Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows

New Documentary produced and narrated by Martin Scorsese on the life and work on the films of Val Lewton. It premiered tonight on Turner Classic Movies and has occasioned the reissue of the box set of the Lewton RKO horror films on DVD. To be honest I don't think this is really a documentary so much as its film essay on the Lewton produced films and his life. There is no nitty gritty about the making of the films (the fact that one of his films occasioned the last screen teaming of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi is not mentioned). If one wants details one has to look to the documentary that was originally released with the DVD set, Shadows in the Dark:The Val Lewton Legacy. Here Scorsese talks about the deeper meanings of the films Lewton over saw and how they affected the people who saw them.Its clear that Scorsese is in love with the poetry of the movies, and its nice to have him as a guide into their recesses, indeed watching the film I picked up a good many details that I had never noticed before. It also reveals symbols and character types that reoccur in his movies. Its an examination of how Lewton's melancholy nature produced some very dark and troubling films, films which echo to this day. I liked the film a great deal but I'm not in love with it. While I learned some new things I didn't learn enough (I think the earlier Shadows in the Dark is slightly better, but that may be purely a matter of personal taste).Its very good but there is something that keeps me from saying its great. Is it worth seeing, absolutely, it will reveal many things to you about the films that you probably never noticed. Ultimately it will make you want to see all the films again, which is a pretty good thing if you ask me

Born in Yalta in the early 1900s to Russian parents, film producer Val Lewton was raised in America by his mother and sister, honing a colorful imagination even through his years at military school; he wrote articles and published a few pulpy stories before landing in Hollywood as protégé to David O. Selznick. Selznick turned out to be a helpful boss but was no father-figure, rarely if ever giving Lewton credit for the work he did on pictures such as "Anna Karenina" and "Gone With the Wind". A movie-producing offer eventually came from financially-strapped RKO, who hoped a series of low-budget thrillers would get them back in the black, and Val Lewton was on his way. This documentary on Lewton's career (produced in conjunction with Turner Classic Movies by Martin Scorsese, who also narrates) is nearly bereft of details on Lewton's personal life, mostly due to the fact no documents exist of his recorded voice. Photos and letters written by Lewton help to fill in the gaps, but we never get much sense of the reported turmoils and trouble Lewton went through while working in Hollywood. We also are not privy to much information that went on in the RKO offices with each new Lewton release, only that his films were "successful" up to and including 1946's "Bedlam". If all or most of his films were so popular, what accounted for Lewton's anxieties? He and his wife raised two children--a girl who is unaccounted for here, and a son who has grown up seemingly in the dark regarding his father's business affairs--but what happened to his supporters? Editor Mark Robson and director Robert Wise, themselves protégés of Val Lewton, later found success on their own but failed to extend an olive branch to Lewton once tastes in Hollywood changed. Yet, instead of acknowledging the fact that Lewton was out of step with the times, Robson and Wise are left looking like false friends. The special is clip-heavy, with a finely-tuned parallel atmosphere to compliment the array of sequences, yet it doesn't cut very deep. Still, if the central desire here was to create an interest in Val Lewton's productions for audiences unaware of his languid, elegiac and stylized mood pieces, then "The Man in the Shadows" certainly succeeds. It thoughtfully whets the appetite for an evening's worth of Lewton product, and the artful way in which he was able to combine good and evil with the most subtle of touches.

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.

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.

How well I remember seeing Cat People for the first time. I was almost bowled over by my first sight of poetic horror. It was the 1950's and cheap monsters were all over the drive-ins, fun, but hardly mesmerizing. Then, suddenly, there was Lewton's flick on the late show and I was transfixed by a whole new world of fright movies. The shadowy b&w was riveting, but the shadows of my imagination were beyond even that. As they say- a whole new world had opened up.

Over time, I managed to catch the bulk of Lewton's extraordinary canon, especially The Seventh Victim (1943). That movie's bold ending showed what film censorship typically denied us. I tried to learn more about Lewton, but movie books were almost non-existent at a time when movies were still not considered an art form. To say that Lewton was an obscure moviemaker in a time of Ford, Huston, and De Mille seems almost an understatement. It wasn't until I got a collection of James Agee's magazine reviews that I saw Lewton's brilliance publicly affirmed.

Thanks now to Matin Scorsese, later generations can dive into Lewton's fascinating world in a single sitting. The 75-minutes is replete with clips from his best films, along with commentary from Lewton directors Robert Wise and Jacques Tourneur, and other luminaries. Too bad the illustrious part of his career was so brief, brought down by studio maneuvering. More importantly, Lewton's work shows how unparalled b&w artistry continues even in our era of colorized spectacle. Plus, Lewton uses the spooky not only to open up horror but to lead us into the unique world of a lonely child (Curse of the Cat People, {1944}). Maybe I'm just an old fogey, but I'll bet if you tune in, you'll be as fascinated as I was on that long ago night.