Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows

Val Lewton: Man in the Shadows (2008)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Martin Scorsese produced and narrates this documentary that takes a look at the life and career of producer Val Lewton who hated the horror genre but become best known for his horror titles like The Body Snatcher, Bedlam, I Walked with a Zombie and Cat People. I personally find many of Lewton's horror movies overrated but they are popular so I understand the need to do a documentary on them but to do one on Lewton never really made much sense to me. It's even more senseless when you consider that another documentary, Shadows in the Dark was just made in 2005. As with that documentary, there really isn't much to Lewton so we learn very little. He didn't do interviews, didn't have any on camera stuff and in reality there's very little known about him so we don't learn a thing. When they discuss the movies we still don't learn anything outside the fact that Lewton hated horror movies and didn't want to work with Boris Karloff. Since there's nothing to Lewton I just can't justify having two documentaries about him and in the end neither of them do much. Roger Corman, Robert Wise and Japanese director Kiyoski Kurosawa are the only movie people interviewed and both only get a few clips.

VAL LEWTON gave us many wonderful horror films throughout the '40s, but at one time he worked as a reader for David O. Selznick and told the producer his feelings about GONE WITH THE WIND: "This is the biggest piece of rubbish I've ever read. You'll be making the biggest mistake of your career if you decide to make this." (paraphrasing, of course). Well, he may never qualify as an accurate prophet, but he did know how to use subtle horror to make films like THE CAT PEOPLE and I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE.

MARTIN SCORSESE narrates this thoughtful documentary on the producer with many interesting film clips from the low-budget horror films that are now considered film classics of their kind by a man who was "drawn to the darkness of the shadow world." He trusted many of his associates when he began filming the features at RKO with men like Jacques Tourneur, Nicholas Musuraca, DeWitt Bodeen, Roy Webb, and later Mark Robson. His films had an hypnotic effect on audiences, providing subtle horror through the power of suggestion.

In private, he was a sensitive man, never fully satisfied with his work or his assignments, but happily married to a woman who understood him and his needs. He was really not tough enough to be a Hollywood survivor and had a few heart attacks before the major one that killed him at the age of 46.

The documentary tells how he ignited the career of BORIS KARLOFF when Karloff was assigned to films like ISLE OF THE DEAD, THE BODY SNATCHERS and BEDLAM. As the war drew to a close, people began to turn away from horror films and Lewton's career began to decline when the defining films of his earlier career were no longer being made.

His low-budget films really were low-budget: for CAT PEOPLE he was given a budget of $150,000, but the film was a huge hit, made a million at the box-office when only A-budget features made as much and stayed in big city theaters longer than CITIZEN KANE that year!

Strange how sometimes one does not always see what others see. That is the germ of the artist.

Scorcese clearly delves deeply into the world of Val Lewton, practically an unknown artist in the golden era of the movies which was sadly unlauded sufficiently during his law.

We see what so many of us probably didn't see or were not able to analyze as adeptly as Scorcese in Lewton's work. Certainly, these are not the grade A pictures we all know about, but Scorcese thrusts them into their well-deserved prominence by explaining how really fabulous Lewton's falsely relegated B-pictures they were. Sure they were low budget - but WHAT Lewton did was nothing short of miracles of mood, suspense and mystery, contrast and hue and the deep character development which exists within a movie and not necessarily a protagonist. We are shown, and it is explained just how Lewton worked his magic with shoestring budgets.

I've seen some of these movies, but never in this way...and after this, I will always bring with me the wonderful aura of the prodigious talent of Val Lewton.

There are many people in movie history the likes of which will probably never be seen again, since many great films are a product of a person existing at a certain point in time and having certain ideas. Val Lewton, while not a director, is legendary in the realm of old horror movies for producing some of the most groundbreaking pictures of 40s cinema, such as Cat People, The Ghost Ship, I Walked With a Zombie, and Isle of the Dead. Born in the Russian Empire in 1904, Volodymyr Ivanovich Leventon was brought with his mother (who left his father behind in Berlin) to America via a ship which sailed from Hamburg. Once in New York, he eventually changed his name to Val Lewton. His first major claim to fame in the movie industry came in 1932, when a Clark Gable and Carole Lombard film (No Man of Her Own) was released. While not involved with the movie, Lewton had written a novel called No Bed of Her Own, which served to inspire it. He continued to acquire experience by working at MGM's publicity office, providing magazines comic versions of trending films. He would eventually leave this position when he had 3 subsequent novelizations that weren't very successful. Flying to California to meet with future Gone With the Wind producer David O Selznick, he was tasked with writing a possible script for a movie based on the russian novel Taras Bulba. The film never got made, but Lewton held onto his new position of being David's assistant. Although not a well known fact, Lewton actually was involved with Gone With the Wind, writing the part that shows countless wounded and dying Confederate soldiers in the city of Atlanta, then under attack from Northern forces. It is this morbid scene that gives the world a taste of what Lewton will be known for a few years later. In 1942, Lewton was given control of his own unit at RKO pictures. Tasked with making horror films that could rival Universal's monumental classics such as Frankenstein or Jekyll and Hyde, Lewton nevertheless had to follow a set of rules. He was not allowed to make use of more than 150 grand, he could not make up the titles, and none were to exceed an hour and 15 minutes. He first threw his hat in the ring with Cat People, a 1942 production that focuses on a newly married Serbian immigrant woman who believes she is cursed to become a panther every time a man gets intimate with her. The movie defied expectations and Lewton had the last laugh: it was cheaply made, but grossed over a million dollars. He followed up with I Walked with a Zombie, directed by Jacques Tourneur (who also did the previous one). Still very creepy today, the movie focuses on a girl that two brothers both like, and the nurse that takes care of her on a remote island in the Caribbean. While RKO was basking in the success Lewton had reaped for them, he finally was in a position to make his next movies without them really getting in his way. While RKO decided to promote Tourneur to directing higher budget movies, Lewton stayed where he was, which was probably just as well; the more expensive your movie, the more you have to deal with studios breathing down your neck. With Tourneur out of the picture, Lewton gave Robert Wise and Mark Robson director status. The Body Snatcher followed in 1945, which features Boris Karloff as a horse carriage driver who secretly commits murders at night in order to deliver corpses to a medical professor for use in his class. Lewton walked on thin ice with this one, as the Production Code wanted less violence in movies, but RKO wanted more of it. Boris also appeared in Isle of the Dead that same year, which is about a military officer (played by Karloff) who goes to a plague-infested island in 1912 to visit his wife's grave. Karloff later credited Lewton with saving him from being hopelessly typecast as Frankenstein for the rest of his life. In terms of good movies, this was about the end of the line for Lewton. In 1946, RKO boss Charles Koerner died, and the studio fell into chaos. Lewton fled RKO and found a new job at Paramount, producing My Own True Love in 1949. After this, Lewton went back to MGM in order to produce the comedy Please Believe Me, starring Deborah Kerr. It should be said that comedy was not Lewton's strong suit. Around this time, Lewton tried to do what he always wanted and start his own production company with his old friends Robson and Wise, where he had the power to choose what to produce. Lewton was eventually forced away from them after they couldn't agree on what to produce. In 1951, he produced his last film, Apache Drums. Although it was to be his final movie, it incorporated two firsts for him, as it was a western that was in color. After this, he would be offered a production job at Columbia working alongside Stanley Kramer, but the pressure of producing so many films so fast caught up to him, and he died of a heart attack at only 46. It is maybe correct to say the film business killed him, but as morbid as his movies were, Lewton was an important part of film history. If he was a more cheerful and positive person, we probably wouldn't have these films. As someone who has barely ever heard Scorcese's voice, this was a good documentary on a person who has produced some of my favorite old movies. There's a few I have not mentioned, but put simply, they can't be described with words. You'll have to see them in order to observe how Lewton deftly combined light with shadow, and darkness with mysterious wonder. Lewton's movies were special since they have that quiet and cozy feel to them, the perfect things to watch during a storm for instance. I used to think all old movies had this trait, but it's more rare than you think. Lewton's ability to tell great stories with engaging characters played by underappreciated actors made him a genius in the film world. He didn't have money for special effects, but he didn't need them.

Val Lewton was another one of these guys (Sol Wurtzel was another) who was terrific at making "A" pictures on a "B" budget. To this day, Lewton's horror films are fairly well-known and receive wonderful notices by critics and film historians.

This look at the somewhat-but-not altogether famous filmmaker is a 77-minute very interesting excursion that was made, I believe, for the Turner Classic Movie (TCM) network, and was aired several times recently (mid January of 2008). I assume it will run numerous times on the network, in future months. Director Martin Scorcese narrates this tale about Lewton, his history and his films.

Some of the comments that particularly caught my ear, made by either Scorcese, Val Lewton's son, or by someone else in here, included:

"His movies moved and spoke to audiences in a different way....Lewton's films were more terror than horror....He was always at odds with his bosses but never satisfied with is own achievements....There is no film footage of him, no voice recordings of him.......He had no inkling he would be remembered by posterity......Many scenes in his films reflected his own phobias and views on life, as an outsider......We are all potentially evil and possible murderers."

Some of Lewton's films are examined in detail, beginning with "The Cat People," followed by "I Walked With A Zombie," "The Leopard Man," "Curse Of The Cat People," and to a lesser extant, films that followed those. It was interesting to hear about his struggles with RKO and his unexpected success later with Boris Karloff in several of his movies ("The Body Snatcher" being his best, in many people's opinion.) We also hear from directors Roger Corman, Jacques Tourneur (who worked with Lewton on a number of films) and the famous Robert Wise.

This is a long documentary - and it is definitely slanted in favor of Lewton - and might have been more effectively edited down to an hour, but still pretty fascinating. I recognized the voice of actor Elias Koteas, who was reading some of the comments Lewton made over the years, almost in dairy or autobiographical form.

Some of the Lewton's film clips shown here will just about give you chills watching them. This man was a master at frightening you with things unseen.