just a job.”54 Bedlam is of special interest because it shows this frivolous rococo world just as it began to split from the realm of wartime horror, but with the two sides—war and peace—still within shouting distance and closer even than that, so close that the two iconographies coexist throughout the film. As a cart of laughing children rolls outside the prison in one scene, we see it through the bars of a black, spike-tipped fence: cheeriness and violence occupy the same frame, intermingling without quite touching. The same proximity marks the Vauxhall scene. Even so, the film suggests that wartime tragedy, as early as 1945–46, was already being set apart, quarantined in a separate space, and that when it showed its face, like the Gilded Boy at Vauxhall, it would be a source of distanced curiosity and commercial amusement as much as tragedy. From then on, it appears only in its vanishing—blood become rain—and beyond that, like a satellite moving ever farther from earth (the effect one feels watching Please Believe Me), emitting fainter and fainter signals, hollow and choked, until contact is lost. Lewton was out of place in the postwar world for another reason. His sense of the tragic was hopelessly outmoded in light of the revelations

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emerging at war’s end. The new world was both a more opulent and a more horrible place, and Lewton had little feeling for either new situation. Concentration camps and atomic bombs made his imagery of suffering seem toylike and precious, even as the Gilded Boy is somehow an image of the bomb’s victims. The newsreels of bodies bulldozed at Auschwitz and other concentration camps in May 1945 forever put to one side Lewton’s vocabulary of the tragic, consigning it to an earlier, more sentimental time, ill equipped to deal with the enormities of death on an unimagined scale. This is why the icons now look so odd as signs of catastrophe. We behold them across a divide of disasters they cannot conceive. Lewton’s figures were themselves among “the last convulsions of the Victorian world,” offering a view of “that old-fashioned Victorian thing—the soul,” to revisit the quotations from Farber and James Agate.55 And though the soul may be down—though it may always be a halo worn at the feet—it is a sign all the same of the old tragic individuality, the kind that the new world made obsolete. The Gilded Boy is neither an eighteenth-century figure nor one of 1946 but an atomic-bomb victim as conceived by Dickens. If Lewton was out of place, he did not disappear without a fight, however, and Bedlam shows how his icons remain powerful. They assert the value of a minor work of art to say things a major work can never say, to know things a major work can never know. Bedlam is an especially strong case because it is the most epic of all Lewton’s RKO films and because it loathes that status the same way it shows itself to despise all major productions. The Vauxhall scene is at the center of this issue, too, in a way that Glenn Vernon himself explained in an interview with Gregory William Mank in 1993: “After the preview of Bedlam,” he said, “I used to call myself an ‘Oscar.’ I always tell people, ‘I invented the Oscar—they saw me in Bedlam and said, ‘Hey, that’s an idea! Let’s make the Academy Award an Oscar—call it the Golden Boy!’ I’d say, ‘Next year, they’re giving me away! Put me up on a mantel!’ ”56 Vernon’s comments are flip but not off base. RKO was grooming him to be a star—the studio ran a full-page ad in the Motion Picture Herald of June 3, 1944, showing him in his role as Mitya with the legend “A Career Is Born!”57 It was Vernon’s fellow screen actor Gregory Peck, also making his debut in Days of Glory, who would go on to be the big star and the Oscar winner, but the Gilded Boy’s reference to movie fame in 1945 was fair enough. Nor was it unprecedented. In Henry Hathaway’s film Wing and a Prayer (1944), William Eythe plays a movie star who as

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a hotshot carrier pilot in the Pacific carries his Oscar around with him. But Vernon was right about his role for reasons beyond his own career. Bedlam contains the most explicit reference Lewton ever made to the film industry. This is a scene in which the inmate Sidney Long (Ian Wolfe) fans through the pages of a book to show how the static pictures drawn on each page magically simulate movement. As he says to an amazed visitor, “If I could only get a light behind these pages, I could throw them large as life upon the wall.” The self-reflexive meaning was clear right away. “An inmate of a lunatic asylum in 1761 forecasts the invention of the movies,” wrote John McCarten of the New Yorker in 1946.58 This “odd, anachronistically Brechtian, wholly outrageous scene,” as Siegel describes it, is no less strange than the sight of the Gilded Boy looking as burnished and bright as Oscar.59 Why, then, does Bedlam show the Oscar collapsing in a heap? Partly because Lewton distrusted the movie’s own pretense to Quality. Budgeted at $350,000, Bedlam was by far his most ambitious production at RKO, more sumptuous, more self-consciously important, than any of his earlier movies, most of which had cost approximately $150,000. And though this was still not a large amount—Warners’ Mildred Pierce, for example, was projected at a cost of $1,342,000 when it went into production about seven months before Bedlam60—the increased expense reflected RKO’s wish to switch Lewton to bigger productions. Life magazine featured a preview of the film in its February 25, 1946, issue, and though it referred to Lewton as a “B-film Virtuoso,” only a rising “A” man could command four pages in the nationwide magazine, on one of which we see a photograph of Lewton screening the film, seated next to director Mark Robson (fig. 57). “Lewton’s bosses,” notes the anonymous writer, “are planning to give him, as soon as possible, an A picture, high-priced stars, brand-new sets and as much as a million dollars to play around with.”61 This prophecy turned out to be wrong, as Siegel notes, since Lewton never got any of these things and was gone from the studio within the year.62 Lewton was temperamentally unsuited to make something important anyway, and the Gilded Boy’s collapse demonstrates the fact. If the inmate’s flipbook was “an admirable piece of self-deprecation on the part of the producers,”63 as the New Yorker’s McCarten described it, Vernon’s character was also a piece of self-criticism. Ill equipped for the role, he makes a poor Oscar, wilting in the limelight. No Lewton production could ever be considered a Major Motion Picture, the kind that might win an Academy Award, and the film is the first to say so.

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Figure 57. Val Lewton (left) and Mark Robson screening Bedlam, illustration for Life, February 25, 1946, 123. Photo by Martha Holmes. Courtesy of Getty Images.

At the same time, the Vauxhall scene reserves its sharpest condemnation for the epics of other people, especially those of David O. Selznick, Lewton’s former boss. Lewton advised Selznick against making a movie from Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, which he called “ponderous trash,” and once Selznick had made his film, Lewton did not care for it or for the grandiose attitude of the man who made it. “You can’t talk reason to a man who believes that he has made the greatest motion picture of all time, past, present, and future,” he wrote to his mother and sister on New Year’s Day 1940.64 Selznick’s epic was like that of Lucky Larry Bishop, the Butte, Montana, copper magnate in Lewton’s novel Yearly Lease (1932), which opens with a description of Bishop’s brandnew fifty-five-room, twelve-bathroom mansion: “Square, high-built, ungainly, it had only one advantage, that of size.” For Larry, “it was large, it had cost him a lot of money; therefore it was good. . . . That was what mattered to him. It looked expensive.”65

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Bedlam, Lewton’s most costly film, is strewn with direct references to Selznick’s excess. A pullback scene of the asylum and its inmates repeats in small scale the famous elevator shot of the Confederate wounded at the Atlanta train depot in Gone with the Wind, which Lewton claimed in 1940 was “a sort of bastardized version of my idea.”66 Anna Lee wears one of Vivien Leigh’s cast-off dresses from the same film.67 Billy House, as Lord Mortimer, climbs down from his carriage to inspect a dead person just as Basil Rathbone’s Duke d’Evremonde leaves his carriage after it has run over and killed a French boy in A Tale of Two Cities. The references are self-critical, in some ways—the asylum pullback scene, for example, is a laughably small-scale attempt to approximate the sublime spectacle that famously closed Selznick’s film just prior to intermission, and Anna Lee was good enough, apparently, only to wear Vivien Leigh’s hand-me-downs—but the anger is directed mainly outward, at other people’s pretensions of greatness. The Gilded Boy’s demise mocks epic productions and major stardom as things not worth achieving: the Oscar drops dead. Vernon’s character exemplifies kenosis, one way a minor figure deals with the legacy of major creative forebears, according to the literary critic Harold Bloom. Kenosis humbles minor and major figures alike. The follower conquers, not by himself producing a great work, “but by the discontinuous mode of emptying the precursor of his divinity, while appearing to empty himself of his own.”68 One makes work to be laughed at—or to be dismissed as just a B film or some other instance of minorness. But in so doing the minor producer empties the authority of the source. This was the way Lewton thought—he was always trying to bring the big production down to size. The script for his never-filmed Ticonderoga contains telling diminutions of greatness. It notes that “from the Vermont shore the great fortress of Ticonderoga looks like a toy,” and one character says, “The fort looks little from here—smaller than your thumb.”69 The Bedlam asylum scene works in this way, belittling Selznick’s famous precedent even as Lewton proclaimed himself just a minor imitator. It is a way of saying, look at how woefully inadequate this scene is, but look too, and for the first time, at the pretense of the major work it quotes from; look too at the very idea of self-conscious importance as a criterion of meaningfulness. The scene puts grandiosity under its thumb. The Gilded Boy operates like this. The demise of the boy indicts Lewton’s film but also asserts the hard fall, indeed the collapse, of the entire

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Hollywood system of value predicated on major accomplishments, grand and shiny moments, the whole bluster of epics and stars. “The ephebe falls soft, while the precursor falls hard,” writes Bloom.70 Even as the boy dies mouthing the praise of the great man, the system the great man represents comes under fateful indictment at the boy’s death. In movie terms, the Oscar is demolished. There was more than just criticism in Lewton’s method, however. Lewton enjoyed making little things emerge out of large remains, and minor figures such as the Gilded Boy become distinctive and memorable precisely because they cannibalize epic forms. Larry Bishop’s huge house becomes known as “Bishop’s Folly” and sits dormant for twenty years until it is made into an apartment building full of small units in which Lewton’s soap opera–style novel unfolds. Once the ridiculous mansion is divvied up into small spaces, Lewton’s characters have room to operate. The same ingenious cannibalizing of bombast and monstrosity characterizes his films, as every writer on Lewton likes to note. The staircase in Irena’s apartment building in Cat People, Siegel and others have pointed out, is a leftover prop from Orson Welles’s epic of that same year, The Magnificent Ambersons. (As Oliver says, eyeing the staircase on first entering Irena’s building, “I never cease to be amazed at what lies behind a brownstone front.”) I Walked with a Zombie, as Farber noted, is “a minor approximation of Jane Eyre”—a novel that Lewton, in one of his inventive memos to Selznick, described as “the sixth greatest novel in the English language,” “among the twenty best English novels selected by librarians all over the world,” and as “tenth among the sixty great novels of the world as chosen by a committee of American and English university professors.”71 Lewton clearly enjoyed reworking Charlotte Brontë’s famous novel on such a small scale, not least because Selznick was hard at work on his own film version, which appeared in 1944. The opening scene of Ticonderoga, a script Lewton wrote in 1948, summarizes his method, describing a shot of Fort Ticonderoga, “a mountainous weight of warlike stone and metal,” from which emerges “a military mouse.”72 Bedlam’s quotations from Gone with the Wind show this same pleasure in making tiny things emerge from epic productions. Anna Lee’s use of Vivien Leigh’s dress, the Confederate wounded transposed into the London asylum, the allusion to A Tale of Two Cities, and the set borrowed from the Bing Crosby film The Bells of St. Mary’s (the top box office hit of the entire industry in 1945, grossing $3,715,000 in profits), all mark this impulse.73 In each case there is an implicit wish to make some-

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thing small that is better and more lasting than the famous bloated original. The Gilded Boy is a similar instance. He is cannibalized from the pomp and circumstance of the Oscar—center of an annual ceremony as excessive as anything Selznick ever filmed in Gone with the Wind—and turned into something intensely insignificant, yet more memorable for that very reason. “Look at it; crude work, limited field, and yet see what the man’s done with what he had,” says Brenner in A Laughing Woman, eyeing a hunting print as he lectures the successful but stupid film director Larry Cunningham. “With the man, the horse, the dogs and a million dollars’ worth of technical equipment, you couldn’t capture that spirit in a month of Sundays.”74 Naturally, there was a risk in operating this way, as one of Lewton’s collaborators knew. In 1943, just after he wrote the screenplay for I Walked with a Zombie, the German-born author Curt Siodmak published his science fiction novel Donovan’s Brain, an apt parable about the dangers for the minor figure who steals the ideas of a great man. Warren Horace Donovan is an immensely wealthy businessman, a megalomaniac like Charles Foster Kane. “He had a score of mansions all over the country, and an apartment in every town,” says his secretary, and he insisted that his servants bring breakfast, lunch, and dinner to each residence every day, whether he was there or not. “ ‘I am omnipresent,’ he used to say.”75 The tables turn, however, when Donovan is mortally injured in a plane crash in the remote mountainous terrain of Arizona. Among those first on the scene is the brilliant and disturbed doctor, Patrick Cory, who has been hard at work nearby on a loner’s project if ever there was one: living in a shack in the desert, trying to keep a dead monkey’s brain alive in a jar. Recognizing the stricken man, Cory waits for Donovan to die, extracts his brain, and keeps it alive. The little man now controls the mind of the great man, but soon Donovan’s brain begins to exert its power, growing to twice its normal size, straining at the limits of its glass container and sending written messages to the amazed doctor through a pen attached to an encephalogram, acting like a boss issuing office memoranda to a hapless assistant. Then the messages start coming directly, no writing required, through the increasingly shared wavelength between Donovan and the doctor. Cory, no longer himself, begins executing the dead man’s unfinished business. The story is a seriocomic fable of the rivalry between minor and major creative figures. In Siodmak’s case, the fable, fittingly enough, centers on a thematics of writing, but it applies to Lewton as well. He too treated the ordinary business of artistic quotation as a type of mad experiment,

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so that conceiving his plots, as many have noted, became invigoratingly ridiculous, a crazy quest—a way of extracting staircases, dresses, props, and narratives fully intact from other films, other tales, to make them function anew in his own projects. At the same time, Lewton, like Cory, understood the dangers of his borrowing. There was always the chance that, like Donovan, the great precursor would exert his power and proclaim the triviality of anyone, especially a little person, presuming to take command of greatness. Thus the perilous journey of kenosis in 1940s Hollywood. Lewton “lifts many ideas from old plots,” just as Cory lifts the brain of Donovan out of his skull.76 Unlike Cory, he even flaunted the theft—he “was a kind of hack, but he enjoyed the challenge that came with turning hack work into something special,” his son notes.77 But the stolen plots and props might always underscore the essential secondariness of the adaptation. The poet Jessica Weinberg in Lewton’s novel 4 Wives is a mildly successful writer, but she is one of a “dozen imitators” of another poet’s work, and she “knew she was an imitator and that her work was of little worth.”78 That sentiment always lurks in Lewton’s films and books. But Lewton’s best minor moments trump these concerns about derivation. The Vauxhall scene is not a quotation—it is not Lewton copying orders from some greater filmmaker. The reason has as much to do with Boris Karloff as with Vernon. Karloff was perhaps the most talented of all Lewton’s players of minorness, even if he was not a minor actor. His great gift was to play the afflicted and the persecuted. When he wrote in the introduction to his 1943 anthology Tales of Terror that one of the stories included there, Joseph Conrad’s “Amy Foster,” is about “the essential loneliness of every human being,”79 he might as well have been describing his own roles, most famously the Frankenstein monster. As an actor, Karloff was an exponentially enlarged Skelton Knaggs: twice the size, and just as small. Not that Lewton immediately perceived Karloff in this way. When the actor was first assigned to his B-film unit in 1944, Lewton unjustly regarded him as a major star associated only with large (and vulgar) productions. Fittingly, in Karloff’s first scene in a Lewton film (the first of three), he is like a heartless studio executive unfairly crushing a loyal subordinate. The scene is the opening of Isle of the Dead, where Karloff, as the Greek General Pherides, stands in his tent, listening implacably to the lament of a colonel who has failed to advance all his troops to the line. The subordinate tries to explain himself, and he makes a good case. Pherides remains unmoved, however, and the colonel is stripped of his

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rank and given a pistol to shoot himself, which he does. The scene is a parable of the studio politics film historians have detected in other Lewton films: Pherides, a hyperbolic Selznick type, has won the day but can tolerate nothing less than perfection from subordinates, even the best and closest ones. Lewton wrote in 1940 that “ ‘Gone with the Wind’ has grossed ten million dollars in a little less than two months of limited release. . . . And with the money rolling in, our executives, as usual, and with nothing else to do, have been firing office boys and stenographers.”80 “Do you think I wanted to send Colonel Tolbitis out to be shot?” General Pherides asks. “He and I were friends.”81 Soon, however, Lewton became a better judge of Karloff’s sensibility, which was all on the side of minorness. As the cabman Gray in The Body Snatcher, Karloff is the vengeful man in the shadows gleefully haunting the great Doctor MacFarlane (Henry Daniell), taking savage pleasure in reminding the famous physician that he owes his reputation to the suffering of his obscure subordinate. (As a grave robber for MacFarlane, Gray had taken the fall for the physician’s crimes.) It is not surprising that Gray’s speeches, in which he disparages MacFarlane by using the diminutive Toddy, feature some of the best acting in any of Lewton’s films. “I am a small man, a humble man,” Gray tells MacFarlane, “and being poor I have had to do much that I did not want to do. [But] so long as the great Dr. MacFarlane jumps to my whistle, that long am I a man. And if I have not that, I have nothing. Then I’m only a cabman and a grave-robber. You’ll never get rid of me, Toddy.” Here is where a deep energy resides, not just for Karloff but for Lewton: the small man empowered; the great man brought down to size. All this shows up in the Vauxhall scene. In one sense Karloff as Master Sims is another figure like Pherides, hastening the death of a subordinate who was only trying to follow orders. But Sims himself is a subordinate, devising his sadistic ritual to flatter Lord Mortimer and his guests. Karloff, in his copy of the script, wrote next to one of his character’s fawning lines: “more servile.”82 The film leaves no doubt about this weakness when it later gives Karloff lines that might as well have been spoken by Lewton himself (and were, like those mentioned earlier, almost certainly written by him). “Can’t you understand?” says Sims to the inmates who have finally imprisoned him. “This is a great world and strong men with great advantages rule over it, and men like me are frightened, born poor and misshapen. . . . It is a great world, a world of force and pomp and power, and I was frightened at my littleness, my ugliness and my poverty. I had to fawn and toady and make a mock of myself so

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that all I could hear was the world laughing at my ugliness. I was afraid.” The scene in which Sims speaks before the Vauxhall banqueters gives the visual note to his separation (see fig. 52). The loneliness of the little man is the same as the quarantined darkness of the war years: none of it—minorness, tragedy, isolation—belongs in the new postwar world. There were real stakes in this battle between major and minor worlds in Lewton’s movies. At issue was a film’s ability to represent lived experience—to comment on it in what Farber called a “hard and formful” way, a way that took a memorable shape. A pompously major film, Farber thought, was no place to find this vividness. He listed the ingredients for the officially “distinguished” epic motion picture: “philosophical undertones, pan-fried domestic sights, risqué crevices, sporty actors and actresses, circuslike gymnastics, a bit of tragedy like the main fall at Niagara.” All of this only canceled the world, turning it into a generalized spectacle, what Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in 1944 called “the dominant forms of generality.”83 The minor film, though, found the “unheralded ripple of physical experience, the tiny morbidly life-worn detail,” as we have seen Farber put it, and that gave these underground pictures their power.84 The Gilded Boy, like Lewton’s other icons, still produces the ripple of the various tragedies encompassed in his small frame. He still comes across with a memorable singularity precisely because of his unimportance. The minor mode was the only way to register the war’s effects— to capture the tragedy of a true inconsequence, to dramatize the forgotten in a memorable way. And though some other minor films and minor actors inadvertently express this durable vanishing, conveying by a look or a line or by the flimsiness of the sets or the deterioration of the film stock a sense of the disappearance of something once solid, only Lewton’s icons turn minorness and triviality into an exalted principle, a static thickness, giving the “essential loneliness of every human being” no grand memorial—for that would be false and wrong and stupidly distinguished—but the more eloquent form of a quick density, a minor moment in which the antistars align—small movie, small actor, small scene—to create a hard sculpture of nothing. It is a special extra power of the Gilded Boy’s triviality that he should implode the Hollywood sign of epic importance even as he collapses. The life of Lewton’s films now is in such moments of death, when figures of weakness display a suicidal strength born of their own insignificance. Like blind Samson among the Philistines, they bring the house down.

Notes

introduction 1. Jacques Tourneur, quoted in Kim Newman, Cat People (London: British Film Institute, 1999), 71. 2. Val Lewton, quoted in John L. Scott, “Master of Horror Films Reveals His Technique,” Los Angeles Times, June 10, 1945, pt. 3, p. 3. James Agee, Nation 160 (January 20, 1945): 80. 3. Manny Farber, “Movies in Wartime,” New Republic 110 (January 3, 1944): 20. 4. Edmund Wilson, “A Treatise on Tales of Horror,” New Yorker, May 27, 1944, 72. 5. Boris Karloff, “Introduction,” Tales of Terror (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1943), 14. 6. Barbara Berch, “Gold in Them Chills,” Collier’s, January 29, 1944, 66. 7. Karloff, Tales of Terror, 10. 8. Manny Farber, “Val Lewton” (1951), in Farber, Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998), 48. 9. In Kiss of the Spider Woman (1978), Puig’s novel about two inmates in an Argentine prison, Molina tells his cellmate, Valentin, the entire plot of Cat People, taking almost two chapters to do so, starting with the novel’s first line: “Something a little strange, that’s what you notice, that she’s not a woman like all the others.” Kiss of the Spider Woman, trans. Thomas Colchie (New York: Vintage, 1991), 3. Scorsese has said, “I like looking at old Val Lewton films a lot. I just like the look of them, they’re so beautiful.” Scorsese, quoted in Lesley Stern, The Scorsese Connection (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 49. Stern titles one of her chapters “The Glitter of Putrescence,” after a line spoken by Paul Holland (Tom Conway) in I Walked with a Zombie. 10. James Agee, “So Proudly We Fail,” Nation 157 (October 30, 1943): 509,

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Notes to pages 3–8

reprinted in Agee, Agee on Film: Criticism and Comment on the Movies (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 38. 11. Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 170. 12. George Roeder, The Censored War: American Visual Experience during World War II (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), 7–25. As Roeder notes, American propaganda officials “perceived pictures of the American dead as extremely hazardous material during the war’s early years. Before it ended they considered them the most powerful weapons in their motivational arsenal” (25). 13. Farber, “Movies in Wartime,” 18. 14. Chris Fujiwara, Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1998), 107; Newman, Cat People, 73. 15. Agee, “Films,” Nation 160 (May 26, 1945): 608, reprinted in Agee on Film, 152. 16. For an informative account of Lewton’s life and films, see Joel Siegel, Val Lewton: The Reality of Terror (New York: Viking, 1973). Siegel reprints Lewton’s list of his publications and jobs up to 1937 on 173–75. 17. See, for example, Farber, “Val Lewton,” 48. 18. Lewton, letter to Nina and Lucy Lewton, [1942?], 4, collection of Val Lewton Jr., Washington, D.C. 19. Newman, Cat People, 36. 20. Carlos Keith [Val Lewton], A Laughing Woman (New York: Vanguard Press, 1933), 16–17. 21. Farber, “Underground Films” (1957), quoted in Negative Space, 17. 22. The drawing indicates the major Lewton theme of irrationality covered in the four previous books on his career: Siegel, Val Lewton; J. P. Telotte, Dreams of Darkness: Fantasy and the Films of Val Lewton (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985); Edmund Bansak, Fearing the Dark: The Val Lewton Career (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1995); and Newman, Cat People. Siegel’s book, organized into a biography and separate chapters concerning each of Lewton’s films, remains the best introduction to the producer’s work. Telotte’s book treats the nine horror films in detail, analyzing them according to theoretical frameworks such as those of Michel Foucault. Bansak’s Fearing the Dark rehearses the plots of all the films in detail, in addition to providing a biographical account and judgment of Lewton’s long-term influences on Hollywood film. Bansak makes some interesting asides, including one about The Leopard Man: “Wartime audiences may not have liked Leopard’s downbeat message—that the young and the innocent also die—but it was an important one for them to grasp” (178). The comment is made in passing and never galvanized into an argument concerning the war. Newman’s book treats Cat People in illuminating scene-by-scene detail. 23. Agee, “Films,” Nation 162 (March 23, 1946): 354, quoted in Agee on Film, 182. 24. Lewton, letter to Nina and Lucy Lewton, [1942], collection of Val Lewton Jr. 25. Herbert Kerkow [Val Lewton], The Fateful Star Murder (New York: Mohawk Press, 1931), 238–39. With this open invitation to the reader to throw

Notes to pages 8–13

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away the book just completed, Lewton helps explain why most of his novels now exist in very small numbers, in some cases maybe just a handful of copies. 26. Fussell, Wartime, 168–69. 27. Among previous writers on Lewton, only Bansak devotes some space to the novels, discussing No Bed of Her Own and Yearly Lease (Bansak, Fearing the Dark, 20–29) and noting occasionally the symbiosis between books and films: No Bed of Her Own, for example, “gives further definition to the female roles that turned up repeatedly in Lewton’s RKO films” (21). My account also argues that the novels enrich viewing the films, except my goal is to use all eight of the available books to illuminate not Lewton’s hallowed themes of irrationality and atavism (which we already know to look for), but other issues that might not be visible or verifiable without a reading of these texts. (I have not been able to track down Lewton’s one other novel, Improved Road [Edinburgh: Collier and Sons, 1925], or his one volume of verse, Panther Skin and Grapes [n.p.: Poynton Press, 1923].) The eight novels that I do use, however, provide more than a rich enough background for studying the movies. 28. T. J. Clark, “In Defense of Abstract Expressionism,” in Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999), 371–75. 29. Lewton, letters to Nina and Lucy Lewton, November 30, 1939, [March 1940], and [1940], collection of Val Lewton Jr. 30. Newman, Cat People, 10. 31. Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era (New York: Henry Holt, 1988). 32. Robin Wood, “The Shadow Worlds of Jacques Tourneur,” Film Comment 8 (Summer 1972): 64. 33. Barbara Hall, “An Oral History with Albert E. van Schmus,” Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, California, 1993, 68. In answer to Hall’s question “Now he [Lewton] was the kind of producer who was on the set all the time?” van Schmus responded, “Yes, Val and Tourneur had a very close relationship. So they were comparing notes all the time. He might have been on the set every day, but I can’t swear to that.” Hall asks, “So he had input into the visual style of the picture?” and van Schmus responds, “Yes. I would say definitely, yes.” 34. Manny Farber, “Against the Grain,” New Republic 111 (September 18, 1944): 339. 35. George L. K. Morris, “Art Chronicle: Hans Arp,” Partisan Review 4 (January 1938): 32.

chapter one 1. Carlos Keith [Val Lewton], A Laughing Woman (New York: Vanguard Press, 1933), 23, 256–57, 53. 2. Cosmo Forbes [Val Lewton], Where the Cobra Sings (New York: Macaulay, 1932), 172, 223, 262, 247. 3. Carlos Keith [Val Lewton], This Fool, Passion (New York: Vanguard Press, 1934), 19, 76.

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Notes to pages 14–22

4. H. Mark Glancy, “Dreaming of Christmas: Hollywood and the Second World War,” in Christmas at the Movies: Images of Christmas in American, British, and European Cinema, ed. Mark Connelly (London: I. B. Tauris, 2000), 60. 5. John McManus, “A Blessing in Disguise,” PM, March 5, 1944, 16. 6. Lewton, letter to Nina and Lucy Lewton, [November 1940], collection of Val Lewton Jr., Washington, D.C. For Miller’s own views on sculpture, see Alec Miller, “Sculpture in Wood,” American Magazine of Art 21 (June 1930): 329–34. One of the works presumably destroyed at Coventry was a First World War memorial—a figure of Saint Michael carved from “a block of teakwood 9 feet long and 2 feet square” (334). See also Miller, Stone and Marble Carving: A Manual for the Student Sculptor (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1948), and Miller, Tradition in Sculpture (London and New York: Studio Publications, 1949). 7. Keith [Lewton], A Laughing Woman, 82. 8. Howard Barnes, “On the Screen: The Curse of the Cat People,” New York Herald-Tribune, March 4, 1944, 6. 9. [Val Lewton], “Actor Like Tree Responding to Wind, Says L. Barrymore,” Evening World Motion Picture, undated clipping [ca. 1927–29], Val Lewton Scrapbook, Nov. 1, 1927–Sept. 1, 1929, Val Lewton Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 10. Tom Gunning, “Loie Fuller and the Art of Motion: Body, Light, Electricity, and the Origins of Cinema,” in Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida: Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson, ed. Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003), 80. 11. Manny Farber, “Movies in Wartime,” New Republic 110 (January 3, 1944): 16. 12. Ibid. 13. Noel Carroll, The Philosophy of Horror; or, Paradoxes of the Heart (New York: Routledge, 1990). See the chapter “Why Horror?” 158–214. 14. Val Lewton, Rape of Glory (New York: Mohawk Press, 1931), 178, 239, 243. 15. Keith [Lewton], This Fool, Passion, 28. 16. Keith [Lewton], A Laughing Woman, 156; Herbert Kerkow [Val Lewton], The Fateful Star Murder (New York: Mohawk Press, 1931), 111. 17. Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 19–20. 18. Keith [Lewton], A Laughing Woman, 23, 30. 19. Richard Schickel, Good Morning, Mr. Zip Zip Zip: Movies, Memory, and World War II (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2003), 108. 20. Lewton, “Pushkin Verse,” memo to Mr. Behrman, March 30, 1935, Lilly Library Special Collections, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. Lewton’s memo also quotes a prose version of the Pushkin prologue found in Ida Zeitlin, Skazki: Tales and Legends of Old Russia (New York: George H. Doran, 1926), 15–16. According to William Todd, a professor of comparative literature at Harvard, both translations in the memo are bad. A more nuanced translation of the

Notes to pages 23–30

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lines is Walter Arndt, Alexander Pushkin: Collected Narrative and Lyrical Poetry (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Ardis, 1984), 130. My thanks to Professor Todd for his help. 21. Michael Sheridan, “Sultan of Shudders,” Coronet, November 1943, 123. 22. Val Lewton, “Further notes on child-mother situation in Anna Karenina,” memo to David O. Selznick, March 28, 1935, p. 1, Lilly Library Special Collections, Indiana University. 23. Val Lewton, memo to Mr. Behrman. Lewton quoted these lines from Zeitlin, Skazki, 16; see note 20. 24. Quoted in Schickel, Good Morning, Mr. Zip Zip Zip, 110. 25. Keith [Lewton], This Fool, Passion, 132, 134, 184. 26. Lewton, Rape of Glory, 245–46. 27. Keith [Lewton], This Fool, Passion, 287, 262. 28. Gavin Lambert, Nazimova: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), 17. 29. Ibid., 24–25. For an extensive account of Nazimova’s youth in Russia, see ibid., 17–66. 30. Ibid., 344. 31. Lewton, letter to Nina and Lucy Lewton, [1939], collection of Val Lewton Jr. 32. Annette Michelson, “The Kinetic Icon in the Work of Mourning: Prolegomena to the Analysis of a Textual System,” October 52 (Spring 1990): 25. 33. Belting, Likeness and Presence, 88, 98. 34. Michelson, “Kinetic Icon,” 31–32. 35. Keith [Lewton], This Fool, Passion, 287. 36. Val Lewton, No Bed of Her Own (New York: Vanguard Press, 1932), 17. 37. Val Lewton, Yearly Lease (New York: Vanguard Press, 1932), 214–15. 38. Keith [Lewton], A Laughing Woman, 133, 133, 132. 39. Forbes [Lewton], Where the Cobra Sings, 129. 40. Lewton, letter to Nina and Lucy Lewton, undated [1940], collection of Val Lewton Jr. 41. Keith [Lewton], A Laughing Woman, 16. 42. Keith [Lewton], This Fool, Passion, 43, 47, 266, 273, 28. 43. Ibid., 264, 282. 44. Lewton, letter to Nina and Lucy Lewton, [November 1938], p. 2, collection of Val Lewton Jr. 45. Lowell E. Redelings, “The Hollywood Scene,” Citizen News, June 21, 1948. Wrote Redelings, “D’Agostino has been designing eye-catching movie houses for some 25 years now. He’s aroused the building instincts of countless filmgoers. But more important, he hasn’t left them wanting. Whenever a fan writes in for photos or plans of some arresting set, D’Agostino and his staff see that the fan gets what he wants. Furthermore, helpful suggestions are passed on to home owners who ask how a room can be remodeled to match what was seen on screen.” 46. Farber, “Val Lewton,” in Negative Space, 48; Farber, “B Plus,” New Republic 110 (March 20, 1944): 381. 47. Robin Wood, “The Shadow Worlds of Jacques Tourneur,” Film Comment 8 (Summer 1972): 65.

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Notes to pages 30–36

48. “Three Americans,” Life, September 20, 1943, 34–35. 49. Ernie Pyle, “Mountain Fighting,” in Pyle, Brave Men (New York: Henry Holt, 1943), 154–56. 50. James Agee, “So Proudly We Fail,” Nation 157 (October 30, 1943): 509, reprinted in Agee on Film (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 38–39. 51. “Budget of Production Cost,” The Curse of the Cat People, RKO memorandum, 1943, Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA. The itemized budget includes the following entry: “ext. backyard & garden— reed house—snow seq. (Shoot in set to be built for ‘Tender Comrade’).” 52. “W.R.W.,” Review of Marine Raiders, in “What the Picture Did for Me,” Motion Picture Herald, June 24, 1944, 195. 53. Noa Steimatsky, “Pasolini on Terra Sancta: Towards a Theology of Film,” Yale Journal of Criticism 11 (1998): 247. 54. André Bazin, “Theater and Cinema: Part Two,” in Bazin, What Is Cinema? trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), 97–98. 55. Manny Farber, “Theatrical Movies,” New Republic 110 (February 14, 1944): 211–12. 56. Tom Gunning, “ ‘An Unseen Energy Swallows Space’: The Space in Early Film and Its Relation to American Avant-Garde Film,” in Film Before Griffith, ed. John Fell (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983), 359–61. 57. See Michael Levey, Sir Thomas Lawrence, 1769–1830 (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1979), 187. 58. Edmund G. Bansak, Fearing the Dark: The Val Lewton Career (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1995), 225. 59. DeWitt Bodeen, Ladies of the Footlights (Pasadena, Calif.: Pasadena Playhouse Association, 1937). In addition to Dean, Bodeen writes about Lola Montez, Lillie Langtry, Sarah Bernhardt, and Ellen Terry, among others. 60. In Fearing the Dark, Bansak writes that the “assumption that the has-been actress, Julia Farren, is based upon Alla Nazimova” is “quite reasonable” (237). 61. Robert Louis Stevenson, “The Body Snatcher,” in The Complete Stories of Robert Louis Stevenson (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 710–27. Robert Wise’s copy of The Body Snatcher script is in the Cinema-Television Library, Special Collections, Doheny Library, University of Southern California. 62. For Donna Lee’s career, see Perry Lieber, “Donna Lee O’Leary,” RKO press release, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, California. 63. Richard B. Jewell, with Vernon Harbin, The RKO Story (London: Arlington House, 1982), 205. 64. For Lee’s background in Butte, Montana, see Lieber, “Donna Lee O’Leary.” 65. “Horror Pictures,” Motion Picture Herald 159 (May 5, 1945): 8. 66. Edmund Wilson, “A Treatise on Tales of Horror,” New Yorker, May 27, 1944, 72. 67. James Agee, “Films,” Nation 159 (December 2, 1944): 699, reprinted in Agee on Film, 115.

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68. “Simone’s Aid,” RKO Radio Flash 15 (October 21, 1944): 7. 69. See, for example, Agee’s report on the “thorough applause” at the conclusion of the film when he saw it at the Rialto in Times Square. Agee, “Films,” Nation 158 (April 1, 1944): 401, reprinted in Agee on Film, 70. 70. For an extremely rare photograph of one such makeshift movie theater, see James P. Gallagher, With the Fifth Army Air Force: Photos from the Pacific Theater (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 52. 71. “Ann Carter Personal Aids on ‘I Married a Witch,’ ” Motion Picture Herald 149 (November 21, 1942): 56; “Friends Honor Syracuse Film Player,” Syracuse Post-Standard, November 5, 1942; Perry Lieber, “Ann Carter,” RKO press release, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; “Carter Girl Eager to Visit Syracuse,” Syracuse Post-Standard, September 1947. 72. The Curse of the Cat People, script, p. 66, scene 118. 73. Thomas Pauly, An American Odyssey: Elia Kazan and American Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983), 93. 74. William Baer, ed., Elia Kazan: Interviews (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2000), 127; Pauly, American Odyssey, 94. 75. Elia Kazan, A Life (New York: Knopf, 1988), 257–58. Kazan, recalling the adage that “when the actor cries, the audience won’t,” notes that he actually did not use this take and instead reshot it with Garner’s back to the camera, leaving more to the audience’s imagination. “A viewer could guess from the tension and quiver in her shoulders and the muffled sound what was going on” (258). The odd thing is that Kazan’s recollection is wrong, since Garner’s face appears in full view during the scene. Apparently he used the first take after all. 76. For an interesting account of childhood emotion on the home front during the war, see James M. Tuttle Jr., “Daddy’s Gone to War”: The Second World War in the Lives of America’s Children (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 77. Bansak, Fearing the Dark, 226. 78. David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1953), 52–55. Siegel mentions the seminar, organized by the Hollywood Writers Mobilization and the Los Angeles Council of Social Agencies, in Val Lewton: The Reality of Terror (New York: Viking, 1973), 58. For more on that event, see Pauline Lauber, letter to Charles Koerner, n.d. [September 1944], Cinema-Television Library, Special Collections, University of Southern California. “The RKO picture, The Curse of the Cat People, served as a basis for the discussion,” wrote Lauber, executive secretary for the group. “As guests, the Mobilization invited leading child welfare officials, educators, child psychologists, and writers.” 79. The Curse of the Cat People script, p. 2, scene 3; Lewton Papers, Library of Congress. 80. “Wear,” “Curse of the Cat People,” Variety 153 (February 23, 1944): 10. 81. The Curse of the Cat People script, p. 71, scene 135; p. 73, scene 136; p. 76, scenes 140–42. 82. The Curse of the Cat People script, p. 71, scene 135; pp. 98–99, scenes 211–14.

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Notes to pages 49–60

83. Robert Louis Stevenson, “My Shadow,” in A Child’s Garden of Verses (London: Longmans, Green, 1885), 22. “The Unseen Playmate” is on 55–56. 84. Farber, “B Plus,” New Republic 110 (March 20, 1944): 381. 85. Robert Louis Stevenson, “Looking-Glass River,” in A Child’s Garden of Verses, 42–43. 86. Agee, “Films,” Nation 160 (May 26, 1945): 608, reprinted in Agee on Film, 152. 87. Pauly, American Odyssey, 94. 88. Not all wartime uses of Stevenson, of course, carried a dark critical edge. In Toni Frissell’s photographic illustrations for a volume of A Child’s Garden of Verses published in 1944, she used her children Sidney and Varick and their friends to portray scenes from the poems in the most upbeat way. Frissell would photograph enlisted men and civilians in Britain and Italy, but her photographs of freckle-faced children cavorting on the dunes and farms of Southampton, Long Island, make the war seem far away. See Stevenson, A Child’s Garden of Verses, photo-illustrations by Toni Frissell (New York: U.S. Camera Publishing, 1944). 89. Stevenson, “My Bed Is a Boat,” in A Child’s Garden of Verses, 38; for daguerreotypes of the kind evoked by the bathtub scene, see Michael Lesy, Wisconsin Death Trip (New York: Pantheon, 1973). 90. Allan R. Ellenberger, Margaret O’Brien: A Career Chronicle and Biography (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2000), 81. 91. Agee, “Films,” Nation 159 (November 25, 1944): 670, reprinted in Agee on Film, 114. 92. The Curse of the Cat People script, p. 91, scene 190.

chapter two 1. James Agate, “Brave Little Theatre: A Remarkable Actor,” London Sunday Times, January 24, 1937, 5. In Knaggs’s home city of Sheffield, journalists quickly noted Agate’s extravagant praise. See “Sheffield Born,” Sheffield Telegraph, January 27, 1937, 6; and especially “Big Ben,” “Drama Critic’s Praise of Sheffield Actor,” Daily Independent, January 27, 1937, 6. For short accounts of Knaggs’s career, see Blackie Seymour, “Skelton Knaggs: ‘The Vigilant Villagers,’ ” Classic Images 19 (March 1995): 34; and Clive Greenwood, “Skelton Knaggs: One of a Kind,” Classic Images 19 (August 1995): 16, 18. 2. Marten Cumberland, Climbing: A Comedy in Three Acts (London: H. F. W. Deane and Sons, 1937), 22, 64. Soon Willie becomes a media celebrity speaking of his “public” and enjoying his fame. He is even sponsored by “Nuttie-Milko Chocolates” (38). Eventually, he becomes a fascist referred to as the Dictator: “I want money. I want to climb! I want power! . . . To climb! . . . over the other fellows!” (87, 82, 83). In Cumberland’s farce, “climbing” implies spirituality turned into commercialized social aspiration and political will to power. Agate has little to say about the plot, noting only as an afterthought that “the play itself is an amusing and witty fantasy.” Clearly for him Knaggs’s special abilities were the most memorable part of the show.

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3. Agate, “Brave Little Theatre,” 5. He wrote: In conclusion I can only say that the performance made sufficient impression on me to send me back to the poem beginning:— with delicate, mad hands, behind his sordid bars, Surely he hath his poesies, which they tear and twine; Those scentless wisps of straw, that miserably line His strait, caged universe, whereat the dull world stares, Pedant and pitiful. O, how his rapt gaze wars With their stupidity! Know they what dreams divine Lift his long, laughing reveries like enchanted wine, And make his melancholy germane to the stars?

4. Cumberland, Climbing, 22. 5. Perry Lieber, “Russell Wade,” RKO press release, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, California. 6. Charles K. Freeman and Gerald Savory, Hand in Glove script (1944), act 1, p. 2. 7. Ibid., act 1, p. 24, act 2, p. 1. 8. Robert Garland, “ ‘Hand in Glove’ at the Playhouse,” newspaper clipping, n.d. [December 1944], New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Collection. 9. Ibid. 10. Anonymous, “ ‘Hand in Glove,’ ” Commonweal, n.d., p. 253; Rowland Field, “Weak Murder Play about a Strangler,” newspaper clipping, n.d. [December 1944]; Robert Coleman, “ ‘Hand in Glove’ Just Doesn’t Fit In,” New York Daily Mirror, n.d. [December 1944]. All clippings: New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Collection. 11. Field, “Weak Murder Play about a Strangler.” 12. For the response of the opening-night audience, see Wilella Waldorf, “English Thriller That Has Its Points,” New York Post, December 5, 1944, p. 20 (“Despite the carrying-on of a very trying first-night audience, . . . [t]he whole company is to be congratulated on the fortitude with which it ignored the titters and squeals of a certain portion of the audience that sounded as if it might have been recruited from the ranks of Mr. Sinatra’s more witless followers”); see also Coleman, “ ‘Hand in Glove’ Just Doesn’t Fit In” (“when the idiot’s drooling and infantile actions stirred a few particular souls in a first-night audience to laughter, well—we just wished we’d stood [sic] home in bed”); and see Wolcott Gibbs, “Something for Everybody,” New Yorker, December 16, 1944, 43 (“George Lloyd and Skelton Knaggs, as the killer and the lunatic, have a tendency to make the audience laugh in the wrong places”). 13. Burton Rascoe, “Directing a Movie versus Staging a Play,” New York World-Telegram, December 2, 1944, New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Collection. Whale notes that he was a painter before he turned to the theater, and that both afford opportunities for individual expression not available to the film director. It is in that context that his self-deprecation takes place: “In directing a stage play you have something of the same creative satisfaction you have when you paint a picture. The picture you paint may not be very good, but

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Notes to pages 65–69

it is your picture. . . . The job, after you have finished with it, may be rather poor: you may not have perfectly understood all the characters or made them come to life in the persons of the actors; you may have the perspective slightly askew. But after you have finished with the staging of a play it is your work, your creation.” 14. James Curtis, James Whale: A New World of Gods and Monsters (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), 356. Curtis discusses the play in detail on 352–56. 15. Hand in Glove script, act 2, p. 25. It is conceivable that this was one of the moments in the play when Whale used “some tricky devices, such as spotlighting the various principals in the lurid fable in times of crisis.” Field, “Weak Murder Play about a Strangler.” If so, Hughie’s isolation onstage would have been that much more intense. 16. For the connection between monsters and showing, see Alberto Manguel, The Bride of Frankenstein (London: British Film Institute, 1997), 8. 17. Ibid., 30. 18. “Donn,” “The Ghost Ship,” Variety 153 (December 29, 1943): 8. 19. “The Ghost Ship,” Film Daily, December 14, 1943, n.p. 20. Bosley Crowther, “A Chilly Christmas,” New York Times, December 25, 1943, 19; J. T. M., “The Ghost Ship,” PM, December 26, 1943, 16. 21. Howard Barnes, “On the Screen,” New York Herald-Tribune, December 25, 1943, 8; Barnes, “The Theater: Season Leaps into Top Class,” New York Herald-Tribune, December 10, 1944, sec. IV, p. 1. 22. “What the Picture Did for Me,” Motion Picture Herald 154 (March 4, 1944): 47. 23. For an account of the lawsuit and Lewton’s reaction to it, see Joel Siegel, Val Lewton: The Reality of Terror (New York: Viking, 1973), 53–54. 24. Clement Greenberg, “The Situation at the Moment,” Partisan Review 15 (January 1948): 82. 25. Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 66, 70. 26. “What the Picture Did for Me,” Motion Picture Herald 159 (May 5, 1945): 45; “What the Picture Did for Me,” Motion Picture Herald 159 (June 16, 1945): 44. 27. Manny Farber, “Rich Creamy Lather,” New Republic 111 (December 11, 1944): 800. 28. Manny Farber, “Against the Grain,” New Republic 111 (September 18, 1944): 339. Farber’s review in this instance is of Youth Runs Wild. 29. Manny Farber, “B Plus,” New Republic 110 (March 20, 1944): 380; James Agee, “Films,” Nation 159 (September 30, 1944): 389, reprinted in Agee on Film, 104. 30. Manny Farber, “Pish-Tush,” reprinted in Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998), 180, 183. 31. Alex Woloch, The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003). See later sections of this chapter for a more detailed account of Woloch’s ideas. 32. “Tightly budgeted, the film borrowed extensively from the studio’s library of stock shots of bustling train stations . . . , speeding locomotives and barren landscapes fading into the distance. These insertions, edited into the new

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footage by former serial director Saul A. Goodkind, give the picture fluidity and a sense of urgency.” Michael Brunas, John Brunas, and Tom Weaver, Universal Horrors: The Studio’s Classic Films, 1931–1946 (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1990), 535. 33. For the concept of “deterritorialization” and its relation to minor literature, see Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986). 34. Woloch, The One vs. the Many, 4. 35. Quoted in ibid., 4. 36. “Budget of Production Cost,” The Ghost Ship, p. 4, Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA. 37. Herbert Kerkow [Val Lewton], The Fateful Star Murder (New York: Mohawk Press, 1931), 123, 215. 38. Fussell, Wartime, 72, 70, 72. 39. Woloch, The One vs. the Many, 42. 40. Lewton, letter to Nina and Lucy Lewton, June 15, 1935, p. 5, Val Lewton Jr., Papers, Washington, D.C. 41. In Dickens’s novels, unlike Jane Austen’s, “minorness has become more of an absolute given in the narrative universe, has become more deeply embedded as an essential narrative principle.” Woloch, The One vs. the Many, 129. 42. Ibid., 125. 43. Siegel, Val Lewton, 15. 44. Lewton, “Critique of Details of ‘Tale of Two Cities,’ ” memo, April 11, 1935, pp. 2, 15–16, Special Collections, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, California; Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities (New York: Bantam, 1981), 363. Lewton’s advice about the mender of roads continues, “I’d like to see this character introduced earlier in the script and kept in his original profession until he reaches Paris and becomes a wood cutter. [In the film he appears only in the latter guise.] Even this change seems to signify a change in the people and their spirit that makes him useful.” 45. Farber, “Pish-Tush,” 180. 46. Agate, “Brave Little Theatre,” 5. For period reviews of the acting of Frederick “Little” Robson, see Donald Mullin, ed., Victorian Actors and Actresses in Review: A Dictionary of Contemporary Views of Representative British and American Actors and Actresses, 1837–1901 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983), 388–92. 47. Sheffield, the cutlery capital of England, was notorious for its terrible working conditions and “their extraordinarily injurious influence upon health,” as Engels put it in 1845. “By far the most unwholesome work is the grinding of knife blades and forks, which, especially when done with a dry stone, entails certain early death. The unwholesomeness of this work lies in part in the bent posture, in which chest and stomach are cramped; but especially in the quantity of sharp-edged metal dust particles freed in the cutting, which fill the atmosphere, and are necessarily inhaled. The dry grinders’ average life is hardly thirty-five years, the wet grinders’ rarely exceeds forty-five.” (Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England [London: Penguin, 1987], 214.) The Knaggs family, apparently not associated with cutlery manufacture, moved from Sheffield when

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Notes to pages 74–79

Skelton was twelve to give him a healthier environment. The actor’s diminutive and fragile body registers the city’s deleterious effects. Even the steam rising beside him as he undertakes his quotidian task seems Sheffield-like. “You can’t have art where you have smoke,” wrote John Ruskin about Sheffield. (The Complete Works of John Ruskin, vol. 34 [New York: Longmans, Green, 1908], 521.) 48. The 1912 Sheffield directory lists a Mr. Harry Knaggs, grocer’s assistant, at 26 Garry Road. The 1919 directory lists him at 134 Dixon Road, very close to Garry Road. The 1912 directory lists a Mr. William Skelton at number 20 Garry Road; the 1916 directory lists Mr. Skelton at 134 Garry Road, the same house into which Harry Knaggs moved sometime before 1919. Skelton Knaggs, the son of Harry Knaggs, was born in 1911 in Sheffield. His Dickensian last name, then, is authentic and not a stage nom de plume. His first name may have been derived from the name of this man, William Skelton, who lived close to the Knaggs family and into whose former house they moved when Skelton was a young boy. At any rate, the entire name Skelton Knaggs appears to have been given him at birth; thus, he was outfitted from the start with a name that anticipated the Dickensian minor characters he would play. My thanks to Steve Pool of Sheffield, England, for researching the Knaggs family. 49. Charles Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby (London: Everyman, 1994), 10. 50. George Orwell, “Charles Dickens,” reprinted in George Orwell: Essays (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 2000), 73, 72, 73, 72. 51. E. M. Forster, Aspects of the Novel (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1974), 74. 52. Quoted in Woloch, The One vs. the Many, 127. 53. Woloch, The One vs. the Many, 180, 181. 54. “Blow the Man Down,” lyrics sheet, Special Collections, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In the song, various sea creatures, including a seal, shark, whale, mackerel, and herring, all try to assist a skipper whose ship “lay becalmed on the tropical seas,” but the captain eats the mackerel, salts the herring, harpoons the seal, catches the shark, and kills the whale. The breeze then blows gaily, but “what an old rascal that skipper must be.” In the movie, Craig’s character sings few of these lines, but he establishes a mood of foreboding all the same, and Captain Stone turns out to be murderous in a way predicted by the song. The Ancient Mariner suffers a worse fate than the captain of “Blow the Man Down,” but the cost of his hubris calls to mind the fate of the domineering Captain Stone. 55. “Budget of Production Cost,” The Ghost Ship, pp. 3–4, Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA. Craig was initially slated to be on the set on August 26, but a later addendum to the budget assigns him to one day of work, on August 24. His weekly (six-day) salary rate was $900, compared with Knaggs’s $400. 56. Manny Farber, “Movies in Wartime,” New Republic 110 (January 3, 1944): 18. 57. Margo Graham, “Maple Mania,” Los Angeles Times Home Magazine, December 19, 1943, 5. 58. Woloch, The One vs. the Many, 129, 125, 129.

Notes to pages 79–87

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59. Carlos Keith [Val Lewton], 4 Wives (New York: Vanguard Press, 1932), 100. 60. The scene reflects Lewton’s own fixation on minor players upstaging stars, since the character of Kiki departs from the movie’s source, Cornell Woolrich’s novel The Black Alibi (1942). Woolrich’s Kiki is no minor performer but the star of “the biggest spectacular in the city,” her name in lights, and the cosmetics executives “were already naming perfumes and nail polishes after her.” She had “been queening it over the third largest city south of the Panama Canal, with her own car and chauffeur, personal maid, [and] hotel suite.” Though Kiki had been a nobody once—“a run-of-the-mill roadhouse entertainer from Detroit”—she is famous as Woolrich’s story opens, and her leopard stunt is just to get additional publicity, not to upstage a rival. See Woolrich, The Black Alibi (New York: Mercury Publications, 1942), 3–4. 61. Caryn James, “Old Hollywood Horror, but with Depth and Flair,” New York Times, July 2, 1993, C3. For the full schedule of the Film Forum series, see “When the Films Are On,” New York Times, July 2, 1993, C3. The Ghost Ship was shown three times daily on each of the series’ fourteen days, from July 2 to 15. 62. Michael Feingold, “The Ghost Ship,” Village Voice, July 13, 1993, 57. See also Georgina Brown, “Dark Knight,” Village Voice, July 6, 1993, 45. 63. The narrator describes Moncure’s feelings of sexual self-loathing: “He was a living corpse—worse than a living corpse, he was a corpse that had in himself the seeds of degeneration.” Keith [Lewton], 4 Wives, 273. 64. Farber, “Underground Films,” reprinted in Negative Space, 15–16. 65. Farber, “Signs of the Double-Cross,” New Republic 112 (June 4, 1945): 791. 66. Ibid. 67. The Ghost Ship script, p. 1, scene 1, Val Lewton Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 68. I Walked with a Zombie press book, n.p., Cinema-Television Library, Special Collections, Doheny Library, University of Southern California; The Curse of the Cat People press book, n.p., Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The press books for Cat People and Youth Runs Wild are also in the Cinema-Television Library Special Collections at the University of Southern California. 69. I Walked with a Zombie press book, Doheny Library; The Leopard Man press book, Margaret Herrick Library. 70. Manny Farber, “The Trouble with Movies: II,” New Republic 108 (June 7, 1943): 764. 71. Farber, “Underground Films,” 18. 72. Ibid. Farber mentions Lewton twice in the essay (12, 15), grouping him among the “infamous men of art” forgotten and forsaken by reviewers and audiences interested in twice-baked, warmed-over Quality Motion Pictures. 73. Siegel, Val Lewton, 10. 74. Donald Henderson Clarke, Man of the World: Recollections of an Irreverent Reporter (New York: Vanguard Press, 1951), 17, 163.

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Notes to pages 87–93

75. Herbert Kerkow [Val Lewton], The Fateful Star Murder (New York: Mohawk Press, 1931), 26, 44. 76. Val Lewton, No Bed of Her Own (New York: Vanguard Press, 1932), 98–99. 77. The Seventh Victim script, p. 103, scene 118, Lewton Papers, Library of Congress. 78. “Only one of the group [of soldiers] would be killed, and so the death was hardly noticed, or the emphasis turned from individual dying to mass slaughter so that it became no longer a matter of men dying but endless streams of extras running wildly out into the open and falling down. Death would be further sterilized by switching immediately to more heroics, intense activity or scenes with a merry note.” Farber, “Movies in Wartime,” 18. 79. Barbara Berch, “Gold in Them Chills,” Collier’s, January 29, 1944, 66. 80. Edmund Wilson, “A Treatise on Tales of Terror,” New Yorker, May 27, 1944, 72. 81. The Seventh Victim script, p. 103, scene 118, Lewton Papers, Library of Congress. 82. For information about Hammerstein’s Victoria, see Loney Haskell, “The Corner—II: Reminiscences of Hammerstein’s Victoria,” New Yorker, December 20, 1930, 42, 44, 46–48; and Anna Marble Pollock, “Notes on the Amusement Market’s First Corner,” New York Times, December 2, 1934, sec. X, p. 3. For information about the first Rialto movie theater on the site, see Ben Hall, The Best Remaining Seats: The Story of the Golden Age of the Movie Palace (New York: Clarkson Potter, 1961), 44–45, 51. 83. Lewis Mumford, “The Sky Line: Concerning Glass Houses,” New Yorker, April 11, 1936, 57–58. 84. Lea Jacobs, “The B Film and the Problem of Cultural Distinction,” Screen 33 (Spring 1992): 7. Jacobs notes the capacity and prices of other New York theaters near the Rialto: Radio City Music Hall seated 5,980 and charged $.40 to $1.65; the Rivoli seated 2,092 and charged $.25 to $.95; and the Palace seated 1,700 and charged $.25 to $.55. 85. Farber, “The Trouble with Movies: II,” 764. 86. Thomas F. Brady, “Times Square, New York: ‘Cesspool of the World,’ ” New York Times, February 21, 1969, 50. 87. See Michiko Kakutani, “Rialto to Reopen Feb. 7 as Legitimate Theater,” New York Times, January 15, 1980, C8; Christopher Gray, “A Times Sq. Cinema Nurtured by the Merchant of Menace,’ ” New York Times, July 19, 1987, 14R. 88. For an account of Hopper making preparatory sketches at a Forty-second Street burlesque house, see Vivien Green Fryd, Art and the Crisis of Marriage: Edward Hopper and Georgia O’Keeffe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 89. 89. “Judges Honor 14 in Times Square Dimout Photo Salon,” press release, Metropolitan Camera Club Council, October 19, 1942, The Museum of the City of New York. 90. Fussell, Wartime, 109. 91. New York Times, May 23, 1943, sec. 2, p. 1.

Notes to pages 93–102

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92. The Ghost Ship script, p. 1, scene 1, Lewton Papers, Library of Congress. 93. This photograph is in the Raymond Mander and Joe Mitchenson Theatre Collection, London. 94. Gerald Savory, Hughie Roddis (New York: Alliance, 1942), epigraph [n.p.]. The lines are taken from Isabella’s counsel to Claudio in Measure for Measure, act 3, scene 1, 86–88. 95. Savory, Hughie Roddis, 154–55. 96. Ibid., 277–78. 97. In the play, cowritten by Savory and Charles K. Freeman, Hughie pulls out “a cross made from bits of twigs, clay and china and tin he has been collecting. It is about two and a half feet high and two feet across, and the pieces of tin catch the light as Hughie admires it.” Hand in Glove script, act 2, p. 25, New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Collection. At the conclusion of the novel Hughie falls to his death as the police try to rescue him after realizing they have been wrong to suspect him of murder. 98. Manny Farber, “B Plus,” New Republic 110 (March 20, 1944): 381. 99. Anna Marble Pollock, “Notes on the Amusement Market’s First Corner,” New York Times, December 2, 1934, sec. X, p. 3. 100. Quoted in Lesley Stern, The Scorsese Connection (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 49. 101. Siegel describes eventually tracking down a rare print of The Ghost Ship at a Pittsburgh television station. Val Lewton, 130.

chapter three 1. Script quoted from Karl French, intro., The Marx Brothers: Monkey Business, Duck Soup and A Day at the Races (London: Faber and Faber, 1993), 238–39. 2. Robeson, quoted in Florence Murray, ed., The Negro Handbook (New York: Current Reference Publications, 1944), 261. Robeson protested a film in which he appeared called Tales of Manhattan (1944). When money accidentally drops from an airplane into plantation fields, the sharecroppers believe it is a gift from heaven. Robeson “had requested a closing scene, . . . which would show the improved community which the sharecroppers had constructed. Instead, the Negro ‘was pictured in the same old way,’ he said, ‘as solving his problems by singing his way to Glory . . . as a plantation Hallelujah shouter.’ ” 3. Thomas Cripps, Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie from World War II to the Civil Rights Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 44. See also Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, “Blacks, Loyalty, and Motion-Picture Propaganda in World War II,” Journal of American History 73 (September 1986): 383–406. 4. Wendell Willkie, One World (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1943), 191. 5. David M. Kennedy, Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 765–76. 6. Cripps, Making Movies Black, 46–48, ix. 7. Lewton, letter to Nina and Lucy Lewton, [1940], collection of Val Lewton Jr., Washington, D.C.

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Notes to pages 102–111

8. Carlos Keith [Val Lewton], A Laughing Woman (New York: Vanguard Press, 1933), 182, 183, 183–84, 185. 9. Lewton, letter to Nina and Lucy Lewton, [1940], collection of Val Lewton Jr. 10. Cripps, Making Movies Black, 94. 11. James Agee, “Films,” Nation 158 (April 1, 1944): 402, reprinted in Agee on Film: Criticism and Comment on the Movies (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 70. For additional information on the actor Lancelot Pinard (1902– 2001), see Todd Everett, “The Noble Quest of Sir Lancelot Pinard,” Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, December 14, 1984, 33. 12. Wade Davis, The Serpent and the Rainbow (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), 139. 13. Zora Neale Hurston, Tell My Horse (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1938), 190, 193. A clear source for the film is “Black Haiti: Where Old Africa and New World Meet,” Life, December 13, 1937, 26–30. This is in addition to the most-noted starting point for the film: Inez Wallace’s article “I Walked with a Zombie,” which appeared in American Weekly Magazine. 14. Helen Langa, “Two Antilynching Art Exhibitions: Politicized Viewpoints, Racial Perspectives, Gendered Constraints,” American Art 13 (Spring 1999): 11. 15. Wendell Willkie, “The Case for the Minorities,” Saturday Evening Post, June 27, 1942, 14. 16. Julia P. Herzberg, “Wifredo Lam: The Development of a Style and World View, the Havana Years, 1941–1952,” in Wifredo Lam and His Contemporaries, 1938–1952, ed. Maria R. Balderrama (New York: Studio Museum in Harlem, 1992), 40. 17. T. J. Clark, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999). Clark writes that art historians have been “utterly sidetracked by a debate over whether or not these pictures—just look at them!—follow scripts from Jung” (358). Instead, Clark suggests (in a reading I have tried to follow in my text), Guardians of the Secret and other Pollock works from the time scorn this psychological methodology, deriding the very limitations of this mode and turning that derision—at “content,” at painting—into a paradoxically convincing account of art’s inability to be convincing about anything. Guardians of the Secret makes the end of painting its subject, finding a new life for picture making in its self-conscious proclamation that it has nothing left to say except to comment angrily on its own descent into cliché and triviality. 18. John Pym, The Palm Beach Story (London: British Film Institute, 1998), 44. 19. Manny Farber with William S. Poster, “Preston Sturges” (1954); reprinted in Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998), 93–94. 20. Walter Van Tilburg Clark, The Ox-Bow Incident (New York: Modern Library, 2001), 88, 111, 144. 21. Even so, the film omits some of the novel’s more explicit antisouthern passages and characters. In the book Art Croft notes that he had “worked in out-

Notes to pages 111–112

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fits with a lot of Southern boys, mostly Texas. They’d drop a white man who played with a nigger even faster than they would a nigger, and they had a sharp line about niggers. They wouldn’t condescend about them, the way some of us did, but they wouldn’t eat or drink where black men did, or sleep in blankets a nigger had used, or have anything more to do with a house where a nigger had been let in the front door.” The book also includes a character named Gabe, “from Mississippi, and the worst about niggers I ever knew. He wouldn’t eat where they’d eaten, sleep where they’d slept, or be seen talking to one.” Clark, The Ox-Bow Incident, 118–19, 41. 22. Ibid., 71, 96, 73. 23. In the novel, Sparks tells Croft the story of his brother’s lynching (119–20). White’s book is Rope and Faggot: A Biography of Judge Lynch (New York: Knopf, 1929). 24. Dominic J. Capeci Jr., “The Lynching of Cleo Wright: Federal Protection of Constitutional Rights during World War II,” Journal of American History 72 (March 1986): 859–87; Manny Farber, “The Great White Way,” New Republic 109 (July 5, 1943): 20. Farber is prescient in this remark, since wartime films did use lynching as a way of showing the tragic suffering of (often innocent) white people. In Harold Schuster’s Marine Raiders (1944), we briefly see the victim of a Japanese battlefield atrocity, Lieutenant Tony “Junior” Hewitt (Russell Wade), suspended from trees and looking like the victim of a lynching. The sight of his innocent friend strung up is enough to send his commanding officer (Robert Ryan) into paroxysms of vengeance through the jungle, and presumably to rile up American audiences as well. Here lynching epitomizes the wrongful death of an innocent person, even as the practice itself was not then illegal in the United States. Another example is Alfred Hitchcock’s Lifeboat (1944), which opens with the white victims of a U-boat torpedo attack climbing blackfaced into the lifeboat, each one coated in grease from the sunken ship’s engine. The first one to climb aboard, Kovak, says he is one of the engine-room crew, “the black gang.” When an actual black man is hoisted from the waves, Canada Lee as “Charcoal” the steward, he literalizes what the film has already stated: to be a helpless victim of war is to be, in an important sense, black. The black-and-white squares of a chessboard we briefly see floating on the water suggest this racial interchange as much as they do the strategic mind games that will take place between the survivors. The sky soon clears, and the white characters wipe the grease off their faces, but in its initial moments Lifeboat shows a racial basis for depicting the war’s casualties. An anecdote in Gunnar Myrdal’s book An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1944) suggests how this basis went unnoticed during the war, even when it was spectacularly evident. At an art exhibition in the “Old South,” Myrdal sees a sculpture called Soldier in the Rain, depicting a man hanging by a noose. To him, the piece clearly shows the lynched body of a black man. The organizers of the exhibition, however, adamantly deny that the sculpture shows anything except a soldier who has likely been hung for treason. Incredulous, Myrdal later meets the sculptor, a dark-skinned man, who ultimately admits that the work does show a lynching. “Don’t you think everybody must know it?” Myrdal asks him. “Yes, in a way,”

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Notes to pages 112–117

he responds, “but they don’t want to know it.” As the organizers of the exhibition tell Myrdal, “None of all the thousands of visitors to the exhibition had ever hinted at the possibility that the sculpture represented a lynched Negro” (35–36). The story illuminates how home front audiences and even filmmakers did not notice the presence of similarly “lynched” figures in the era’s combat films, even when those figures wore blackface or hung from trees. This racial basis, however, did not always determine portrayals of tragic wartime death. There is not a hint of the Scottsboro Boys in the fates of the five white Sullivan Brothers in The Sullivans (1944). 25. Willkie, “The Case for the Minorities,” 14. 26. James Agee, “Prize Day,” Nation 157 (December 25, 1943): 769, and Nation 157 (July 3, 1943), reprinted in Agee on Film, 50, 26–27. 27. See the discussion in chapter 2 of the contest between minor and major characters for space, as adapted from Alex Woloch’s book The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003). 28. “Budget of Production Cost,” I Walked with a Zombie, Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA. 29. Earl Brown, “American Negroes and the War,” Harper’s, April 1942, 546. 30. Dorothy Heyward and Howard Rigsby, New Georgia [South Pacific] script, 1943, act 1, p. 13. 31. Louis Kronenberger, “An Honest Try on a Good Theme,” PM, December 31, 1943, 20. 32. Howard Barnes, “South Pacific,” New York Herald-Tribune, December 30, 1943, 8. 33. Kronenberger, “An Honest Try on a Good Theme,” 20. 34. The phrase is that of the theater critic Rosamond Gilder in Theatre Arts Monthly (May 1941), describing Lee’s performance as Bigger; quoted in Glenda E. Gill, No Surrender! No Retreat! African American Pioneer Performers of Twentieth-Century American Theater (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 117. Gill discusses the prejudice Lee encountered during the play’s run on 117–18. 35. Wolcott Gibbs, “Black Majesty,” New Yorker, October 30, 1943, 38. 36. Stark Young, “Othello,” New Republic, November 1, 1943, 622. 37. Heyward and Rigsby, New Georgia script, Act I, p. 1. 38. George Orwell, “Charles Dickens” (1939), reprinted in George Orwell: Essays (Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 2000), 73. 39. Myrdal, An American Dilemma, 997, 423, 997. “America Again at the Crossroads” is the title of chapter 45. 40. Richard M. Dalfiume, “The ‘Forgotten Years’ of the Negro Revolution,” in The Negro in Depression and War: Prelude to Revolution, 1930–1945, ed. Bernard Sternsher (Chicago: Quadrangle, 1969), 306, 304, and (for Baldwin) 299. For Asa Philip Randolph, see Kennedy, Freedom from Fear, 763–67. 41. Robin Wood, “The Shadow Worlds of Jacques Tourneur,” Film Comment 8 (Summer 1972): 69.

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42. “O Legba” lyrics sheet, Special Collections, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. 43. Russell Gold, “Guilty of Syncopation, Joy, and Animation: The Closing of Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom,” Studies in Dance History 5 (Spring 1994): 52–53. 44. Quoted in ibid., 50. 45. James Naremore, The Films of Vincente Minnelli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 62, 59, 60. 46. The Ghost Ship script, p. 1, scene 1, Val Lewton Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 47. T. M. P., “At the Rialto,” New York Times, April 22, 1943, 31. 48. Gold, “Guilty of Syncopation, Joy, and Animation,” 61, 60. 49. Ibid., 59, 60. 50. André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in What Is Cinema? trans. Hugh Gray (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), vol. 1, 9–10, 14–15. See also Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981). 51. Bazin, “Ontology of the Photographic Image,” 14. 52. Manny Farber, “Val Lewton,” in Negative Space (New York: Da Capo Press, 1971), 49. 53. See Tom Gunning, “Loie Fuller and the Art of Motion: Body, Light, Electricity, and the Origins of Cinema,” in Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida: Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson, ed. Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003), 75–89. 54. Farber, “Val Lewton,” 49. 55. Val Lewton, Ticonderoga script, 73–74, collection of Val Lewton Jr. 56. Again, the dignified slowness would not be a function of an actor’s role, since portraying a black man as a zombie was clearly not what the NAACP had in mind in its Hollywood campaign. Instead, it would be an ideological principle inherent in the type of movement, or nonmovement, itself. This dignity of slowness fit not just Darby Jones but the measured steps of Sir Lancelot in his threatening song, “Pain and Sorrow in the Family.” Even the scene of wildest commotion in the film—the houmfort dance of Jeni Le Gon and Rita Christian— is carefully controlled, with Tourneur’s camera moving in slow counterpoint to the dancers’ whirl, and the dancers converging until they flank the lone drummer and come to a full, dramatic stop. Theirs is a “wonderful dance concocted out of a minimum of movement”—Farber’s praise for a performance by Rochester in Minnelli’s Cabin in the Sky (New Republic 109 [July 5, 1943]: 20). The audience of black men and women standing nearly still as they listen to the music, arms folded across their chests, sets the cue for Lewton’s scene. 57. Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1999), 130. 58. Ardel Wray, quoted in Joel Siegel, Val Lewton: The Reality of Terror (New York: Viking, 1973), 45. 59. The Leopard Man call sheet, Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA. We see only the hand of the other accuser, Raoul Bel-

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Notes to pages 125–131

monte, who needed only to stand off-camera grasping Galbraith’s arm in order to appear to be in stride. 60. The scene also recalls a moment of commemoration and stillness in Lewton’s novel This Fool, Passion, when Alex Sablin, standing among the bodies of Armenian villagers, is joined by a group of Russian peasants, traveling in “a procession of carts,” who come up beside him, “exchang[ing] their slow gait for immobility.” Carlos Keith [Val Lewton], This Fool, Passion (New York: Vanguard Press, 1934), 135–36. Like The Leopard Man’s penitents, Sablin and the Russian peasants commemorate the tragedy that took place at the site. 61. The museum in The Leopard Man is not a place just of superficial recollection but of active forgetting. After explaining the procession to a local resident—“Oh, that’s very interesting,” she says—Galbraith hears haunting reminders of the three women he has murdered, but he assuages his fears and erases his recollections by returning to his curator’s desk, where he works on an object the script identifies as “a small model of Indian ruins in colored clays.” The Leopard Man script, p. 94, Lewton Papers, Library of Congress. Even when it depicts ruins, the museum is a place not to remember. 62. Ibid., p. 93, scene 134. 63. William Faulkner, “Dry September,” in Collected Stories (New York: Vintage, 1977), 180. Faulkner, describing the guilt of the mob leader McLendon, does conclude the story with an image of stillness and perpetual staring akin to Lewton’s static commemorations: “There was no movement, no sound, not even an insect. The dark world seemed to lie stricken beneath the cold moon and the lidless stars” (183). For Lewton and Faulkner as across-the-street neighbors in 1935, see Edmund Bansak’s quotations from a 1992 interview with Lewton’s wife, Ruth, in Bansak, Fearing the Dark: The Val Lewton Career (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1995), 58. “The Faulkners came to dinner at our house, and we would often go there for dinner as well. Mr. Faulkner . . . enjoyed my husband . . . and my husband enjoyed him.” Growing up in the 1940s, Val Lewton Jr., born in 1939, heard his father’s stories about Faulkner. Among the family photographs in his possession now is one showing Faulkner, his daughter Jill, and Val Lewton Jr.’s, older sister, Nina, taken in Pacific Palisades. I do not, of course, imply any direct connection between “Dry September” and the end of The Leopard Man. Instead, for me, Lewton’s acquaintance with Faulkner simply adds to the sense that this film and I Walked with a Zombie contain an oblique but forceful imagery of lynching. 64. I Walked with a Zombie call sheet, Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA. 65. Lewton, “Critique of Details of ‘Tale of Two Cities,’ ” memo, April 11, 1935, p. 16, Special Collections, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, California. 66. J.Saunders Redding, “A Negro Looks at This War,” American Mercury 55 (November 1942): 591, 590. “If we could not believe in the realization of democratic freedom for ourselves,” Redding wrote, “certainly no one could ask us to die for the preservation of that ideal for others,” but that belief, despite “the inequalities, the outraged hopes and faith, the inbred hate,” does exist. The cause is therefore worth fighting for (589, 591).

Notes to pages 131–138

191

67. Earl Brown, “American Negroes and the War,” Harper’s, April 1942, 546.

chapter four 1. Carlos Keith [Val Lewton], This Fool, Passion (New York: Vanguard Press, 1934), 285–86, 288; Herbert Kerkow [Val Lewton], The Fateful Star Murder (New York: Mohawk Press, 1931), 185. 2. Val Lewton, letter to Nina and Lucy Lewton, [January 1, 1940], p. 2, collection of Val Lewton Jr., Washington, D.C. 3. Lewton, letter to Nina and Lucy Lewton, June 15, 1935, collection of Val Lewton Jr. 4. “The curtains slowly part to reveal what appears to be a statue,” stage directions, Chamber of Horrors [Bedlam] script, p. 24, scene 47, Val Lewton Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 5. For Vernon’s roles, background, and interests prior to Bedlam, see Perry Lieber, “Glenn Vernon,” RKO press release, May 8, 1945, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, California; and “Dad Said ‘Vaudeville’s a Goner’: Helped Son Win Film Success,” New York Herald-Tribune, January 16, 1944, sec. IV, p. 3. Vernon’s association with movement did not exactly diminish in the ongoing postwar years. He plays a gas station attendant in The Devil Thumbs a Ride (1947), one of the era’s spate of carculture movies, and though the role requires him to stand around a lot, he is the glad facilitator of other people’s speeding journeys. The fast automobile has somehow replaced fast music as a sign of quick gratification, with Vernon again a part of the frenzy. “Come on, Sonny, get some gas in that car.” 6. Quoted in Janet Staiger, Perverse Spectators: The Practice of Film Reception (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 47. For more on rowdy wartime crowds, see William Fagelson, “Fighting Films: The Everyday Tactics of World War II Soldiers,” Cinema Journal 40 (2001): 94–112; John N. Popham, “Films Free Inhibitions of Aleutian Marines,” Motion Picture Herald 153 (November 6, 1943): 58; “Cinema,” Time 41 (March 15, 1943): 74; W. H. M. Watson, “Theatre Management—How to Meet the Vandals,” Motion Picture Herald 153 (October 30, 1943): 36; and especially Farber, “Movies in Wartime,” New Republic 110 (January 3, 1944): 16–20. “The character of the movie audience has changed radically during the war years,” wrote Farber. “It no longer seems to be the silent, rapt mass it once was: there is a noticeable quality of more or less cynical detachment, it has become a little more like the audience at a ball park where the crowd is broken up into pockets of people who do not give up their personality wholly to the spectacle but in one form or another express their own reactions—moviegoers nowadays are running conversations with one another, criticizing the film while watching it, taking the whole thing far less seriously than formerly” (19). Farber notwithstanding, for the volubility of 1930s movie audiences, see Thomas Doherty, “This Is Where We Came In: The Audible Screen and the Voluble Audience of Early Sound Cinema,” in American Movie Audiences: From the Turn of the Century to the Early Sound Era, ed. Melvyn Stokes and Richard Maltby (London: British Film Institute, 1999), 143–63; and Eric

192

Notes to pages 138–146

Smoodin, “ ‘This Business of America’: Fan Mail, Film Reception, and Meet John Doe,” Screen 37 (Summer 1996): 111–28. 7. Gregory William Mank, Hollywood Cauldron (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1994), 365–66. 8. Ibid., 366. 9. Scott MacQueen, Roy Webb: Music for the Films of Val Lewton, booklet accompanying compact disc (N.p.: Marco Polo, 2000), 20. 10. Ibid. 11. The Ghost Ship script, p. 3, scene 8, Lewton Papers, Library of Congress. 12. Antonia Lant, Blackout: Reinventing Women for Wartime British Cinema (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), 119, 122, 123, 124. 13. Val Lewton diary, January 23, 1946, Lewton Papers, Library of Congress. 14. Val Lewton diary, January 16, 17, 22, 1946, Lewton Papers, Library of Congress. 15. William S. Graebner, The Age of Doubt: American Thought and Culture in the 1940s (Boston: Twayne, 1991), 8. 16. For information about Vauxhall as a polite pleasure ground, see T. J. Edelstein, Vauxhall Gardens (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Center for British Art, 1983); David Solkin, Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), 106–56; Peter de Bolla, “The Visibility of Visuality: Vauxhall Gardens and the Siting of the Viewer,” in Vision and Textuality, ed. Stephen Melville and Bill Readings (New York: Macmillan, 1995), 282–95; and Miles Ogborn, “Locating the Macaroni: Luxury, Sexuality and Vision in Vauxhall Gardens,” Textual Practice 11 (1997): 445–61. 17. Quoted in Ogborn, “Locating the Macaroni,” 454. 18. Chamber of Horrors [Bedlam] script, p. 23, scene 44, Lewton Papers, Library of Congress. 19. Manny Farber with William S. Poster, “Preston Sturges” (1954), reprinted in Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998), 102. 20. Pfc. Bruce O. Bishop, “GIs No Like Over-S.A. USO Femme Troupers or Anti-Negro Pictures,” Variety 158 (April 25, 1945): 11. For more on Langford’s trip to Peleliu, see Bill D. Ross, Peleliu, Tragic Triumph: The Untold Story of the Pacific War’s Forgotten Battle (New York: Random House, 1991), 78–79. 21. Graebner, Age of Doubt, 7, 12–13. The phrase “consumer vampire,” cited by Graebner, is that of film theorist Mary Ann Doane in The Desire to Desire: The Woman’s Film of the 1940s (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 81. 22. Willard Waller, The Veteran Comes Back (New York: Dryden Press, 1944); Irvin L. Child and Marjorie Van de Water, eds., Psychology for the Returning Serviceman (Washington, D.C.: Penguin, 1945). 23. “In 1943 she . . . went overseas with the Jack Benny troupe on an entertainment tour. Anna was the first woman to entertain troops in central Africa, Iran and Iraq. After Benny returned to America, Anna stayed on in North [Africa] for another three months, visiting hospitals there and in Sicily.” Perry

Notes to pages 146–155

193

Lieber, “Anna Lee,” RKO press release, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. 24. Joseph Breen, letter to William Gordon, June 26, 1945, p. 1, Special Collections, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. 25. George Roeder, The Censored War: American Visual Experience during World War II (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993), 1. 26. Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 168–69. 27. Ibid., 200–201. 28. My Own True Love script, reel 4A, p. 1, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. 29. “Erford Gage, Actor, Killed on Iwo Jima,” Variety 158 (April 25, 1945): 11; RKO Studio Club News 8 (December 1945): 39. 30. Perry Lieber, “Erford Gage,” RKO press release, Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. 31. Keith [Lewton], This Fool, Passion, 46. 32. Ibid., 285–94. 33. Doubtless it is just a coincidence owing to the limited budgets of Lewton’s films, but it is fitting that during the Vauxhall scene Nell Bowen wears the same piece of shooting-star jewelry that Amy gave Irena on Christmas Eve in The Curse of the Cat People. 34. John L. Scott, “Master of Horror Films Reveals His Technique,” Los Angeles Times, June 10, 1945, pt. 3, p. 3. 35. [Val Lewton], “Anaconda Uses Special Department to Solve Problem of Exhibitions,” clipping, May 1928, p. 138, Lewton Papers, Library of Congress. 36. Val Lewton, No Bed of Her Own (New York: Vanguard Press, 1932), 58. 37. Bedlam press book, p. 11, Special Collections, Cinema-Television Library, Doheny Library, University of Southern California. 38. Chamber of Horrors [Bedlam] script, p. 27, scene 59; p. 28, scene 64, Lewton Papers, Library of Congress. 39. Lewton, letter to Nina and Lucy Lewton, [1942], collection of Val Lewton Jr. 40. Agee, “Films,” Nation 159 (December 2, 1944): 699, reprinted in Agee on Film: Criticism and Comment on the Movies (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 115. 41. Agee, “Films,” Nation 158 (March 11, 1944): 316, reprinted in Agee on Film, 65. 42. Val Lewton, Rape of Glory (New York: Mohawk Press, 1931), 178–79. 43. Vernon’s height and weight are listed in Perry Lieber, “Glenn Vernon,” RKO press release. 44. Cosmo Forbes [Val Lewton], Where the Cobra Sings (New York: Macaulay, 1932), 88. 45. Lewton, No Bed of Her Own, 218, 222, 220. 46. Carlos Keith [Val Lewton], A Laughing Woman (New York: Vanguard Press, 1933), 164.

194

Notes to pages 156–163

47. Joe Cummiskey, “Robinson Has Got It,” PM, April 19, 1946, 14. 48. “Call Sheet,” Bedlam, August 1, 1945, Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA. The call sheet notes that Vernon, among others, should be made up and ready for work on that day for the shooting of the Vauxhall sequence. 49. John Hersey, Hiroshima (Toronto: Bantam, 1981), 96. 50. Val Lewton diary, January 2, 1946, Lewton Papers, Library of Congress. 51. “What the Picture Did for Me,” Motion Picture Herald 168 (May 18, 1946): 50. 52. Joel Siegel, Val Lewton: The Reality of Terror (New York: Viking, 1973), 83–85. 53. Ibid., 168. 54. Ibid. 55. James Agate, “Brave Little Theatre: A Remarkable Actor,” London Sunday Times, January 24, 1937, 5. 56. Mank, Hollywood Cauldron, 375. 57. Motion Picture Herald 155 (June 3, 1944): 29. Vernon is the last of seven relatively unknown actors starring in Days of Glory who are featured in the advertising for this issue of the Herald. The others are Tamara Toumanova, Gregory Peck, Alan Reed, Maria Palmer, Lowell Gilmore, and Hugo Haas. 58. John McCarten, capsule review, New Yorker, May 4, 1946, 48. 59. Siegel, Val Lewton, 164. 60. Thomas Schatz, The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era (New York: Henry Holt, 1988), 418. 61. “Movie of the Week: Bedlam,” Life, February 25, 1946, 123. 62. Siegel, Val Lewton, 82. 63. McCarten, capsule review, 70. 64. Lewton, letter to Nina and Lucy Lewton, [January 1, 1940], collection of Val Lewton Jr. Lewton was proud in some ways of his contribution to Gone with the Wind, as in his excitement about which of his small suggestions made it into the final film. However, he did not like the film overall: “When you do see it . . . ,” he wrote to his mother and sister, “I hope you like it better than I do.” His wife, Ruth, writing on the same day, shared his views: “It’s a very overpowering thing but I’m not fond of big epics.” Lewton, letter to Nina and Lucy Lewton, January 1, 1940, collection of Val Lewton Jr.; Ruth Lewton, letter to Nina and Lucy Lewton, January 1, 1940, collection of Val Lewton Jr. Lewton did not change his views the year Bedlam was released. In 1946 Selznick encountered Lewton in the lobby after a preview screening of the great man’s new Technicolor epic, A Duel in the Sun, and he asked his onetime employee how he liked the picture. Responded Lewton, who had nothing favorable to say: “That was . . . a film; that was . . . a movie.” Author’s conversation with Val Lewton Jr., August 2001. 65. Val Lewton, Yearly Lease (New York: Vanguard Press, 1932), 5, 10, 12. The epic was also a rip-off foisted on the American people, and no boon to those required to promote it either, or so Lewton wrote in No Bed of Her Own. Rose Mahoney answers a sales ad in the newspaper and discovers that her prospective employer wants her to go door-to-door to sell “Rich’s History of America in the Great War,” a twelve-volume set “bound in full morocco with fourteen carat

Notes to pages 164–168

195

gold lettering.” The cost is $200 per set, but “no truly American family can afford to be without it,” the fast-talking interviewer tells Rose. He gives her advice about getting her foot in the door before it can slam in her face, and he furnishes a dossier of supplemental materials—“an elaborate leather portfolio, heavy with brass, two loose-leaf leather books filled with printed pages and photostat copies of letters from government officials, generals and notables, all recommending the history.” The enterprise turns out to be a scam. Lewton, No Bed of Her Own, 64–65. 66. Lewton, letter to Nina and Lucy Lewton, [January 1, 1940], collection of Val Lewton Jr. 67. Mank, Hollywood Cauldron, 370–71. 68. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 90–91. 69. Lewton, Ticonderoga script, 28, 45, collection of Val Lewton Jr. 70. Bloom, Anxiety of Influence, 91. 71. Farber, “Val Lewton,” in Negative Space, 48; Lewton, quoted in Schatz, The Genius of the System, 328. 72. Val Lewton, Ticonderoga script, p. 1, scene 2, collection of Val Lewton Jr. 73. The profits of Crosby’s film are listed in Richard B. Jewell, The RKO Story (London: Arlington House, 1982), 206. 74. Keith [Lewton], A Laughing Woman, 130. 75. Curt Siodmak, Donovan’s Brain (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1943), 128–29. 76. “Movie of the Week: Bedlam,” 123. 77. Val Lewton Jr., quoted in Edmund Bansak, Fearing the Dark: The Val Lewton Career (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1995), 24. 78. Carlos Keith [Val Lewton], 4 Wives (New York: Vanguard Press, 1932), 166. 79. Boris Karloff, introduction, Tales of Terror (Cleveland: World Publishing, 1943), 13. Conrad’s story is about Yanko Goorall, a shipwreck victim from central Europe who lands raving and exhausted on the English coast, where the local townsfolk regard him as a freak. Only the simple girl Amy Foster cares for him, and the countryside and its inhabitants establish the grim mood: “A sense of penetrating sadness, like that inspired by a grave strain of music, disengaged itself from the silence of the fields. The men we met walked past, slow, unsmiling, with downcast eyes, as if the melancholy of an overburdened earth had weighted their feet, bowed their shoulders, borne down their glances.” Conrad, “Amy Foster,” reprinted in Tales of Terror, 143. Other stories in Karloff’s collection concerning loneliness include Helen Hull’s “Clay-Shuttered Doors” and Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows.” 80. Lewton, letter to Nina and Lucy Lewton, undated letter [1940], collection of Val Lewton Jr. 81. Colonel Tolbitis’s response is that of a loyal subordinate, a contributor to overall success, punished for a small infraction not his fault—a Lewton-style nightmare of the little man’s heroic efforts gone unappreciated: “They were raw troops—they’d marched all night—they hadn’t eaten all day—they were under heavy fire—and you won the battle—we’re encamped on the field. It was not my

196

Notes to pages 168–169

fault that they did not arrive on time. . . . Only one company was late. As soon as I could I moved up . . . . They didn’t rest. I made them move on.” 82. Karloff’s copy of the script is in the Cinema-Television Library, Special Collections, Doheny Library, University of Southern California. See Chamber of Horrors: A Tale of Bedlam, 11. 83. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in The Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Continuum, 1999), 130. 84. Manny Farber, “Underground Films” (1957), in Negative Space, 20, 14, 17.

Selected Bibliography

archival sources Cinema-Television Library, Special Collections, Doheny Library, University of Southern California (RKO scripts, publicity materials). Margaret Herrick Library, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills California (RKO publicity materials, Production Code documents). Collection of Val Lewton Jr., Washington, D.C. (letters, Ticonderoga script). Val Lewton Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. (scripts, letters, diaries, scrapbooks). Lilly Library Special Collections, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana. Museum of the City of New York (articles pertaining to Times Square). New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Collection. Charles E. Young Research Library, Special Collections, University of California at Los Angeles (RKO budgets of production costs, RKO shooting schedules, RKO call sheets).

primary sources Agate, James. “Brave Little Theatre: A Remarkable Actor.” London Sunday Times, January 24, 1937, 5. Agee, James. Agee on Film: Criticism and Comment on the Movies. New York: Modern Library, 2000. ———. “Films.” Nation 158 (March 11, 1944): 316. ———. “Films.” Nation 158 (April 1, 1944): 401–2. ———. “Films.” Nation 159 (September 30, 1944): 389. ———. “Films.” Nation 159 (November 25, 1944): 670–71. ———. “Films.” Nation 159 (December 2, 1944): 698–99. ———. “Films.” Nation 160 (January 20, 1945): 80.

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———. “Films.” Nation 160 (May 26, 1945): 608–9. ———. “Films.” Nation 162 (March 23, 1946): 354–55. ———. “Prize Day.” Nation 157 (December 25, 1943): 768–69. ———. “So Proudly We Fail.” Nation 157 (October 30, 1943): 509–10. Barnes, Howard. “On the Screen: The Curse of the Cat People.” New York Herald-Tribune, March 4, 1944. Berch, Barbara. “Gold in Them Chills.” Collier’s, January 29, 1944, 66. “Black Haiti: Where Old Africa and New World Meet.” Life, December 13, 1937, 26–30. Bodeen, DeWitt. Ladies of the Footlights. Pasadena, Calif.: Pasadena Playhouse Association, 1937. Brown, Earl. “American Negroes and the War.” Harper’s, April 1942, 545–52. Clark, Walter Van Tilburg. The Ox-Bow Incident. New York: Modern Library, 2001 [1940]. Clarke, Donald Henderson. Man of the World: Recollections of an Irreverent Reporter. New York: Vanguard Press, 1951. Cumberland, Marten. Climbing: A Comedy in Three Acts. London: H. F. W. Deane and Sons, 1937. Cummiskey, Joe. “Robinson Has Got It.” PM, April 19, 1946, 14. “Dad Said ‘Vaudeville’s a Goner’: Helped Son Win Film Success.” New York Herald-Tribune, January 16, 1944, sec. IV, p. 3. Dickens, Charles. A Tale of Two Cities. New York: Bantam, 1981 [1859]. Farber, Manny. “Against the Grain.” New Republic 111 (September 18, 1944): 339. ———. “B Plus.” New Republic 110 (March 20, 1944): 380–81. ———. “The Great White Way.” New Republic 109 (July 5, 1943): 20. ———. “Movies in Wartime.” New Republic 110 (January 3, 1944): 16–20. ———. “Rich Creamy Lather.” New Republic 111 (December 11, 1944): 800. ——— . “Signs of the Double-Cross.” New Republic 112 (June 4, 1945): 791. ———. “Theatrical Movies.” New Republic 110 (February 14, 1944): 211–12. ———. “The Trouble with Movies.” New Republic 108 (April 19, 1943): 508. ———. “The Trouble with Movies: II.” New Republic 108 (June 7, 1943): 764. Faulkner, William. “Dry September.” In Collected Stories, 169–83. New York: Vintage, 1977 [1931]. Forbes, Cosmo [Val Lewton]. Where the Cobra Sings. New York: Macaulay Press, 1932. Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 1974 [1940]. Freeman, Charles K., and Gerald Savory. Hand in Glove script, 1944. New York Public Library, Billy Rose Theatre Collection. Gibbs, Wolcott. “Black Majesty.” New Yorker, October 30, 1943, 38. Greenberg, Clement. “The Situation at the Moment.” Partisan Review 15 (January 1948): 81–84. Haskell, Loney. “The Corner—II: Reminiscences of Hammerstein’s Victoria.” New Yorker (December 20, 1930): 42, 44, 46–48. Hersey, John. Hiroshima. Toronto: Bantam, 1981 [1946]. Heyward, Dorothy, and Howard Rigsby. New Georgia [South Pacific] script, 1943. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. “The Culture Industry: Enlighten-

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ment as Mass Deception” (1944). In Horkheimer and Adorno, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, 120–67. New York: Continuum, 1999. Hurston, Zora Neale. Tell My Horse. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1938. Karloff, Boris, ed. Tales of Terror. Cleveland: World Publishing, 1943. Keith, Carlos [Val Lewton]. 4 Wives. New York: Vanguard Press, 1932. ———. A Laughing Woman. New York: Vanguard Press, 1933. ———. This Fool, Passion. New York: Vanguard Press, 1934. Kerkow, Herbert [Val Lewton]. The Fateful Star Murder. New York: Mohawk Press, 1931. Kronenberger, Louis. “An Honest Try on a Good Theme.” PM, December 31, 1943, p. 20. Lewton, Val. No Bed of Her Own. New York: Vanguard Press, 1932. ———. Rape of Glory. New York: Mohawk Press, 1931. ———. Yearly Lease. New York: Vanguard Press, 1932. McCarten, John. Untitled review of Bedlam. New Yorker (May 4, 1946): 48. McManus, John. “A Blessing in Disguise.” PM, March 5, 1944, p. 16. Morris, George L. K. “Art Chronicle: Hans Arp.” Partisan Review 4 (January 1938): 32. “Movie of the Week: Bedlam.” Life, February 25, 1946, 117–23. Mumford, Lewis. “The Sky Line: Concerning Glass Houses.” New Yorker, April 11, 1936, 57–58. Murray, Florence, ed. The Negro Handbook. New York: Current Reference Publications, 1944. Myrdal, Gunnar. An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1944. Orwell, George. “Charles Dickens” (1939). Reprinted in George Orwell: Essays. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin, 2000. 35–78. Pollock, Anna Marble. “Notes on the Amusement Market’s First Corner.” New York Times, December 2, 1934, X3. Pyle, Ernie. Brave Men. New York: Henry Holt, 1943. Redding, J. Saunders. “A Negro Looks at This War.” American Mercury 55 (November 1942): 585–92. Savory, Gerald. Hughie Roddis. New York: Alliance, 1942. Scott, John L. “Master of Horror Films Reveals His Technique.” Los Angeles Times, June 10, 1945, pt. 3, p. 3. Sheridan, Michael. “Sultan of Shudders.” Coronet, November 1943, 123. Siodmak, Curt. Donovan’s Brain. New York: Knopf, 1943. Stevenson, Robert Louis. A Child’s Garden of Verses. London: Longmans, Green, 1885. ———. A Child’s Garden of Verses. Photo-illustrations by Toni Frissell. New York: U.S. Camera Publishing, 1944. Willkie, Wendell. “The Case for the Minorities.” Saturday Evening Post, June 27, 1942, 14, 50. ———. One World. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1943. Wilson, Edmund. “A Treatise on Tales of Horror.” New Yorker, May 27, 1944, 72–82. Woolrich, Cornell. The Black Alibi. New York: Mercury Publications, 1942.

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secondary sources Baer, William, ed. Elia Kazan: Interviews. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2000. Bansak, Edmund. Fearing the Dark: The Val Lewton Career. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1995. Bazin, André. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” In Bazin, What Is Cinema? trans. Hugh Gray, 9–16. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967. ———. “Theater and Cinema: Part Two.” In Bazin, What Is Cinema? trans. Hugh Gray, 95–124. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967. Belting, Hans. Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. Bolla, Peter de. “The Visibility of Visuality: Vauxhall Gardens and the Siting of the Viewer.” In Vision and Textuality, ed. Stephen Melville and Bill Readings, 282–95. New York: Macmillan, 1995. Brady, Thomas F. “Times Square, New York: ‘Cesspool of the World.’ ” New York Times, February 21, 1969, 50. Brown, Georgina. “Dark Knight.” Village Voice, July 6, 1993, 45. Brunas, Michael, John Brunas, and Tom Weaver. Universal Horrors: The Studio’s Classic Films, 1931–1946. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1990. Carroll, Noel. The Philosophy of Horror; or, Paradoxes of the Heart. New York: Routledge, 1990. Clark, T. J. Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1999. Cripps, Thomas. Making Movies Black: The Hollywood Message Movie from World War II to the Civil Rights Era. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Curtis, James. James Whale: A New World of Gods and Monsters. London: Faber and Faber, 1998. Dalfiume, Richard M. “The ‘Forgotten Years’ of the Negro Revolution.” In The Negro in Depression and War: Prelude to Revolution, 1930–1945, ed. Bernard Sternsher, 298–316. Chicago: Quadrangle, 1969. Davis, Wade. The Serpent and the Rainbow. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985. Deleuze, Gilles, and Felix Guattari. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Trans. Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Edelstein, T. J. Vauxhall Gardens. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Center for British Art, 1983. Ellenberger, Allan R. Margaret O’Brien: A Career Chronicle and Biography. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2000. Everett, Todd. “The Noble Quest of Sir Lancelot Pinard.” Los Angeles HeraldExaminer, December 14, 1983, 33. Farber, Manny. “Pish-Tush” (1966). In Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies, 180–83. New York: Da Capo Press, 1998.

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———. “Underground Films” (1957). In Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies, 12–24. New York: Da Capo Press, 1998. ———. “Val Lewton” (1951). In Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies, 47–50. New York: Da Capo Press, 1998. Farber, Manny, with William S. Poster. “Preston Sturges” (1954). In Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies, 89–104. New York: Da Capo Press, 1998. Feingold, Michael. “The Ghost Ship.” Village Voice, July 13, 1993, 57. Fujiwara, Chris. Jacques Tourneur: The Cinema of Nightfall. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1998. Fussell, Paul. Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Gill, Glenda E. “Swifter Than a Weaver’s Shuttle: The Days of Canada Lee.” In Gill, No Surrender! No Retreat! African-American Pioneer Performers of Twentieth-Century American Theater, 107–35. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Glancy, H. Mark. “Dreaming of Christmas: Hollywood and the Second World War.” In Christmas at the Movies: Images of Christmas in American, British, and European Cinema, ed. Mark Connelly, 59–76. London: I. B. Tauris, 2000. Gold, Russell. “Guilty of Syncopation, Joy, and Animation: The Closing of Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom.” Studies in Dance History 5 (Spring 1994): 50–64. Graebner, William S. The Age of Doubt: American Thought and Culture in the 1940s. Boston: Twayne, 1991. Gray, Christopher. “A Times Sq. Cinema Nurtured by the Merchant of Menace.” New York Times, July 19, 1987, R14. Greenwood, Clive. “Skelton Knaggs: One of a Kind.” Classic Images 19 (August 1995): 16, 18. Gunning, Tom. “ ‘Like unto a Leopard’: Figurative Discourse in Cat People (1942) and Todorov’s The Fantastic.” Wide Angle 10 (1988): 30–39. ———. “Loie Fuller and the Art of Motion: Body, Light, Electricity and the Origins of Cinema.” In Camera Obscura, Camera Lucida: Essays in Honor of Annette Michelson, ed. Richard Allen and Malcolm Turvey, 75–89. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2003. ———. “ ‘An Unseen Energy Swallows Space’: The Space in Early Film and Its Relation to American Avant-Garde Film.” In Film Before Griffith, ed. John Fell, 355–66. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983. Hall, Barbara. “An Oral History with Albert E. van Schmus.” Unpublished manuscript, 1993. Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, California. Jacobs, Lea. “The B Film and the Problem of Cultural Distinction.” Screen 33 (Spring 1992): 1–13. James, Caryn. “Old Hollywood Horror, but with Depth and Flair.” New York Times, July 2, 1993, C3. Jewell, Richard B., with Vernon Harbin. The RKO Story. London: Arlington House, 1982.

202

Selected Bibliography

Kakutani, Michiko. “Rialto to Reopen Feb. 7 as Legitimate Theater.” New York Times, January 15, 1980, C8. Kazan, Elia. A Life. New York: Knopf, 1988. Kennedy, David M. Freedom from Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929–1945. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Koppes, Clayton R., and Gregory D. Black, “Blacks, Loyalty, and Motion-Picture Propaganda in World War II.” Journal of American History 73 (September 1986): 383–406. Lambert, Gavin. Nazimova: A Biography. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997. Langa, Helen. “Two Antilynching Art Exhibitions: Politicized Viewpoints, Racial Perspectives, Gendered Constraints.” American Art 13 (Spring 1999): 10–39. Lant, Antonia. Blackout: Reinventing Women for Wartime British Cinema. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991. MacQueen, Scott. Roy Webb: Music for the Films of Val Lewton. N.p.: Marco Polo, 2000. Booklet accompanying compact disc. Manguel, Alberto. The Bride of Frankenstein. London: British Film Institute, 1997. Mank, Gregory William. Hollywood Cauldron. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1994. Michelson, Annette. “The Kinetic Icon in the Work of Mourning: Prolegomena to the Analysis of a Textual System.” October 52 (Spring 1990): 17–38. Naremore, James. The Films of Vincente Minnelli. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. ———. More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998. Newman, Kim. Cat People. London: British Film Institute, 1999. Ogborn, Miles. “Locating the Macaroni: Luxury, Sexuality and Vision in Vauxhall Gardens.” Textual Practice 11 (1997): 445–61. Pauly, Thomas. An American Odyssey: Elia Kazan and American Culture. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983. Puig, Manuel. Kiss of the Spider Woman. Trans. Thomas Colchie. New York: Vintage, 1991. Pym, John. The Palm Beach Story. London: British Film Institute, 1998. Roeder, George. The Censored War: American Visual Experience during World War II. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993. Schatz, Thomas. The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era. New York: Henry Holt, 1988. Schickel, Richard. Good Morning, Mr. Zip Zip Zip: Movies, Memory, and World War II. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2003. Seymour, Blackie. “Skelton Knaggs: ‘The Vigilant Villagers.’ ” Classic Images 19 (March 1995): 34. Siegel, Joel. Val Lewton: The Reality of Terror. New York: Viking, 1973. Solkin, David. Painting for Money: The Visual Arts and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century England. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1993.

Selected Bibliography

203

Steimatsky, Noa. “Pasolini on Terra Sancta: Towards a Theology of Film.” Yale Journal of Criticism 11 (1998): 239–58. Stern, Lesley. The Scorsese Connection. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995. Telotte, J. P. Dreams of Darkness: Fantasy and the Films of Val Lewton. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985. Tuttle, William M., Jr. “Daddy’s Gone to War”: The Second World War in the Lives of America’s Children. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Woloch, Alex. The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003. Wood, Robin. “The Shadow Worlds of Jacques Tourneur.” Film Comment 8 (Summer 1972): 64–70.

Index

“Actors Like Trees” (Lewton), 17 Adorno, Theodor, 123, 169 Agate, James, 161; on Skelton Knaggs, 60–61, 71–72, 74, 178n2, 179n3 Agee, James, 9, 149; on The Curse of the Cat People, 2; on Hollywood snow, 55; on Mademoiselle Fifi, 36, 153; on Ox-Box Incident, 112; on power of film, 4; on The Sullivans, 153; on wartime experience, 3, 30––31; on Youth Runs Wild, 67–68 alienation: of black stand-alone roles, 114–16, 188n34; Dickensian figures of, 73–75, 181n41; Skelton Knaggs’s portrayals of, 63–66, 94–95, 179n12, 180n15, 185n97; minorness linked to, 66–68, 72–73; of movie theater environs, 85–88, 90; plot–stopping model of, 79–80, 183n60; in Taxi Driver, 95–96; of Times Square outsiders, 92–94; of war veterans, 147–52 An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (Myrdal), 116–17, 187n24 Americans: class inequities of, 153; contrasted with foreigners, 27–30; wartime experience of, 3–4, 30–31, 172n12 “Amy Foster” (Conrad), 167, 195n79 Anderson, Ivie, 97, 119 And Now Tomorrow (film), 40–41, 76 Anna Karenina (film), 22

Antoine, Leroy, 118 Apache Drums (Lewton, prod.), 122, 159 An Art Commentary on Lynching exhibition (1935), 105 Aspects of the Novel (Forster), 75 Astor, Mary, 142 The Bad and the Beautiful (film), 55 Baldwin, James, 117 ballyhoo, 83–84, 85 The Bamboo Blonde (film), 133, 143–45 Bansak, Edmund, 45, 172n22, 173n27 Barnes, Howard, 17, 66, 115 Barrymore, Lionel, 17 Basilica of S. Apollinaire in Classe, 19–20 The Battle of San Pietro (film), 4, 131 Bazin, André, 32, 63, 121 Beavers, Louise, 113 Bedlam (Lewton, prod.), 1, 62–63, 81; advertising for 82–83; amalgamation symbolism of, 155–57; dark/light realms of, 139–40, 160; Gilded Boy scene of, 132–134; Hiroshima context of, 157–58; holy/universalized victim of, 153–55; as indictment of excess, 161–65, 194nn64,65; Karloff’s minorness in, 168–69; and My Own True Love, 147–52; postwar consumerism of, 141–42, 145, 152–53; production cost of, 162; sculpted/iconic figure of, 137, 138–39, 191n4; war images of, 146–47

205

206 Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, 139 Behrman, S. N., 22, 174n20 The Bells of St. Mary’s (film), 165 Belting, Hans, 19, 25 Benito Cereno (Melville), 28 Benton, Thomas Hart, 107 Berch, Barbara, 2 Best, Willie, 102 Best Foot Forward (stage show), 137 Best Years of Our Lives (film), 151–52 The Biggest Thief in Paris (Lewton, assigned prod.), 159 The Black Alibi (Woolrich), 183n60 Blackbeard (Lewton, assigned prod.), 159 The Black Cat (film), 28 black roles: as amalgamated figures, 155–57; fast-action pace of, 97–100, 101, 185n2; lynching identity of, 104–7, 108–9; of power/minorness, 112–17, 188n34; Paul Robeson on, 99, 185n2; slowing/stopping’s treatment of, 109–11, 123, 189n56; as tragic/descendant figures, 126–29, 131; wartime revision of, 100, 102–3 blacks: entertainment venues of, 118–20; Leopard Man’s commemoration of, 124–26, 127; 1930s antilynching images of, 104–5, 106; war sentiments of, 114–15, 131, 190n66; wartime policy on, 100, 102–3 Bloch, Julius, 104 Bloom, Harold, 164, 165 Blore, Eric, 113–14 Blyth, Ann, 145 Bodeen, DeWitt, 11, 33, 36–37, 38 The Body Snatcher (Lewton, prod.), 2, 51, 81, 158; grieving-woman icon of, 34, 35–36; Karloff’s role in, 168 Bogart, Humphrey, 145 Bombardier (film), 78 Borden, L. C., 100 Boucher, François, 151 Brady, Thomas F., 92 Brahm, John, 62 Bride of Frankenstein (film), 65 The Bridge of San Luis Rey (film), 24 Broadway on a Saturday Night (Hirschfeld), 94 Broken Strings (film), 99–100, 101 Brontë, Charlotte, 165 Brooks, Jean, 88 B-29 bombers, 143–45 Bulgakov, Leo, 40 Cabin in the Sky (film), 119, 189n56 Calvert, Phyllis, 147, 149

Index Capra, Frank, 131, 143 Carre-Four (I Walked with a Zombie): Haitian links to, 103–4, 186n13; iconic stasis of, 97, 98, 102–3; immortality of, 121–22; lynching images of, 104–7, 108–9; power/minorness of, 112–13, 116–18, 119–20; as tragic/descendant figure, 126–29, 131 Carroll, Noel, 19 Carter, Ann, 11, 39, 51; in And Now Tomorrow, 40–41; in Commandos Strike at Dawn, 40, 45; in I Married a Witch, 46; morbid imagination of in The Curse of the Cat People, 41, 45–50; stillness of in The Curse of the Cat People, 55, 56, 57; in The North Star, 40 Carter, Bertram, 39 Cat People (Lewton, prod.), 1, 2, 10, 19, 76, 80, 160; American characters of, 29, 30; cannibalized elements of, 165; Manny Farber on, 67; trashiness theme of, 7–9 Cat People (Newman), 172n22 children. See otherworldly child A Child’s Garden of Verses (Stevenson), 48–49, 178n88 Christmas Eve scenes: American-foreign oppositions in, 29–31, 41; commemorative grief of, 33–34; Russianness of, 19–20, 22–24; wartime symbolism of, 53–55 cinema: cannibalized epics of, 164–66; depth standards of, 31–32; excesses of, 161–62, 163–64, 194nn64,65; horror film genre of, 1–2, 89, 152, 158–59; mummification concept of, 121; narrative action principle of, 17–19; with theatrical orientation, 32–33. See also movie theaters; war films Citizen Kane (film), 32 Clair, René, 46 Clark, T. J., 9, 186n17 Clark, Walter Van Tilburg, 111 Clarke, Robert, 141, 146 Clarke, Donald Henderson, 87, 88 Climbing: A Comedy in Three Acts (Cumberland), 60, 178n2 The Clock (film), 54, 68 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 77, 182n54 Commandos Strike at Dawn (film), 40, 45, 124, 146 commemoration. See recollection The Condition of the Working Class in England (Engels), 74, 181n47

Index Conrad, Joseph, 167, 195n79 Conway, Tom, 103 Cotten, Joseph, 68 Craig, Alec, 75–78, 83, 85, 182nn54,55 Cripps, Thomas, 100, 103 Crowther, Bosley, 66 Cumberland, Marten, 60, 178n2 Cummiskey, Joe, 156 Curry, John Steuart, 104 The Curse of the Cat People (Lewton, prod.), 37, 67, 80, 122, 149; admirers on, 2, 171n9; American-foreign oppositions in, 29–31; commemorative grief of, 33–34; iconic figure of, 13–15, 16–17; Lewton’s title for, 2; otherworldly/imaginative child of, 38–39, 41, 45–48; Rialto-style connotations of, 95; Russianness of, 19–20, 22–24; snow imagery of, 24, 55, 56; Stevenson-based images of, 48–50; theatrical orientation of, 32–33, 176n60; wheel/reel image of, 56, 57 Curtiz, Michael, 145 Cymbeline (Shaw), 63, 94 D’Agostino, Albert, 11, 29, 175n45 Dale, Virginia, 70 Dalfiume, Richard, 117 Daniell, Henry, 168 dark/light symbolism: of Christmas Eve scenes, 29–31; of war/peace transition, 139–41, 160 David Copperfield (film), 73 Davis, Wade, 104 A Day at the Races (film), 97–99, 119 Days of Glory (film), 26, 135–37, 138 Dean, Julia, 33 death: child’s relation to, 38–39; funerary icons of, 25–26; imagination’s sense of, 41–43, 46–48; officially censored images of, 3, 30, 146, 172n12; postwar commercialization of, 143–45, 152–53; snow images of, 55–56, 57; Stevenson-based images of, 48–52; in war films, 3–4, 89, 184n78 Dee, Frances, 114 Deity of the Crossroads (Lam), 107 Demarest, William, 109 De Niro, Robert, 95–96 Desirable Woman (Lewton, assigned prod.), 159 de Toth, André, 113 The Devil Thumbs a Ride (film), 191n5 Dickens, Charles, 73–75, 79, 181n41 Die Gently Stranger (Lewton, prod.), 159 Ding Dong Williams (film), 137–38, 157

207 Dix, Richard, 71, 72 Dmytryk, Edward, 29 Donat, Robert, 140 Donne, John, 140 Donovan’s Brain (Siodmak), 166–67 Double Indemnity (film), 18, 79 Douglas, Melvyn, 147 Dowson, Ernest, 60 Drake, Tom, 142 Dreams of Darkness: Fantasy and the Films of Val Lewton (Telotte), 172n22 Drew, Ellen, 70 “Dry September” (Faulkner), 126, 190n63 A Duel in the Sun (film), 194n64 Dunn, James, 42, 43 Eaton, Shirley, 158 Edwards, Ralph, 143 Ellerbe, Harry, 25 Elsom, Isobel, 64 L’Enfant du Regiment (Millais), 57 Engels, Friedrich, 74, 181n47 Evenings on a Farm near Dikanka (Gogol), 22–23 Executive Order 8802, 100, 117 Eythe, William, 161–62 fairgrounds imagery, 142–43 Farber, Manny, 2, 9, 110, 121, 142, 161; on American protagonists, 29–30; on The Curse of the Cat People, 49, 67; on film/movie house connection, 81, 87; on I Walked with a Zombie, 165; on minor films, 7, 169; on movie audiences, 191n6; on movie advertising, 82; on movie theater staff, 85; on narrative action principle, 18; on None But the Lonely Heart, 67; on Ox-Bow Incident, 111–12; on Rialto Theater, 91–92; on slowness images, 122, 189n56; on Preston Sturges, 74; on theatrical movie technique, 32; on war film formula, 3–4, 78, 89, 184n78 Farren, Elizabeth, 33 Farrow, John, 40, 124 The Fateful Star Murder (Lewton), 5, 8, 19, 72, 87, 136, 172n25 Father Malachy’s Miracle (Lewton, assigned prod.), 159 Faulkner, William, 126, 190n63 Fearing the Dark: The Val Lewton Career (Bansak), 172n22 Feingold, Michael, 81 Ferguson, Otis, 118–19 film. See cinema

208 Fonda, Henry, 111 Ford, John, 32 Forever Amber (film), 62 Forster, E. M., 75, 116 Fort Apache (film), 32 4 Wives (Lewton), 5, 79, 81, 87, 167, 183n63 Fragonard, Jean-Honoré, 151 Frankenstein (film), 65 Fraser, Richard, 146 Friend, Philip, 147, 149 Frissell, Toni, 178n88 frontality: deanimation effects of, 17; of Gilded Boy, 137; of Russian icons, 19–20, 21; of theatrical orientation, 32–33 The Fugitive (Curry), 104–5, 106 Fussell, Paul, 3, 8, 9, 41, 66, 72, 147 Gage, Erford, 149–50 Garland, Judy, 42, 54, 68, 142 Garland, Robert, 63 Garner, Peggy Ann: tragic imagination of in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, 42–44, 51, 177n75 gay characters, 81, 183n63 The Ghost Ship (Lewton, prod.), 2, 122, 160, 185n101; alienation theme of, 65–66; ballyhoo allusions of, 83, 85; Dickensian ties to, 73–75; majorminor power relations of, 71–72, 76–78, 80, 182n54; movie theater imagery of, 81–82, 85–87, 88, 90; at 1993 film series, 81, 183n61; original blind singer role of, 120; sailor’s soliloquy in, 58, 59, 61–62; Taxi Driver’s homage to, 95–96; Times Square connotations of, 92–94, 95 Gibbs, Wolcott, 115–16 Gilded Boy (Bedlam): as amalgamated racial figure, 155–57; as cannibalized figure, 164–65, 166; as commodified suffering, 152–53; Hiroshima context of, 157–58; holiness/universalism of, 153–55; iconic stasis of, 137, 191n4; powerful minorness of, 137–39, 169; Vauxhall Gardens scene of, 132–133, 134; war veteran’s link to, 148–52 Girlie Show (Hopper), 92 Gogol, Nikolai, 22 Gold, Russell, 120 Goldfinger (film), 158 Gone with the Wind (film), 102, 136, 163–64, 165, 168, 194n64 Goodkind, Saul, 69, 180n32

Index Gordon, Christine, 122, 123 Graebner, William S., 141, 145 Grant, Cary, 67, 69 Green, Elizabeth Shippen, 52 Greenberg, Clement, 66 grief: as ambiguous patriotism, 36–38; of lamenting female icons, 33–36; of Lewton’s Russian characters, 23–24; of Russians versus Americans, 27–31 Griffith, Edward, 51, 113 Guardians of the Secret (Pollock), 107–108, 186n17 Gunning, Tom, 17, 33 Hall, Barbara, 173n33 Hall, Porter, 79 Hand in Glove (play), 63–65, 95, 179n12, 180n15, 185n97 “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” (song), 53–54 Hawks, Howard, 32 Headin’ for God’s Country (film), 70–71 Heart of a City (play), 63 Hero of Our Time (Lermontov), 136 Herrmann, Bernard, 96 Hersey, John, 157–58 Hess, Myra, 148 Heyward, Dorothy, 115 Hiroshima (Hersey), 158 Hiroshima bombing, 157–58 Hirschfeld, Al, 92–93 Hitchcock, Alfred, 5, 25, 32, 68, 187n24 Hitler’s Children (film), 29 Hogarth, William, 137 Holbrook, Victor, 146 The Hoofer (vaudeville show), 137 Hopper, Edward, 92 Horkheimer, Max, 123, 169 horror films: as Lewton’s niche, 5–6; postwar unpopularity of, 152, 158–59; wartime popularity of, 1–2, 89 House, Billy, 145, 164 The House of Dracula (film), 62 Howe, Irving, 75 How to Become a Civilian (film), 29 Hughie Roddis (Savory), 95, 185n97 Hurston, Zora Neale, 104 Huston, John, 4, 131 iconic figures: casting of, 11; commemorative grief of, 33–36; funerary meaning of, 25–26; Gilded Boy as, 137, 152–54, 191n4; mummification role of, 121–22; as postwar oddities, 160–61; powerful minorness of, 3, 4–5, 112–13, 114, 169; Russianness

Index of, 19–20, 22–24, 26–27; stillness of, 13–15, 16–17, 97, 98; theatrical orientation of, 32–33. See also minor characters If This Be Known (Lewton, assigned prod.), 159 Iliad (Homer), 71 imagination: in The Curse of the Cat People, 45–48; death’s relation to, 41–43; of otherworldly child, 38–39; as Stevenson-inspired, 48–52 I Married a Witch (film), 46 The Invisible Man’s Revenge (film), 62 In Which We Serve (film), 120 Isle of the Dead (Lewton, prod.), 62, 81, 96; Karloff’s role in, 167–68, 195n81; major-minor power relations in, 70; musical score of, 139–40 It’s a Wonderful Life (film), 143, 145 I Walked with a Zombie (Lewton, prod.), 1, 80, 160; borrowed plot of, 6, 165; Gilded Boy’s link to, 155–56; Haitian metaphors of, 103–4, 186n13; Harlem nightclub sequence of, 118–20; lynching imagery of, 104–109; minor/powerful figure of, 97, 98, 112–13, 116–18; negative reactions to, 120–21; racial politics of, 102–3; stillness of motion in, 121–23, 189n56; street ballyhoo for, 83–84; tragic/descendant black of, 126–29, 131 Jacobs, Lea, 184n84 James, Caryn, 81 Jane Eyre (Brontë), 6, 165 Jenkins, Jackie, 51 Jewell, Richard, 35 Jones, Darby, 11; ancillary roles of, 113–14; Carre-Four role of, 97, 98, 103, 112–13; fast-action performances by, 97–100, 99, 101; in racist film, 117–18; salary of, 114. See also Carre-Four Junior Miss (stage show), 137 Karloff, Boris, 2, 132, 141; in Bedlam, 139, 140; in Bride of Frankenstein, 65; in Isle of the Dead, 167–68, 195n81; minorness sensibility of, 167, 168–69, 195n79 Kazan, Elia, 5, 42, 43–44, 51, 177n75 Keller, Walter, 11 Kennedy, David M., 102 kenosis (term), 164 Kerr, Deborah, 140, 159–60

209 Kiss of the Spider Woman (Puig), 171n9 Knaggs, Skelton, 11, 61; acting abilities of, 60–62, 178n2, 179n3; as alienated Finn, 65–66, 80, 95; Dickensian ties of, 74–75, 181n47, 182n48; Hand in Glove role of, 63–65, 179n12, 180n15, 185n97; little sailor soliloquy of, 58, 59; salary of, 72, 182n55; Thersites-style staging of, 71–73; in upstaging contests, 68–70 Korda, Alexander, 140 Kronenberger, Louis, 115 Ladies of the Footlights (Bodeen), 33 La Guardia, Fiorello, 37, 120, 121 Lam, Wifredo, 107 Lambert, Gavin, 24 Langa, Helen, 105 Langford, Frances, 143, 144 Lant, Antonia, 140–41 Lauber, Pauline, 177n78 A Laughing Woman (Lewton), 5, 6, 87, 118, 166; American-foreign oppositions of, 27, 28; black roles in, 102, 155; Russian icons of, 19, 20; stillness/deanimation of, 13, 16–17 Laura (film), 72 Lawford, Peter, 160 Lawrence, Sir Thomas, 33 Lee, Anna, 40, 132, 141, 146, 164, 165, 192n23 Lee, Canada, 114, 115, 116, 187n24, 188n34 Lee, Carolyn, 51 Lee, Donna, 34–35 Leigh, Vivien, 164, 165 The Leopard Man (Lewton, prod.), 1, 80, 127; commemorative stillness of, 124–26, 189n59, 190nn60,61,63; Gilded Boy’s link to, 155–56; majorminor power relations of, 80, 183n60 Lermontov, Mikhail, 136 Leskov, Nikolai, 19 Leventon, Yakov, 24 Lewin, Albert, 69 Lewton, Ruth (Lewton’s wife), 160, 194n64 Lewton, Val, 163; on acting, 17; background/career of, 5–6, 87; on Gone with the Wind, 163–64, 194n64; on horror film trends, 1, 89, 152; on Alec Miller, 14; Russian interests of, 19–20, 22–23, 26–27, 135–37, 174n20; trashiness preoccupation of, 7–9, 172n25; on wartime profiteer-

210 Lewton, Val (continued) ing, 153; on World War II, 10. See also Lewton’s films; Lewton’s novels Lewton’s films: American characters of, 29–30; black roles in, 102–3; cannibalizing traits of, 164–67; collaborators on, 10–11, 173n33; Dickensian figures of, 73–75, 181n44; irrationality theme of, 7, 172n22; minorness/trashiness of, 6–9; motion principles of, 122–24, 189nn56,59; new approach to, 9–10, 173n27; 1993 film series of, 80–81; plotstopping grotesquerie of, 79–80, 183n60; in postwar period, 158–61; production costs of, 162; Russianness of, 19–20, 22–24, 26–27; stillness techniques of, 7, 13–15, 16–17, 25–26, 121; Taxi Driver’s homage to, 95–96; upstaging device of, 71–73 Lewton’s novels: American-foreign oppositions of, 27–29; black characters of, 102; golden women of, 154, 156; names of, 5; Russian icons of, 19; still figures of, 13 Lifeboat (film), 32, 187n24 Life magazine, 30, 162, 163 The Lodger (film), 62 Lombard, Carole, 113 The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (Riesman), 45 “Looking-Glass River” (Stevenson), 49 Lugosi, Bela, 118 Lundigan, William, 70 lynching: of amalgamated Gilded Boy, 155–57; Leopard Man’s recollection of, 124–26, 127, 190nn60,61; in 1930s art, 104–105, 106; Pollock’s image of, 107, 108; racial connotations of, 187n24; slowing/stopping’s treatment of, 109–12 The Lynching (Bloch), 104–105 MacMurray, Fred, 113 MacQueen, Scott, 139, 140 Mademoiselle Fifi (Lewton, prod.), 10, 36, 37, 80, 153 Magnificent Ambersons (film), 72, 165 The Major and the Minor (film), 68 Malembo (Lam), 107 Manguel, Alberto, 65 Mank, Gregory William, 139, 161 Mann, Anthony, 133 Man of the World (Clarke), 87 Marine Raiders (film), 32, 133, 187n24

Index Marx Brothers, A Day at the Races, 97–99 Maupassant, Guy de, 36 McCarten, John, 162 McDaniel, Hattie, 102 McManus, John, 14, 66 Meet Me in St. Louis (film): childhood imagination in, 41–42; postwar opulence of, 142–43; wartime symbolism of, 53–55 Melville, Herman, 28 Memphis Belle (film), 31–32, 145 Michelson, Annette, 25, 26 Mildred Pierce (film), 145, 162 Millais, John Everett, 55, 57 Miller, Alec, Virgin and Child, 14, 16 Minnelli, Vincente, 5, 41, 53–54, 55, 68, 119, 145 minor characters: alienation trait of, 67–68; ballyhoo’s link to, 83–84, 85; as cannibalized figures, 164–67; Dickens’s use of, 73–75, 79, 181n41; Karloff’s roles as, 167, 168–69, 195n79; in Lewton’s postwar films, 160; memorable singularity of, 6–7, 11–12, 112–13, 116, 169; plotstopping grotesqueness of, 79–80, 183n60; salaries for, 72, 78, 114, 182n55; Thersites-style staging of, 71–73; in upstaging contests, 68–71, 76–78, 182n54. See also iconic figures Mitchell, Margaret, 163 Moffett, Sharyn, 51 A Month in the Country (film), 25 Morgan, Frank, 113 Morris, George L. K., 12 Mother and Child (Smith), 54 Motion Picture Herald, 161, 194n57 movie theaters: alienated spaces of, 85–88; audiences at, 138, 191n6; ballyhoo figure of, 83–84, 85; B films’ reproduction of, 81–83; prices at, 91, 184n84; Rialto Theater, 90–92; as wartime escape, 88–90, 184n78. See also cinema Mumford, Lewis, 90–91 Muni, Paul, 40 Muse, Clarence, 99, 100 Musuraca, Nicholas, 11, 14 My Own True Love (Lewton, prod.), 147–149, 150, 159 Myrdal, Gunnar, 116–17, 187n24 “My Shadow” (Stevenson), 48–49 NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), 100, 189n56

Index Nagasaki bombing, 157 Napier, Alan, 36, 148 Naremore, James, 14, 119 narrative action principle, 17–19 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 100, 189n56 National Gallery (London), 148 Native Son (Wright), 115, 188n34 Nazimova, Alla, 5, 24–25, 176n60 The Negro Soldier (film), 131 Neill, Roy William, 69 Newman, Kim, 4, 6, 172n22 Nicholas Nickleby (Dickens), 74 No Bed of Her Own (Lewton), 5, 27, 87–88, 152, 154, 173n27, 194n65 None But the Lonely Heart (film), 62, 66–67, 69 The North Star (film), 21–22, 26, 40 Norton, Jack, 109 O’Brien, Margaret: morbid imagination of in Meet Me in St. Louis 41–42; in Our Vines Have Tender Grapes, 51–52 Odets, Clifford, 66 “O Legba” (voodoo song), 118 Oliver Twist (film), 73 The One vs. the Many (Woloch), 9 One World (Willkie), 100 Orozco, José Clemente, 107 Orwell, George, 74–75, 116 Othello (Shakespeare), 115–16 otherworldly child: of The Curse of the Cat People, 45–48; imagination of, 41–43; mother-daughter relationship of, 46; snow play of, 53–55; Stevenson-based images of, 48–53, 178n88; in wartime films, 38–41 Our Vines Have Tender Grapes (film), 51 Ox-Bow Incident (film), 111–12, 186n21 The Paleface (film), 62 The Palm Beach Story (film), 109–10 Palmer, Maria, 136 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 32 Passport to Suez (film), 113 patriotism: of ascendant hero, 78–79, 130; grief’s ambiguous expression of, 36–38; racial politics of, 120–21 Pauly, Thomas, 42 Peck, Gregory, 161 Penn, Dena, 136 Perfect Strangers (film), 140–41 The Picture of Dorian Gray (film), 62, 69 Please Believe Me (Lewton, prod.), 159–60

211 Pollock, Jackson, 107–8, 186n17 Port Authority Bus Terminal (Times Square), 92 postwar symbolism: of atomic destruction, 157–58, 160–61; of B-29 bombers, 143–45; of Bedlam’s dark/light realms, 139–41, 160; of commercialism/opulence, 141–43, 145; of Gilded Boy’s suffering, 152–53; of war veteran’s alienation, 147–52. See also war symbolism Powell, Adam Clayton, Jr., 120 Puig, Manuel, 2, 171n9 Pushkin verse, 22, 23, 174n20 Pyle, Ernie, 30 Pym, John, 109 race riots, 112, 120 racial injustice: Leopard Man’s recollection of, 124–26, 127, 190nn60, 61,63; slowing/stopping treatment of, 109–12; wartime response to, 100, 102–3; zombies linked to, 103–4, 186n13. See also lynching Rake’s Progress (Hogarth), 137 Randolph, Asa Philip, 117 Rape of Glory (Lewton), 5, 19, 22, 24, 153–54 Rathbone, Basil, 69, 164 Ratoff, Gregory, 23 The Reality of Terror (Siegel), 172n22 Rebecca (film), 25 recollection: by iconic figures, 33–36; photographic form of, 121; of racial violence, in Leopard Man, 124–26, 127, 190nn60,61,63; stillness model of, 110–12, 123–24 Redding, J. Saunders, 131, 190n66 Redelings, Lowell E., 175n45 Red River (film), 32 Reisman, David, 45 Rialto Theater (Times Square), 82–83, 90–92, 96 Rigsby, Howard, 115 Robeson, Paul, 99, 115–16, 185n2 Robinson, Edward G., 51 Robinson, Jackie, 156 Robson, Frederick “Little,” 74 Robson, Mark, 154, 162, 163 Rockwell, Norman, 52–53 Roeder, George, 3, 30, 172n12 Rogell, Sid, 100, 117–18, 145 Rogers, Ginger, 31 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 100, 117 Rowland, Roy, 51 Russell, Harold, 152

212 Russell, Jane, 62 Russian images: American attitudes versus, 27–31; frontal/static poses of, 19–20; funerary meaning of, 25–26; Gilded Boy’s link to, 151, 153–54; in Hollywood films, 21–22; of melancholy/tragedy, 23–25; of supernatural folklore, 22–23, 174n20; in Tourneur’s film, 135–136, 137. See also iconic figures Ryan, Robert, 31 Savoy Ballroom (Harlem), 120–21 Schatz, Thomas, 10 Schuster, Harold, 187n24 Scorsese, Martin, 2, 95–96, 171n9 Selznick, David O., 24, 128, 165; Lewton’s criticism of, 163–64, 168, 194n64; Lewton’s work with, 5, 22, 73–74 “Sergeant Mammy” screenplay (Lewton), 102 The Seventh Victim (Lewton, prod.), 2, 80, 88–89, 140, 149 Shadow of a Doubt (film), 68, 79 Shaw, Janet, 68, 79 Shields, Arthur, 159 Siegel, Joel, 96, 159, 162, 172n22, 185n101 Simon, Simone, 3; in The Curse of the Cat People, 13, 15, 17; in Mademoiselle Fifi, 36, 37; Rialto-style images of, 95; and War Department commendation, 36–37, 38 Since You Went Away (film), 24 Sing Your Way Home (film), 34, 137 Siodmak, Curt, 166 “The Situation at the Moment” (Greenberg), 66 slavery. See racial injustice Smith, Betty, 42 Smith, Jessie Willcox, 52; Mother and Child, 54 Smith, Kent, 29 snow (image), 24, 53–56, 57 Snowflake (actor), 109 Soldier in the Rain (sculpture), 187n24 Song of Russia (film), 23 South Pacific (play), 114–15, 116 South Riding (film), 62 The Spy in Black (film), 69–70, 71 Steimatsky, Noa, 32 Stevens, Mark, 160 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 34, 48–52, 178n88 Stewart, Jimmy, 143

Index stillness: Carre-Four’s power of, 97, 98, 112–13, 114; cinematic aversion to, 17–19; commemorative role of, 33–34, 123–26, 190nn60,61,63; dignity of, 189n56; Gilded Boy’s density of, 137, 138–39; immortality of, 121; of Kazan’s funeral scene, 44–45; Lewton’s techniques of, 7, 13–15, 16–17, 25–26; as metaphorical slavery, 103–4; motion’s quality of, 122–23, 189n59; of mummy portraits, 25–26; in Ox-Bow Incident, 111–12; in Palm Beach Story, 109–10; racial politics of, 100, 102–3; and treadmill machine, 124; of war veteran’s alienation, 148–49 The Story of G.I. Joe (film), 30 street ballyhoo, 83–84, 85 Sturges, Preston, 18, 68, 74, 109–10 The Sullivans (film), 130, 153 Sullivan’s Travels (film), 110 Sundown (film), 18 Swing High, Swing Low (film), 113 T. M. P. (movie critic), 120–21 A Tale of Two Cities (film), 73–74, 128, 129, 136–37, 164, 165, 181n44 Tales of Manhattan (film), 185n2 Tales of Terror (Karloff), 2, 167, 195n79 Taras Bulba (Gogol), 22 Tarzan’s New York Adventure (film), 18 Taxi Driver (film), 95–96 Taylor, Robert, 23 Tell My Horse (Hurston), 104 Telotte, J. P., 172n22 Temple, Shirley, 51 Tender Comrade (film), 31, 176n51 Terror by Night (film), 62, 69, 180n32 Thersites (Iliad), 71 “The Sealed Angel” (Leskov), 19 Thimig, Helen, 70 This Fool, Passion (Lewton), 5, 19, 55, 87, 136; American-foreign oppositions of, 28–29; melancholic Russian of, 23, 26; still figures of, 13, 190n60; war veteran of, 150–51 Three Russian Girls (film), 29 Three Songs of Lenin (film), 26 Ticonderoga script (Lewton), 122–23, 164, 165 Times Square, 90–93, 94 Todd, William, 174n20 Toland, Gregg, 32 “To One in Bedlam” (Dowson), 60–61, 179n3 Toumanova, Tamara, 136, 138

Index Tourneur, Jacques, 1, 11, 124, 126, 128, 135, 173n33 The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (film), 145 The Treatment of the Child in Films seminar (1944), 45, 177n78 A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (film), 42–45, 51, 76, 177n75 Tyers, Jonathan, 141 Ulmer, Edgar, 28 “Underground Films” (Farber), 7, 81 “The Unseen Playmate” (Stevenson), 48–49 van Schmus, Albert E., 11, 173n33 Vauxhall Gardens (London), 132–133, 141–42 Veidt, Conrad, 69–70 Vernon, Glenn, 11, 157; dance roles of, 137–38, 191n5; as Gilded Boy, 132–133, 134, 138–39; on movie fame, 161, 194n57; physical appearance of, 154, 155; war roles of, 133, 135 Vertov, Dziga, 25, 26–27 Virgin and Child (Miller), 14, 16 Virginia (film), 51, 113 The Virgin of the Great Panagia, Called the Virgin Orant of Yaroslavl (anonymous), 21 Voyeur (Rockwell), 52–53 Wade, Russell, 59, 62, 77–79, 143 Walker, Robert, 68, 160 War Department, 3, 30, 36–37, 146, 172n12 war films: ascendant hero of, 78–79, 130; classic formula of, 3–4, 89, 184n78; depth standards of, 31–32; lynching metaphors of, 187n24; with Russian themes, 21–22 war symbolism: of ascendant hero, 78–79, 130; in Bedlam, 146–47; of darkness/light, 29–31; derived from Stevenson, 48–52, 178n88; of Kazan’s funeral scene, 43–45, 177n75; of Lewton’s icons, 3, 4–5; in Lewton’s postwar films, 159–60; of lynching, 112, 187n24; of movie theater environs, 88–90, 184n78; of otherworldly/imaginative child, 38–43, 46–48; postwar transition from, 139–42; Russianness of, 21–22; of snow play, 53–56, 57; of

213 Thersites-style domination, 71–73. See also postwar symbolism Wartime (Fussell), 9 Waskow, Henry T., 30 We Are the Marines (film), 120 Webb, Roy, 11, 96, 139 Welles, Orson, 72, 165 Wellman, William, 30, 110–11 Whale, James, 63, 65, 179n13, 180n15 Where the Cobra Sings (Lewton), 5, 13, 27–28, 154, 156 Whipper, Leigh, 111, 112 White, Walter, 100, 103, 105, 111, 121, 155 White Cargo (film), 113 Wilder, Billy, 18, 68, 79 Williams, Jay G., 66 Willkie, Wendell, 100, 103, 107, 112 Wilson, Edmund, 2, 35, 47–48, 89–90 A Wing and a Prayer (film), 31–32, 161–62 Wise, Robert, 34 Wolfe, Ian, 162 Woloch, Alex, 9, 68; on major-minor character relations, 76–77; on minor characters, 71, 72–73, 79, 181n41 Wood, Robin, 10–11, 30, 117 Woolrich, Cornell, 183n60 Wordsworth, William, 46 World’s Fair (St. Louis), 142–43 World War II: American experience of, 3–4, 27, 30–31, 172n12; atomic bombings of, 157–58; black attitudes on, 114–15, 131, 190n66; cinematic commodification of, 143–45, 152–53; horror film trends during, 1–2, 89; hospitals/wards of, 146; Lewton on, 10; racial politics of, 100, 102–3, 112, 116–17, 120. See also war films; war symbolism Wray, Ardel, 124 Wright, Richard, 115 Wright, Teresa, 68 Wyler, William, 31–32, 145, 151 Yearly Lease (Lewton), 5, 27, 163, 173n27 Young, Loretta, 40 Youth Runs Wild (Lewton, prod.), 10, 29, 74, 80, 152; James Agee on, 67–68; Glenn Vernon’s role in, 133, 137, 138 Zombies on Broadway (film), 100, 117–18

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