“How do you ever expect to get to heaven, with one foot in the voodoo houmfort and the other in the church?”
“You never talked about voodoo before, Mrs Rand.”
“It’s just part of everyday life here.”
“You don’t believe in it?”
“A missionary’s widow? It isn’t very likely, is it?”

If Cat People affects us so potently because of our compassion for its central character, this follow-up from Tourneur and Lewton achieves its greatest effect by maintaining a chilly, chilling distance. Again, a young woman (possibly in peril) is at the centre of the story, but we view her with an odd detachment: she seems a sweet enough girl, but perhaps her immediate attraction to the cold, even cruel Paul Holland distances us from her from the outset – her psychology grows increasingly complex as the story progresses, and it’s not easy to hope (or imagine) that everything will work out for these two.

The concentrated pathos of the earlier film is replaced by something altogether eerier and more disquieting, though once again there’s a pervasive sense of melancholy, even despair. Somehow, events on this Caribean island seem fated, orchestrated: the naïve Canadian nurse is walking into the middle of something her good old northern common sense hasn’t prepared her for. We learn early in the story that the narrative ground we walk on is soaked in blood and human misery: the plantation was built and farmed by slaves, the figurehead of the slave ship (which the servants call “T Misery”) has been built into a fountain in the centre of the courtyard, and everything on the island seems fated to end in the sadness that flow from that tragic history.

Before producer Val Lewton was handed the keys to the shop and a (very small) wad of cash to make some little movies of his own (and big money for the studio), he worked on the much-bigger-budget classic Rebecca, which is somewhat derivative of Jane Eyre where he served as story editor. The premise of both stories is evident enough here. A Caribbean plantation owner hires a young nurse to care for his wife, who is kept in an isolated tower room. Though she is awake, and can walk around, she is sedate, completely unresponsive: the locals call her as a zombie, one of the living dead. As in those other two stories, a terrible mystery draws us forward through the story: how did such terrible things come to pass? What – and who – could have caused such misery? And, because this is a Lewton-Tourneur picture, answers will be elusive, and there will be a strong suggestion that they’ll be spiritual.

If you’re hoping for a horror movie, Zombie will disappoint: even seemingly climactic scenes mystify rather than thrill, paying off only in mood and a slow accumulation of character detail. In fact, by the final third of the film even the the basic narrative seem to dissipate. This is a strange aspect of the film: on careful viewing, it becomes evident that every necessary piece of the rather complex story is provided, yet even once we’ve pieced it all together, it remains an oddly dislocated, disorienting narrative.

This is due in part to the elision of story elements you’d expect in most films. Their absence means we have no more awareness of the progression of events than the film’s characters – at times, even less. Forced to fill in narrative gaps by intuition, we assemble scraps of dialogue and details of behaviour into our best guess about what’s going on. It’s a narrative strategy that forces us to “lean in” to the story, heightening our attention and tuning us to nuance, atmosphere, suggestion. However much we succeed in piecing together on repeat viewings, we’re left with unsettling questions, unsure we’ll ever have the full story. Kind of like life.

At one point, a scene involving significant plot developments (which appears in the original screenplay but was either not shot or deleted in the editing room) takes place indoors. We don’t witness the scene directly: we’re outside with the nurse and a servant woman, minding a stubborn horse, getting only glimpses of the men inside, hearing nothing of their dialogue. From this point on the telling of the story becomes more and more odd, the narrative threads increasingly disconnected – just as the story grows more and more inescapably supernatural. Most screenplays zero in on a central line of action in their third act: I Walked With A Zombie seems to do exactly the opposite. If Cat People suggested Robert Bresson in the use of sound and the understatement of its performances, this film not only carries forward those techniques but adopts similarly elliptical story-telling style – and in so doing, evokes a similar sense not only of mystery, but of Mystery. (Of course, Bresson’s distinctive “transcendental” style didn’t emerge until The Diary of a Country Priest, still seven years in the future: you don’t suppose Robert watched a lot of RKO horror flicks, do you?)

The film has been widely celebrated for it’s use of light and shadow: blinds, screens, gauzy curtains, leaves and even a prominently placed harp which appears to have no other function in the film but its visual interest (and a perfectly placed contribution to the soundtrack, tagging the end of an establishing shot that watches the shadows its strings cast on a sheer curtain blowing in the night breeze) give a remarkable sense of depth and texture to Tourneur’s meticulously framed black and white images.

But the film’s most striking image is the bust of San Sebastian. The servant who brings Betsy Connell to the plantation underscores its identification with those who have suffered on the island, calling it by name (”T Misery”) and speaking of the sculpture as if it were human;

“A man, Miss. An old man who lives in the garden at Fort Holland, with arrows stuck in him and a sorrowful weeping look on his black face.”
“Alive?”
“No miss, he’s just the same as he was from the beginning, on the front side of an enormous boat. The enormous boat brought the long-ago fathers and the long-ago mothers of us all, chained to the bottom of the boat.”
“They brought you to a beautiful place, didn’t they?”
“If you say, Miss. If you say.”

Tourneur’s films are remarkable for their anti-racist sensibility: not only is this film grounded in a hatred of slavery, but its portrayal of the Caribbean people of colour and their religious practice is extraordinarily accurate and respectful, free of the racial stereotypes common to other films of the day. No wonder the film had such immense popularity with African-American audiences at the time.

Like the statue of King John in Cat People, there is something emblematic, almost sacramental, about this gruesomely beautiful sculpture to which we return so frequently, often at moments of greatest misery. Through most of the picture the camera shows us the carving at eye level in full or three-quarter profile, sustaining in the viewer’s mind the primary identification of this as the figurehead of a slaveship. But as the film reaches its ultimate climax, something quite remarkable happens to the way this image is presented to us, causing us to re-interpret its significance, drawing out a distinctly spiritual layer to the way we read it.

A character makes a choice to co-operate with what appear to be supernatural forces on the island, then turns to the image of Saint Sebastian that stands in the fountain at the centre of the plantation garden. For the first time the statue is touched: the character grasps one of the arrows imbedded in the figure’s chest and moves the arrow up and down to free it from the carving. We feel the violence of this tangibly, in our ribs: we’ve long been aware that this image has come to represent the general sufferings of the slaves and their children’s children, but suddenly we’re reminded that this carving is also the likeness of a specific saint and martyr, and we almost physically feel that his suffering is being enacted before us. Then the camera cuts to a full-on front perspective, viewed from below, and we see not only the image of a Christian martyr, but a striking evocation of Christ himself, whose suffering was echoed not only in the death of Sebastian and in the agonies of generations of slaves, but which is being carried forward in the film’s present action. Now we see not only the profile but the face of suffering, the willing victim’s eyes turned heavenward, the camera’s upward angle drawing our eyes to something like a circle of thorns which crowns this man of sorrow. In the darkness, the water that streams down the figure’s chest appears to be blood.

A further ritual death is carried out, a relentless collusion of supernatural forces and human decision that is in itself a judgment, a damnation, at the same time as it may be a rough kind of salvation – at any rate, it provides the release, the terrible catharsis, of authentic tragedy. Perhaps a curse is now broken. Or perhaps it has at last been fulfilled.

We are drawn into this story by a mystery, a dark and essential question: who is responsible for Jessica’s condition? What crime or sin or failing led to this unnatural state of things? A once-beautiful, once-beloved woman is trapped between life and death, her will – that singularly human, singularly divine faculty – extinguished? As an African-Caribbean voice intones a final, funereal prayer, a judgment is rendered – a particular selfishness is named, and deemed wicked, and we receive a final answer to the question.

Or do we? Have we traced the evil back to its source, and in knowing it and naming it, broken its power? Or have we merely uncovered one more face of evil, yet another outworking of a malady far more pervasive? Are its consequences at last put to rest with the ritual sacrifice that climaxes the film, or is something greater and more universal needed?

In the final analysis, in the final prayer, an “answer” is offered to the mystery at the centre of this mythic tale. And yet, it is nothing like the whole truth, nothing close to satisfying. We remain as unsure of precise cause and effect, unconvinced about such precise assignment of culpability and responsibility, just as we are unclear about so many other features of this dark dream. We are uncertain, even, which of the film’s characters is the zombie of its title. The one who strolled on a beach, or one who journeyed through a midnight cane field? Or some other character whose will was surrendered to forces darker and more powerful?

Someone chooses to play God and ultimately, with the best of intentions, sentences a woman to a living death – there is something of the Frankenstein myth being played out here. Another character, gripped by an irrational urge to lash out, lives in the grip of the shadows of his own nature, fearing what other beautiful things might be destroyed – Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde, with all its thundering Pauline wretchedness, comes to mind. One brother is consumed by jealousy, another by bitterest resentment, and any number of Old Testament tragedies are invoked. Ancient sins carry forward from generation to generation, as a privileged few profit from the misery of the many – is it any wonder that a final judgment is wrought? Or that, when it comes, it counts for so little, changes almost nothing.

But perhaps what haunts us most won’t be the film’s themes, its psychological intricacies or theological mysteries, but its indelible closing images; Jessica at the gates, T Misery, a breathless jump cut from the voodoo priest to someone rising from the ground, Carrefour’s arms, the waves, then the disorienting cut to an extraordinary image of men in the water with torches. The voice-over, the procession, and an image of someone – finally – weeping. Pure cinema.

And to think – all the studio wanted was a monster movie.

See also…
Jacques Tourneur, B Movie Auteur (Part 1): Cat People
Jacques Tourneur, B Movie Auteur (Part 3): Stars In My Crown
Jacques Tourneur, B Movie Auteur (Part 4): Curse Of The Demon

You’re drawn to her. She’s sexy, sure, but not like the mankiller in a velvet gown on the posters. She’s petite, shy, unsure, gorgeous eyes. Kittenish. Lonely, there’s a sadness there, some secret wound. You just want to help her, and she wants to be helped. She’s hungry for it. If you go for that kind of thing, you’re doomed from the start.

The artistry of this film is something nobody expected. RKO Pictures hired a producer cheap and gave him a tiny bit of money and said, “Here, nobody went to see Citizen Kane, it cost us a fortune and lost us a forture, make us some creature features, people go see those and they don’t cost much. Wolf Man made a pile. Here’s a title, Cat People, see what you can do with that. If you make a few bucks, we’ll want more. Now scram.” You can almost smell the cigar smoke.

So Val Lewton hired himself a like-minded director, and they set out to make some art, which nobody expected. It’s gorgeous to look at, it’s moody, it’s understated, it’s troubling: it’s what horror might feel like in real lives. These two take seriously what this kind of movie usually just exploits, and the result not only sold a million tickets, it earned itself pages and chapters and volumes of commentary, and (fifty years later) a place in the National Film Registry. Cat People is psychologically complex, it’s geniunely sexy and hauntingly sad – and when it comes to the creepy stuff, it plays for keeps. Tourneur’s aren’t called “supernatural thrillers” for nothing: when the subject is treated with this kind of respect the films are both thrilling and theological. The supernatural is rendered spiritual, otherworldliness is grounded in the world of everyday, and things like sin and the human condition are taken seriously.

Lewton and Tourneur’s artistry and integrity make this an unexpected classic, a movie to return to over and over again. But I think what really sets the hook is Simone Simon’s presence in the central role. It’s not a perfect performance: at times she’s making faces, just a bit, at times she’s pouting or indulging or playing it up ever so slightly. But you know, maybe even that contributes to the power of her work here – who is it that’s self-consciously manipulating her own emotions, the slightly stagey actress or the slightly off-kilter young woman she’s playing? If at times the effect is calculated and slightly false, is it the audience or the “good plain Americano” in the picture that she’s performing for? (Is it part of the “not-quite-rightness” the pet store animals pick up on?)

Those slight (and I suppose delicious) false notes aside, Simon creates a portrait of troubled desperate-to-be-goodness you won’t easily shake. “You might be my first real friend.” The damaged loneliness she embodies – partly it’s that accent, so softly exotic, distinctly other – is something contagious, like a plague. Perhaps it matters that the terrible evil she flees is placed but not named: she comes from Serbia, where she has witnessed (or taken part in?) terrible things, and even this scrap of geography roots her not in generalized horror movie evil, but in specific atrocities a modern viewer can all too readily bring to mind. She is fleeing not just something spooky but something specific, and something specifically evil, a legacy of very real human horror.

Irena has a horror of drawing close to anyone, of knowing or – mostly – being known. Her isolation is for protection. But the power of the film lives in this ambiguity: does she fear for herself, or those she might come to know? Saint Paul – that hard-shell New Testament bastard – breaks your heart when he pours out his own: “The thing I do is the thing I don’t want to do, the very thing I hate. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death?” He doesn’t name the sin, or the thoughts that haunt him, but I wonder what memories and impulses rise up even now, in this new life he clings to with such ferocity. What residue remains of the man so driven and steely he’d reveled in the deaths of so many of Jesus’ followers?

It’s all there in Irena, in the way she draws close to this man who walks into her life, draws him close but won’t be known. The talisman she makes of that bizarre statue in her apartment, the way she says “Christian” and the way she says “Satan,” the fear in her eyes as she crosses herself when the cat-like woman calls her “sister.” It’s the white-knuckle Christianity of one who knows the darkness, has loved the darkness, but now resists its pull like a recovering addict fighting the compulsion to use. No wonder the film’s abiding feel is more of melancholy than terror.

Irena isn’t the film’s only memorable character. Kent Smith is a more wooden performer – a definite B-list forties performance, here – but whether the screenwriters wrote for what they knew they could get, or the director cast well, or whether everything about this unlikely miracle of a movie was blessed by some all-pervading cinematic good fortune, the Oliver Reed character (no relation) is the utterly perfect counter-force to Irena’s urge-and-emotion exoticism. The beautifully shaped contour of his story eovkes a complex response: at times we feel he’s just the sort of guy she needs, we’re grateful for his feet-on-the-ground common sense, yet it’s shot through with something that grows increasingly repellent, a sort of fundamentalist materialism that begins to smell like arrogance or willful ignorance. He’s smitten, we feel in our bones his tenderness toward this frightened kitten, so we feel his frustration and disappointment just as tangibly when she can’t draw close, even after their marriage. The moments when we see each of them on the opposite sides of a door – once on their wedding night, once on the night when she weeps alone in her bath – are scenes of unshakeable poignancy. And when Irena’s husband is increasingly drawn to his co-worker – Irena’s opposite, thoroughly American and straight-forward, a little bit pretty and a little bit tough, she says what she feels and goes after what she wants – we understand. And we don’t. Irena warned him things would take time, he promised he’d wait, but when he’s faced with a bit of unhappiness that goes on a bit longer than he’s used to, so much for the promise. He’s a faithless lover, he’s not the self-denying knight on horseback we all wanted him to be – he’s just a perfectly normal red-blooded schmuck like any one of us. We understand, we ache for him – hey, a guy deserves a little happiness, this is America after all! – but we see the self-first-ness that eventually borders on cruelty, and we partly figure whatever might happen to him, he’s got it coming.

“Less is more” say the artists, and the Lewton/Tourneur Cat People could serve as Exhibit A if they ever have to defend their claim in court. (Paul Schrader’s remake could be called to the witness stand as some sort of proof by counter example. Or maybe Schrader’s movie is the crime?) Rather than monsters and hideous bestial transmogrifications and explicit violence and gore, we get shadows and silence and precise edits and carefully calibrated, utterly mundane sound effects: the sound of high heels on pavement, a braking bus, the shrill distortion of a woman’s voice in an indoor swimming pool. (One is reminded of that other minimalist Frenchman who grounds his spiritual transcendence in the sounds and textures of everyday physical observations, Robert Bresson. And by that comparison, and the fact it’s not dismissable out of hand, we recognize how very unusual a monster movie this truly is. More Bresson to come in the next Tourneur/Lewton outing…)

So how does the story end? Happily. The cheapy horror thriller made back all the money Citizen Kane lost, it ran so long that the critics who dismissed it opening weekend had to go back for second looks and rave reviews, and the money-minded studio chiefs came up with a bit more money and another swell title (”I Walked With A Zombie. Think it’ll sell?”) to see if Val and Jacques cold come up with another high-class supernatural thriller.

To be continued…

See also…
Jacques Tourneur, B Movie Auteur (Part 2): I Walked With A Zombie
Jacques Tourneur, B Movie Auteur (Part 3): Stars In My Crown
Jacques Tourneur, B Movie Auteur (Part 4): Curse Of The Demon

And as an added bonus is Tourneur’s stalwart noir masterwork Out of the Past, often referred to as a staple example of the genre.