Shhhh! At long last, lost Lewtons: ZOMBIES ON BROADWAY, THE FALCON AND THE COEDS

Shhhh! Let us speak of Val Lewton, but quietly. A man whose oeuvre of poetic B-movie horrors we knew of, even in the 80s of Central Jersey suburbia (where we taped them off local TV creature double features, like a fisherman dipping his claw into the soft stream), Lewton made subtle and shadowy noir-horrors that are still ephemeral, mere wisps of smoke through the threader. Yet how come even my Journey-crankin' gearhead brother also liked Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie after I taped them back-to-back when they came on WORs Creature Double Feature and we watched them nearly every night one long ago summer, the fan on next to the window drowning out the crickets,  and the harp and frond shadows whistling all around the dark verandas? We dug the growls in eerie WMCA basement pools, and the rustle of the cane fields. They didn't shout and telegraph their emotions --they talked in low, conspiratorial voices and operated on a level of subtlety that drew us in (we had to lean into them), leaving us transported, and... then... suddenly realizing, as does the lovelorn birthday girl in Leopard Man, that it's gotten dark and we're locked in with some strange deadly force we can never see clearly. Where most horror was like a crazy derelict shouting at us over shrill orchestration, Lewton's movies lured us close with seductive calming whispers.

Maybe that was part of their appeal --the low, quiet talking was part of the wartime experience. Loose lips sink ships! The guy on the park bench reading the paper might be a Nazi spy! We could watch these films all night and never wake the parents (and they were good for hangovers, too).

It being the war, the thinking at the big studios was that if one must make horror films, make some of them hilarious, so that America might laugh at its Euro-thrashing boogeyman fears. Boris Karloff was on Broadway with Arsenic and Old Lace, and 1942's underrated Boogeyman will Get You was at Columbia; Lugosi was chasing the Dead End Kids around moldy Monogram passageways. And at RKO--on the B-lot with Lewton and Tourneur--a new way to exorcise the horror of war was manifesting, a style the both looked forward to film noir and backwards to classic literature and ancient myth, and with a minimalist leave-it-to-your-imagination approach to monsters.

The latter was something that we young Famous Monsters of Filmland devotees were initially turned off by, but then later-- when confronted with too many bad monster suits--we finally realized how seeing is never the same as believing; a really dark black shadow is itself scarier than any illuminated monster hiding within it.

That shadowy minimalism, in combination with the quiet whispering and the mostly-indoors filming, and the supernatural--unconscious--power-of-suggestion-genuine supernatural transformation aspects, makes Lewtons seem very personal. Everyone in the world could be wearing I walked with a Zombie T-shirts and we'd still think we were the only one who resonated with its weird dream poetry. It was just some small precious thing that spoke only to us in a 'psssst' sort of conspiratorial whisper, like some girl you meet at four AM outside on a stoop and have an hour-long conversation with in low voice to not wake the neighbor while you share a cigarette (and then you realize she was never even there - just a dream, your anima projected onto the smoke). I'm always amazed when I hear other people say they love these films, for I presume they're my discovery alone, and so perhaps do they.

That's why we fans--especially those who love both film noir and art films as well as horror pics, feel protective of them. I don't like all Lewton's later movies as well as the first four; I think it was a mistake to separate him and Tourneur after the third film, a mistake to start casting children (as in Curse of the Cat People and The Body Snatcher) and setting things in period costumes, and a mistake to lose narrative steam by getting hung up on polemics on 'authority in tight spaces evoking madness '(Ghost Ship, Isle of the Dead). All the tri-corner hats and clattering hooves and smiling coachmen (Bedlam, Body Snatcher), make me feel like I'm being dragged through Colonial Williamsburg as a bored, thirsty kid with aching feet (an experience which left me with a lifetime aversion to period pieces and the smell of horses).

The later Lewton would have no doubt done an actual Jane Eyre instead of I Walked with a Zombie, for example. If only the executives in their infinite wisdom didn't give him such easy literary titles as Body Snatcher and Bedlam! Better they got weirder and more prosaic like The Thorned Glove of the Time Traveler or I was a Voodoo Vampire. 

All of which is a tortuously long preface to the discovery of two 'sort of' Lewton films made by RKO's other B-units but using many of the same people, same actors, crew, writers, sets, props, ghostly mythopoetic flavors and signifiers from the first four films (all from 1942-1943) in the Lewton RKO series. When I've run the Lewton circuit and I got to have more, and am eyeing the Bedlam, Body Snatcher last gasp with grim countenance, maybe I'll turn to these instead. 

So here are two I have found and folded into my Lewton box, if you get my meaning. None of this will mean much to people not in love with the breezy interiority of I Walked with a Zombie. But then again, who wouldn't be, if they surrendered to it?

THE FALCON AND THE CO-EDS 

(1943) Dir William Clemens

***

From its crashing waves close-ups and swirling romantic piano music score, right down to the title font, the resemblance of Falcon and the Co-Eds to the opening of I Walked with a Zombie is uncanny; I only noticed it though as I recently saw them both--quite by accident-- back-to-back (1).
In addition to cast, font and mood, the figure of a gloomy fragile-doomed poet hangs over both this film and Lewton's fourth, The Seventh Victim. All three of them are from 1943, and two were written by Ardel Wray, a mysterious poetic figure who seems clearly to have modeled these fragile doomed poets on himself, possibly exorcising some inner doomed poet, forever at odds with the RKO B-movie system, looking for one muse to lift him from suicidal despair.

In both instances, a poet is hanging around and wafting in his (spacious) bungalow, clearly nursing a fabulous dreamy crush on some girl who's really a shimmering reflection of his own dream anima. A teacher at the all-girls school, the dead poet/English professor has fans who are sure it wasn't an accident or suicide and that the dean just wants to avoid scandal. Hence a saucy student heads down to the city to steal the Falcon's car so he'll need to go up there to get it. Once he's up there, reading the dead poet's manuscript as a crushing girl is swallowed in billowing curtains from an ocean view window, we think instantly of Seventh Victim's Jason (Erford Gage) and his original draft of poetry that Dr. Judd accepts from him on their way to the Satanic mass, or thereabouts. Reconstructing the personality from mute evidence, the Falcon declares this dead poet "a man who perhaps demanded too much from people and had to live in books to get it, who spent most of his time alone,.... who took refuge in his new imagination (...) how easily a man like that could be dominated by others." and "He lived such a narrow empty life that it finally suffocated him." Damn dude, been reading my seventh fLstep? Nimbly prowling around the grounds, Tom romances or confounds the endless string of suspects, manages to maintain the student body's collective crush without either dampening or indulging it, and employs three singing moppets to shadow suspects, the very cool 'Ug Sisters.'

Haunting Co-Eds with otherworldly presence is a dreamy psychic student named Margueritte (the alluring Rita Corday), with a dead composer father--supposedly similar in temperament to the dead poet (but more famous)--who keeps having premonitions of death ---voices whisper to her in the wind to kill herself. We hear what she hears in the sound mix, and it's pretty creepy as the whispers blend with the wind until we almost feel like we're going crazy. And for a supposedly grounded mystery, the film keeps a tactful and open-minded opinion on the supernatural, mirroring that of Lewton's films, wherein the real and the vividly imagined merge into a poetic realism (i.e. Irina is a cat and/or a frigid hysteric in Cat People; Jessica is a zombie and/or a casualty of tropical fever in I Walked with a Zombie - the supernatural as a dweller on the threshold of existence).

Tom Conway seems to have been quite busy amidst the RKO B-lots, for in 1943 alone he was in three Falcons and two Val Lewton pictures (Seventh Victim and I Walked with a Zombie). Like Lewton, Conway was born in Russia (St. Petersburg) to a wealthy family that fled the Bolsheviks, bringing with them with barely any of their vast fortune). Looking at Cat People now I realize that it is not really my favorite Lewton film anymore - it lost some esteem when I lost my own virginity (and stayed human). But whether the curse is real or not, I'm a huge fan of Conway's lascivious Dr. Judd. I'll grant you he doesn't really buy into her story and he should, because he's already losing his chance to get her on the rebound, but then it's too late; one certainly can't hold it against him if he turns up the following year after supposedly being torn up, to go around pimping Jean Parker and pissing off more poets in The Seventh Victim. 

Here are some more similarities -

WOMEN

The women angle too is interesting, as Lewton films are stocked with so many strong females. With women doing so many of the jobs usually taken by men during the years 1941-45, it's imperative to remember that, while women suffer at the hands of soldiers and blah blah, its a great time for feminist advances in the workplace and an even better time for attractive men still at the home front, that is if they want to experience a world where the women compete for the men, for a change. That's part of the noir fantasia we so love in The Big Sleep for example, all the hot available lady cab drivers, librarians, book store managers, etc. We think 'oh how novel!" now, but these films reflect a very real facet of life at home during the height of the war, and not only are there many women, but war widows, and in the morality of the time, a widow was basically allowed to sleep with anyone she wanted. She had given her maidenhood to the cause, and now the rest of her sex life was her own.

The girls' school, seen in both Co-Eds and 7th Victim is a prime example of this Edenic safe space in the time of war (ala the woman's dorm in A Matter of Life and Death). This is a kind paradise a man overseas can imagine without feeling either sexual desire or paternal affection but something in between and yet neither, beyond any one final thing, reflecting the feminine eternal flame that cores the death drive like an apple.

THE AMBERSON STEPS

Astute viewers will also notice the school's main stairwell (built for Welles' Ambersons and used regularly by the B-unit) used for the interior of the all-girls' schools in both Co-Eds and Seventh Victim - leaving us to wonder - is it the same school?

Alas, Jean Brooks

I am not a fan of Brooks, and though she wears a few nicely trimmed dresses here and is a decent actress am shocked by her callous behavior towards the "students" (many of whom seem no older than her) and that we're supposed to not think she's the dragon lady. Kind of the missing link between Joan Bennett and Shelly Winters, she has gravitas and a no BS sense of acting and purpose that creates a kind of hangover contagion rather than the allure we'd hope for. Not sure if it's me but I can't abide her character being mean to Marguerite or letting a panther loose, or turning down a poison drink for weeks only to pick a noose instead. Nothing makes sense when it comes to our Ms. Brooks. 

ZOMBIES ON BROADWAY

(1945) **

Deconstructing the horror / war mindset is tricky. We can understand the psychology behind the horror ban as a classic example of Hollywood misdiagnosing the contradictions that abound in viewer psychology. The feeling was that audiences didn't 'need' more horror (the war provided plenty). Lewton's B-unit and Universal's THE WOLF MAN and SON OF FRANKENSTEIN proved audiences needed the old horrors more than ever, but they also needed to be able to laugh at their fears. Thus, horror comedy became a huge parallel program, stretching from Bob Hope in CAT AND THE CANARY (1939) and GHOST BREAKERS (1940) through to BOOGIE MAN WILL GET YOU (1942 and the stunning success of ARSENIC AND OLD LACE on Broadway, which kept Karloff out of films for almost a year.

RKO finally loaded itself into the horror-comedy canon for ZOMBIES ON BROADWAY in 1945, a clunky if well-crafted little blend of scares, laughs and island intrigue. The comedy comes from a pair of shifty talent agents who try to appease gangster Sheldon Leonard's yen for nightclub entertainment by procuring a real 'live' zombie for his voodoo-themed lounge. What makes it, like Co-Eds, a long lost Lewton is that the boys go to San Sebastian, the same island setting as 1943's I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE, and there they meet several actor/characters from that film, including the tall scrawny bug-eyed zombie, Darby Jones (above- the skeletal tall black man who plays the scariest of the zombies in Lewton's film, Carrafour) and the strolling calypso singer, Sir Galahad.

Though not part of the Lewton crew (he'd only appeared in a small role in the same year's Body Snatcher), Bela Lugosi has a florid, full-tilt villain role as the zombie maker who ensnares our bumbling pair of Abbot-and-Costello-esque comics (2), tying them up and then letting them run amok through his trap doors and passages, chased by himself and Jones.


As with Lewton's Zombie, a real chilling highlight is a song from Galahad, this one played as the boys disembark on the San Sebastian dock. First Galahad sings happily about how San Sebastian is a tropical paradise but when the boys walk past him and he's behind them, and all the other passengers have gone from the dock, the song gradually darkens in melody and lyric, to become a tale of menace, paranoia and woe.

Sir Galahad's songs are always direct addresses to the people he's singing about, which is what makes him uncanny - as in his slow ghostly walk across the empty veranda towards Frances Dee after brother David has passed out in I Walked with a Zombie. But of course the boys are imbeciles, and don't think Galahad's eerie tourist trap warning could apply to them.

Though played for comedy, these little termite moments gives Broadway the Lewton vibe. Also, it's entirely (RKO) studio-bound, with atmospheric lighting especially in the night/dungeon scenes The front of the NYC club could be the same set as in Leopard Man, the NYC exteriors the same as in Seventh Victim.e

As for the boys, they're fairly forgettable. The stooge screams like a hysterical baby the moment anything goes wrong, even while sneaking up on a voodoo ceremony, making the panic of Mantan Moreland in KING OF THE ZOMBIES (1941) seem like square-jawed heroism. I'm also not a huge fan of Darby Jones' doofus ping-pong ball eyes this go-round. It's not a good look. His eyes were plenty buggy in Lewton's film, so what's the rumpus? Luckily we wouldn't see ping pong ball eyes in style again for zombies until 1972's SUGAR HILL where they rawk. At any rate, Bela makes up the difference. He seems to be having a grand time here, stretching his muscles in real sets after loping around Monogram's waterlogged cutaways for so long, Best of all, there's no Jean Brooks!

So enjoy what ye can while ye can, for the war can't last forever and once Johnny comes marching home, all that dizzy poetry will have to be stopped. Played by Alan Ladd or Robert Mitchum, our returning vets will be brooking no umbrage from fey 4F poets who've had the pick of the dame pool for too damn long.

Until then... Shhhh!

NOTES:
1. I thought I was the first to make the Ardel Wray connection, only to find Time Out London's Film Guide had beaten me to it, them crafty Brits.
2. Strangely, aside from Hold that Ghost in 1941, Abbot and Costello stayed away from horror until well after the war (... meet Frankenstein came out 1948), preferring westerns, period pieces, and sports spoofs.
Special shout out to the indispensible DVDBeaver from whom I copped some of the above Co-Eds stills

The Rosebud Principle

 

"Maybe it was something he lost"

Gawker founder Nick Denton recently learned the Zuckerbergian teachings of THE SOCIAL NETWORK the hard way: don't go changing formats in midstream, i.e. you can't expect people to endure slow confusing menus on their lunch break. Denton's recently lost tons of readers in a bid to redesign Gawker for the future. Redesigning is never smart until you have a billion friends, which is why Mark Zuckerberg is so uptight about the server being down even for a day in David Fincher's movie. You can't have doubt, or distraction or difficulty - the competition is too great. Was it self-sabotage, a fear of getting too big too fast that sent Denton on the wrong trail? And if one is, like Zuckerberg, free of such self-doubt, is it because of confidence, or just that the self-doubt already has a home, in bad relationships?

NETWORK's semi-fictionalized (?) Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) is not as pompous--yet--as Charles Foster Kane in decreeing people will think "what I tell them to think!" and he's smart enough to never go down with the ship, because he sells everybody else out first. By contrast in the Big Jim Gettes segment of CITIZEN KANE (the only movie SOCIAL NETWORK can really be compared with), Welles' egotistical billionaire lets go of his common sense and decides to not bow out of New York's gubernatorial race, even if means exposing his love nest with "singer." Zuckerberg knows far more about the death knell of bad press than Kane, who smears right and left in his Inquirer but thinks himself immune. Hmmm-hmmm Zuckerberg knows better.

But I mention Rosebud because of the overarching theme of Fincher's film, which begins with Zuckerberg on a date with Erica (Rooney Mara) and hints Facebook was the result of a drunken bit of coder geek vengeance against her after she broke up with him just because he was more concerned with getting into snooty Harvard clubs than he was about her and her stupid personal issues. Once all Mark's problems are solved, and he's got 24 billion dollars, he remembers he invented Facebook just to stalk her, and lives obsessively ever after.

If old Foster Kane had been around in the age of Facebook, maybe there wouldn't have been so much confusion over who or what Rosebud was: he'd have a picture of it in his online FB albums! He'd have a sledding game on there, and a 'design your own vintage sled' app. The ornate picnics and famous guest-collecting could be canceled, because he wouldn't need to see his friends to prove they existed (only their pictures). He could make Xanadu online via one of those online worlds with the Sims.

In short, for all his fancy talk, Kane failed to crush the social sphere down to a small enough crumpled ball that he could find his obscure object of desire, that Rosebud. Zuckerberg on the other hand destroys the last vestiges of the gasping public sphere all so he can continually orbit around his beloved lost sled/girl because, in the process of amassing his fortune, he dissolved the meaning of wealth. The need to flaunt has been replaced by the need to haunt. A hundred bedroom mansions mean nothing if a poor hipster can party with 500 friends just from a desk in a studio apt.

In each case (Rosebud, Erica) we're caught in the same dramaturgical principle: the 'suspension of functional maturity.' The subject 'freezes' in time when the opportunity arises to escape the confines of his current life - and it resumes when he's climbed so far up there's no one in sight to see him 'need' openly. As a boy Kane dropped his sled when it was time to go to New York and learn to manage his inherited fortune. He remembers it only later, but "singer" Susan Foster comes into his line of flight right as he's about to go uncrate it. Finally preparing to project his objet petit a, Kane's receptivity finds an accidental screen in Susan. His purpose changes from resuming his interrupted childhood to trying to enforce the success of an unwilling opera star on an unwilling public. When his whole life crumbles to shit and he's on his death bed, only then he finally remembers the sled again. It's as if the 'story' of the rope ladder to success at the price of your soul hinges on this surrender of linear personal evolution, or something.

THE SOCIAL NETWORK is similarly constructed as the long personal grudge/obsession of a genius computer nerd over a girl... entrusted to inhabit the parameters of his objet petit a by the near-guarantee of her never wanting to see him again, no matter how many billions he amasses. Once she gives in and sleeps with him (or Kane finds Rosebud and holds it in his hands), the dream is over - it's just wood again.

As David Fincher is so able a candidate for the role of '21st century Welles' let's examine the nature of genius auteurs in depicting genius millionaires, with the fact borne in mind that movies are an intensely expensive endeavor. Even the smallest indie picture can cost millions and one can only assume that there's more skulduggery involved getting a film made than we will ever know. Compare for example Welles'--perhaps unconscious but nonetheless inexcusable--sabotaging of RKO via his boondoggling in Brazil in 1942 whilst attempting to edit both JOURNEY INTO FEAR and THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS via long distance phone calls and telegrams while he slept with local models, waxed poetically over the suffering poor, and danced through Carnivale. (1) Compare that kind of infantile entitlement to Zuckerberg's in SOCIAL NETWORK and all the dots suddenly connect. "You don't make a billion friends without making a few enemies," and sometimes a billion friends are the worst enemy you can have.

Welles in Rio, alone with his million friends

Mark Z, with his.

The ultimate tragedy in both AMBERSONS and FEAR is they could have been great, if Welles had been there to see them through the studio machine to distribution. He wasn't, and ran so far over budget in Brazil he basically bankrupted the studio, then got sore when they re-edited and trimmed AMBERSONS without his consent. The nerve! Fincher seems more reliable as far as wasting other people's money, but don't forget ALIEN 3, which sucked - he all but sabotaged the entirety of the franchise. And frankly I don't like SEVEN, which seems the most claustrophobic and misanthropic of the post-SILENCE OF THE LAMBS genius serial killer movies imitations, and features one of Brad Pitt's most annoying performances, yeah?

Fincher digs coding

But all is forgiven with FIGHT CLUB, which almost started a revolution in the theater on E. 86th Street where I saw it, and of course ZODIAC. I still can't listen to any Donovan, let alone "Hurdy Gurdy Man" without getting nightmares. And yet, it's telling that there exists the question of which came first, Fincher's inability to create human warmth onscreen, or his themes of alienation and the collapse of the social sphere?

Like many emotionally-challenged auteurs, Fincher finds warmth at the office -- the autumnal 70s mod beauty of the newspaper bullpen in ZODIAC, the chummy office spaces of Facebook, but overall his worlds are dark and cold and always on the  brink of savagery. THE SOCIAL NETWORK then, is perfectly suited to his talents, or is it the other way around?

The night Zuckerberg creates the first FB prototype-- a 'who's hot / not" program-- Fincher cuts back and forth between Matt in his dorm and a sterile yet self-consciously 'decadent' exclusive Harvard club party, with bimbos bussed in from all around, for what is basically a long night of strippers and douchebag boys in club ties and backwards white baseball caps. Perhaps it's because my experiences on these lines were clouded in cigarette and pot smoke, full of drunk shouting and noisy bands, but this exclusive party Fincher depicts strikes me as tragically sad and date rapey hollow. Fincher's clinical dep-ick!-tion of it sets the tone for all subsequent SOCIAL gatherings. The women are all drug-addled groupies or wise, centered ladies who look down from their taut heels at lesser mortals--and the boys are either the aforementioned douchebags or rich nerds hiding behind CRTS, funnels, shots, and/or six-foot Graphix bongs. No one is 'connecting.' Ever. Even superstar Napster-creatin' Justin Timberlake is just boastin' and toastin' in a void where he knows everyone's name, but only to show off his memory. A Jewish fraternity's Caribbean night party, for example, is dead in the water since there could be a better party elsewhere. No one can enjoy a party if a better one might be going on somewhere, and by the laws of Groucho Marx, the best party is the one so exclusive they don't even know about it. During the day, lectures and classes are merely backdrops for late arrivals, note passing, and early, dramatic departures.

In sum, Fincher's version of Harvard represents the beginning of the end of the social sphere even before the arrival of Facebook. But again, which came first, the nanny state censoring nearly all our public acts (sexual harassment, smoking, basically everything done by Don Draper in MAD MEN) or the rise of online communities satisfying our final social need, allowing us to stay home alone forever without getting lonely?

Jack Daniels makes a brilliant 1.75 cameo

And is Fincher a misogynist or is the SN mise-en-scene meant to conjure misogyny, and gender stratification? By the end of THE SOCIAL NETWORK, Zuckerberg is blissfully alone, to stalk... and stalk... without getting rained on, or splashed by passing cars, or noticed, or paying for his crimes. The only ones who suffer in this new deal are the women who would prefer their men not hide, sneer, or shout obscenities from the safety of their limousine windows. But that's what money's for. It's to make willowy gorgeous waitresses with attitude smile at you for a 20% tip that could buy a jet ski.

I remember I used to suffer from great social anxiety before the arrival of Friendster. What helped me were my precious testimonials: "Erich is so cool" etc. I had like 300 of them! Being able to read that list of validations any time, like alone at four in the morning after a bad date, saved my sanity. So at the same time, the need to socialize in real time dropped off. By the time I'd migrated to Myspace and Livejournal I was depressed again (neither had testimonials) but I now had my insatiable urge fulfilled and, as smoking anywhere indoors became verboten, my socializing dropped off to nothing.

Now, on iMeds and Facebook I never go anywhere. Bars look weird with all that clear air. Now you can see the sad drunk all the way in the back of the room...  on his laptop, and the cute girl has her iPhone at the ready, repelling any and all would be hitter-onners with the inarguable pre-emptive presence of her black mirror while she waits for her internet date to show. Might as well stay home then, and hide, and wait for the collapse to complete, or until girls who aren't coke-addicted groupies finally find a way to see keyboard clacking as something sexy.... maybe via the flesh of the crushed black centipede?

But anyone can see that the gap between the 'real' of physical nuts-and-bolts-and-eye-contact reality and the safe anonymity of the web is widening to the point that soon not even a ten-foot pole will vault you across it.

A Rosebud by any other name would smell as sweet, until one finally uncrated it. Once exposed to modern air it would smell of musty, warped wood, traces of snow having long since gone to glowing liquid rust along the blades, the oxidation tempered by the crate's suffocating darkness. Better to keep it crated, then, forever, and just dream of it--all perfectly, preciously sad and abandoned--while you race down white sloping hills on that online winter sports app on your phone, pressing 'play again' over and over... until suddenly it's morning and there's no one left online to hear you crack your snow globe balls.

1) See Simon Callow's Orson Welles Volumer 2: Hello Americans