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But in my own silence I can hear things they cannot hear, know things they can never know
A brace of B-pictures makes for a really short double feature, but I do not in any way feel I didn't get my money's worth on Monday night. No title too trashy, no budget too small for Val Lewton to work magic with, thank God.
I knew of The Leopard Man (1943) long before I saw it: a description of its first death memorably opens Harlan Ellison's Watching (1989) and Ellison is correct that it didn't matter if he had misremembered details of the frightened girl pursued through the streets of her small New Mexico town by a black leopard like a piece of hungry night, from the age of nine he remembered the overwhelming, almost unspeakable fear suffusing the scene and it's still there in the insufficient circles of streetlight, the whistle and tumbleweed-whip of the wind under the railway bridge of the arroyo, the flare of eyes in the darkness like ferryman's coins, the stumbling run, the screaming, the blood dividing itself black as a cat under the door. After that, the film could have played tiddlywinks for the rest of its 66 minutes and it would still have deserved its horror laurels. I am pleased to report that nearly all the rest of it is that awful, that beautiful, and that interested not in what people can see to scare them, but what they can't know about their world or even themselves.
The premise is a lesson in unpredictability—a brash press agent can't imagine unleashing a killing spree when he hires a leopard to give his Anglo girlfriend's nightclub act a little oomph in a "bad town for blondes," but when two and then three women are found clawed to death after the cat escapes, the explanation is either a maddened half-wild animal or a disturbingly human copycat and either way it all started with Jerry Manning (Dennis O'Keefe) saying temptingly to Kiki Walker (Jean Brooks), "I thought you might like to strut the kitten in right in the middle of her act." He's speaking of Kiki's rival Clo-Clo (my grandfather's first screen crush Margo), the defiantly beautiful local dancer for whom the ace of spades keeps surfacing in the fortune-teller's cards, though every time we really fear for her the camera that shadows her like the audience's slasher eye veers away and catches on some other prey; she chatters her castanets mockingly at the dark and walks on. There is so much dark in this movie, even for an RKO B-budget it's almost ridiculous, except that it works so dreamily and disorientingly, even in daylight scenes you can feel it pressing at the edges of the frame like the built-in claustrophobia of a soundstage. When there are open-air locations in this picture, they are a desolate arroyo, or a high-walled cemetery, or a little museum in the surrounding hills where artifacts of the Indian past are dead under glass and a contemporary descendant like Charlie How-Come (Abner Biberman) shakes his head over a stone carving supposedly personifying his ancestors' ideas of "force and violence": "Don't look like a leopard to me." To walk anywhere at night in this town is to be terribly vulnerable to that which you cannot see walking with you. A cat, a killer. More intangible things, perhaps: one of the film's recurring symbols is a ball dancing on the jet of a fountain, explicitly called out by the museum's curator Dr. Galbraith (James Bell) as a metaphor for the illusions of free will and self-knowledge: "We know as little about the forces that move us and move the world around us as that empty ball does about the water which pushes it into the air, lets it fall and catches it again." But that suggests a mechanistic movie, in which the characters are most important as moving parts, and The Leopard Man is notable, especially given its blink-and-miss-it runtime, for its attention to their humanity. Jerry and Kiki could easily be nice-looking nonentities; they are snappy, shaken, and sensitive people beginning to realize their professional cynicism has no place in a town gripped by such horror as this one. Clo-Clo is wonderfully realized, not as the stereotypically hot-blooded siren she's first set up as, but a really likable woman with a life that extends far beyond the nightclub and the streets to an aging mother, a young child, an offstage romance, and a name that doesn't appear on her publicity. Technically disposable characters like Teresa Delgado (Margaret Landry) or Consuelo Contreras (Tula Parma) don't feel it because they receive so much more than the vignette treatment from the film, impressing on us not just the shock of their deaths but the shape and weight of their lives. Even walk-ons are given just a little more edge and depth than their utility to the plot strictly requires. I love the blasé chain-smoking of the fortune-teller Maria (Isabel Jewell) while Clo-Clo rehearses her act because it shifts her reading of the cards from mystical to matter-of-fact, a weather report or a bus schedule. Lewton's worlds always feel lived in, even by things other than people. James Agee once observed that "few people in Hollywood show in their work that they know or care half so much about movies or human beings as [Lewton] does," and I pretty much agree with that.
The movie does feel a little outside the Lewton norm, which is probably a factor of its origins. It was directed by Jacques Tourneur from a screenplay by Ardel Wray and Edward Dein, who in turn adapted it from Cornell Woolrich's Black Alibi (1942), and for all its densely imagined dread it is essentially a murder mystery. As such, it is generically conventional in a way that other films I've seen produced by Lewton are not—The Seventh Victim (1943) comes closest and it still isn't really a detective story, just the hook of one before it drifts away into something much more existential, much less easily answered, whatever the question might have been. The Leopard Man follows through to the end of the investigation where the murderer is revealed and some kind of justice done. It just leaves a lot lingering around the edges, including the fact that whatever an audience in 1943 would have made of it, seen now it is an early and unmistakable serial killer film. It isn't the earliest, of course, because M (1931) got there ahead of everybody, but I am trying to decide if it could be Hollywood's first. Certainly it brings the now-codified sense of pattern as well as compulsion, the recapturing ritual of trauma and the trigger that makes so many serial killer stories what Gemma Files has evocatively described as werewolf stories (per Webster: Said he was a wolf, only the difference / Was, a wolf's skin was hairy on the outside, / His on the inside), so that the title isn't misdirection after all; it is fleetingly but startlingly explicit about the sexual aspects of its killer's pathology; and beyond that, especially in hindsight of the genre, it is absolutely fascinating to see a serial killer movie that is ultimately not very interested in its killer. I don't mean that he's an enigma. Any explanation of his behavior has to be construed in hindsight of his blurt of last words, but it's diagram-clear:
"I couldn't rest. I couldn't sleep. All I could see was Teresa Delgado's body—broken, mangled. I saw it day and night. It was waiting everywhere I turned . . . I didn't want to kill! But I had to. I heard the little girl in the cemetery, talking to the man in the auto. When he went away, I thought I was going to help her get over the wall. I can't remember. I looked down. In the darkness I saw her white face, the eyes full of fear. Fear, that was it. The little frail body—the soft skin—and then she screamed—"
The movie anticipates Peeping Tom (1960) in that its arousal-murder trigger is the sight of a woman frightened, just as it anticipates Psycho (1960) in the next-door ordinariness of its killer, but unlike both of those movies it does not seem concerned with what might have primed the man who makes this muttered, almost perplexed confession to leap from witnessing a gruesome murder to repeating it. No childhood demons, no adult ordeals. Past a cursory mention of historical "men with kinks in their brains . . . Bluebeard in France, Jack the Ripper in London," the script doesn't even waste much time on the general question of where serial killers come from. They're real, is mostly what matters about them, and they can look like anyone, even genial, slightly dusty museum curators who are neither spellbinding nor grotesque. Having seen him now in at least four movies where I noticed and then failed to connect him with any of his other roles, I am forced to conclude that James Bell is no minor chameleon for his pleasant professional face; it works nicely for a character like Galbraith, who has no obvious tells. For most of the movie he's one of these small-time scholarly characters that are usually helpful, sometimes quirky, often endearing. It is not any of those things that he almost manages to palm the guilt of the murders off onto Charlie How-Come, but he does it in the light style of a joke and it registers as an unkind tweak of Jerry's theories of human evil, not as murderous camouflage. He's much less at ease around Kiki, notably fumbling a compliment before her performance, but it's a degree of awkwardness that falls within the sadly normal limits of men who haven't yet realized that you just talk to women like people, not a proto-incel red flag. He has a bit of a hangdog look about him, but that might just be the shyness. When his own night walk home turns into a dark ride of memory, it's the most the movie has put itself into his perspective and it is strictly a conscience-catching trick. It's careful to make him a person. I just don't think it cares about him the same way it cares about the women he kills. Even pursued down an empty black street by the ghost-rattle of castanets and a girl's voice softly crying, Galbraith doesn't get the revenge-nightmare sympathy of Teresa sent out for a bag of cornmeal that isn't worth her life, the tender affection of Consuelo not quite sneaking out to meet her boyfriend in a graveyard on her eighteenth birthday, the vital appreciation of Clo-Clo who looks for a rich man in the cards, but when she meets one actually enjoys one of the warmest, most honest and human connections in this isolating film. It plays now like a rebuke to a history of slashed and fridged women; it predates them. It's still refreshing. This order of priorities may come from Woolrich, who after all gave us the night-stalking heroine of Phantom Lady (1944), but it matches Lewton's attentiveness to marginalization and it leaves a better taste than other films full of women's bodies I've seen. Maybe it's just that no one dies shallowly in a Lewton story. Death's too intimate to be a cheap effect.
I had never heard of The Ghost Ship (1943) before I started looking into Lewton's back catalogue; it has something of a spectral, maudit reputation itself, having been pulled from distribution for half a century following a plagiarism suit and then bewildering fans slightly on its return. Written by Leo Mittler and Donald Henderson Clarke and directed by Mark Robson, it's among the Lewton unit's least supernatural stories, concerning the green third officer of a merchant freighter who becomes convinced that his briskly lonely, authoritative captain is a power-mad murderer. I'd like to rewatch Isle of the Dead (1945) before making this claim seriously, but The Ghost Ship may be their purest mood piece, a stripped-down, fog-bound chiller whose 69 minutes are almost all devoted to building an atmosphere of wide-open confinement, flat sky, flat sea, flat steel and swinging shadows. Its very sparseness means that whatever happens feels charged, unmissable. There's ambiguity in it, but there's more old-fashioned suspense, the stomach-curdling and politically relevant fear of inescapable authority abused. "Aboard ship, you better believe in the captain and forget logic . . . The captain's got more law at sea than any man on land has got, even the King of Siam or the President of the United States." Coiling a rope sunwise may be an innocently superstitious observance, but claiming "rights of risk" over the lives of a crew begins to edge into the kind of blasphemy practiced by Captain Ahab. Try as you might to warn the rest, if you're not the ship's master, who'll listen? Look how well it worked out for Starbuck.
The production was originally conceived to take advantage of a shipboard set left over from RKO's earlier adventure Pacific Liner (1938) and I'll admit I don't find it as successfully sea-soaked as something like The Long Voyage Home (1940): I never quite believed in the reality of the SS Altair as a live thing of rivets and funnels and rigging except for a couple of vital scenes, as when the natural roll of a ship under way becomes the engine of a clanging, chaotic torture like an outtake from Poe. Maybe it's just not wet enough. I have a similar difficulty with Russell Wade's Tom Merriam. I appreciate that his job is to be, not the star of the bildungsroman, but the endangered innocent, slim and straight in his new officer's uniform and transparent as a boy who will learn to shudder, but he's not as compelling to me as similar archetypes by Kim Hunter or Anna Lee—not as luminous, not as fierce. He improves with wear and tear, branded a Jonah for his suspicions and increasingly, jumpily, not irrationally afraid he'll be next in the string of incidents and accidents that have gained the Altair the name of a "bad ship." He heard as much from the blind street singer whose hurdy-gurdy rendition of "Blow the Man Down" opened the film over a remarkable, bristling display of knives in the after-hours window of a seamen's outfitting company, like the trophies of sharks' or whales' teeth; he didn't listen any more than your average tragic hero heeds Teiresias. His first meeting with Richard Dix's Captain Stone even plays with the kind of paternal appraisal that often prefigures the other genre, the two men facing each other like flattering mirrors of themselves. "Your history could have been my own at your age—an orphan, serious, hardworking, anxious to get somewhere." On the wall is a third mirror, a polished plaque reading Who Does Not Heed the Rudder Shall Meet the Rock. The viewer may thence expect the ever more inflexible Stone to run aground on himself before the denouement, but when Merriam finds his berth still in disarray from his predecessor who died in it, when the roll call turns up a body even before the Altair leaves port, when the captain's mildly stated preference for a "neat ship" leaves the massive pendulum of a freshly painted cargo hook lashing and bucking against the storm-blown sky like Thor fishing for Jörmungandr while the crew scramble frantically to secure it and the captain looks on with the kind of expectant satisfaction traditionally assigned to spectators of gladiators and lions, the more immediate question becomes how many of the crew he'll take with him first. The drowning rattle of tons of anchor chain pouring into a locker with no exit and a screaming man inside makes a bad answer. The crew overall are not drawn as deeply as some other communities in Lewton's films, but they register in crisp quick sketches whenever they need to come to the fore—Sir Lancelot from Trinidad with the calypso to prove it, Paul Marion as a Greek player of bagpipes, Lawrence Tierney not yet against type as a smart-mouthed sea-lawyer. Edmund Glover carries more weight as the collegiate radio officer who dubs his new shipmate "Tertius" and offers to teach him Latin and cheat him at cards, but adamantly closes his ears at the first sign of trouble: "Not me. Don't tell me. I like my job and I want to keep it." In case you are wondering, there are two women in this story and one of them appears only in silhouette. The other is played by Edith Barrett and she's as instantly vivid, sparrow-faced, sadly wise, not resigned, as some of the men around her are only suggested. She loves Will Stone; he is supposed to feel the same way about her. "Give me a chance to get over this—this feeling that I don't know myself," he urges her gently, the night that was set for their long-desired reunion. The possibility that the captain is aware of his own disintegration raises pathos; it does not guarantee that he can stop it, or that he even wants to. He has certain "theories" he would like to prove. He smiles now at Merriam just as he smiled at the last man who challenged him, who was crushed beneath fathoms of iron: "You know, there are some captains who would hold this against you."
Having just been treasuring Skelton Knaggs in Bedlam (1946), I was made extremely happy to find him here in an elliptically substantial role, at once at the edges of the action and the heart of the story. He is our introduction to the Altair proper, a small figure in a seaman's dark jersey leaning on the rail at the top of the gangway, steadily sharpening a knife nearly as long as his forearm. He looks like a doorman of the sea-roads, one of those liminal figures never encountered above the tide-line; he looks like a figurehead with his weathered face starkly side-lit so as to show the scars and the gnarls and the beauty of the salt-papered bones. Asked for directions to the captain, he gestures with the knife as another man might hook a thumb over his shoulder, its shadow falling like a sundial's motto across the startled Merriam. He looks like a silent clown, especially with his subtle almost stoneface and his watch cap folded eccentrically over on one side. He looks like he shipped out of Innsmouth or drowned on the last voyage home. His name according to the bosun's roll call is Paulo Lindström, but he's only ever called "the Finn" or, once, a "dummy": like so many sea-things come ashore, he's mute. Deliberately poetic and visionary, his thoughts will provide one of the few voiceovers in cinema I don't virulently hate. He never repeats what the audience can see for themselves; he speaks instead of half-seen things, whose knowledge might be insight and feels more like second sight. "The man is dead. With his death, the waters of the sea are open to us. But there will be other deaths, and the agony of dying, before we come to land again." Just as often the camera will observe him going about his business as practically as any fo'c'sle hand, standing watch, tending the wheel, ringing the hours on the ship's bell. The downturned shrug he gives to the question of what he wants with a radiogram when he can't read is marvelously funny and, under the circumstances of the paper's importance, nerve-spiking. Even in Lewton, it is not to be expected that a character so weird and marginal should prove so central to the resolution of the plot, but The Ghost Ship carries it off as neatly as Dickens and with something of the same violently tender doubling. It may not be as mysterious a film as some of its fellows, but that doesn't mean it's not still strange. It does what it needs to, which is never what any of the studio bosses at RKO asked Lewton to do. "All's well."
I can think of several reasons why these two movies might have been paired by the HFA: they are less frequently seen and often lesser-regarded Lewton, they offer unusual takes on murder and madness, they look like noirs with their liquid low-key cinematography by Robert De Grasse and Nicholas Musuraca and they may well at least Venn into the definition. Mostly I am just glad to have seen them on film, with no intermission and all the slight scratches and stutters and flickers of the 35 mm B-picture experience. Now if I'm lucky, someone will run The Body Snatcher (1945) for Halloween and I can further complete my set. This chiaroscuro brought to you by my suggestive backers at Patreon.
I knew of The Leopard Man (1943) long before I saw it: a description of its first death memorably opens Harlan Ellison's Watching (1989) and Ellison is correct that it didn't matter if he had misremembered details of the frightened girl pursued through the streets of her small New Mexico town by a black leopard like a piece of hungry night, from the age of nine he remembered the overwhelming, almost unspeakable fear suffusing the scene and it's still there in the insufficient circles of streetlight, the whistle and tumbleweed-whip of the wind under the railway bridge of the arroyo, the flare of eyes in the darkness like ferryman's coins, the stumbling run, the screaming, the blood dividing itself black as a cat under the door. After that, the film could have played tiddlywinks for the rest of its 66 minutes and it would still have deserved its horror laurels. I am pleased to report that nearly all the rest of it is that awful, that beautiful, and that interested not in what people can see to scare them, but what they can't know about their world or even themselves.
The premise is a lesson in unpredictability—a brash press agent can't imagine unleashing a killing spree when he hires a leopard to give his Anglo girlfriend's nightclub act a little oomph in a "bad town for blondes," but when two and then three women are found clawed to death after the cat escapes, the explanation is either a maddened half-wild animal or a disturbingly human copycat and either way it all started with Jerry Manning (Dennis O'Keefe) saying temptingly to Kiki Walker (Jean Brooks), "I thought you might like to strut the kitten in right in the middle of her act." He's speaking of Kiki's rival Clo-Clo (my grandfather's first screen crush Margo), the defiantly beautiful local dancer for whom the ace of spades keeps surfacing in the fortune-teller's cards, though every time we really fear for her the camera that shadows her like the audience's slasher eye veers away and catches on some other prey; she chatters her castanets mockingly at the dark and walks on. There is so much dark in this movie, even for an RKO B-budget it's almost ridiculous, except that it works so dreamily and disorientingly, even in daylight scenes you can feel it pressing at the edges of the frame like the built-in claustrophobia of a soundstage. When there are open-air locations in this picture, they are a desolate arroyo, or a high-walled cemetery, or a little museum in the surrounding hills where artifacts of the Indian past are dead under glass and a contemporary descendant like Charlie How-Come (Abner Biberman) shakes his head over a stone carving supposedly personifying his ancestors' ideas of "force and violence": "Don't look like a leopard to me." To walk anywhere at night in this town is to be terribly vulnerable to that which you cannot see walking with you. A cat, a killer. More intangible things, perhaps: one of the film's recurring symbols is a ball dancing on the jet of a fountain, explicitly called out by the museum's curator Dr. Galbraith (James Bell) as a metaphor for the illusions of free will and self-knowledge: "We know as little about the forces that move us and move the world around us as that empty ball does about the water which pushes it into the air, lets it fall and catches it again." But that suggests a mechanistic movie, in which the characters are most important as moving parts, and The Leopard Man is notable, especially given its blink-and-miss-it runtime, for its attention to their humanity. Jerry and Kiki could easily be nice-looking nonentities; they are snappy, shaken, and sensitive people beginning to realize their professional cynicism has no place in a town gripped by such horror as this one. Clo-Clo is wonderfully realized, not as the stereotypically hot-blooded siren she's first set up as, but a really likable woman with a life that extends far beyond the nightclub and the streets to an aging mother, a young child, an offstage romance, and a name that doesn't appear on her publicity. Technically disposable characters like Teresa Delgado (Margaret Landry) or Consuelo Contreras (Tula Parma) don't feel it because they receive so much more than the vignette treatment from the film, impressing on us not just the shock of their deaths but the shape and weight of their lives. Even walk-ons are given just a little more edge and depth than their utility to the plot strictly requires. I love the blasé chain-smoking of the fortune-teller Maria (Isabel Jewell) while Clo-Clo rehearses her act because it shifts her reading of the cards from mystical to matter-of-fact, a weather report or a bus schedule. Lewton's worlds always feel lived in, even by things other than people. James Agee once observed that "few people in Hollywood show in their work that they know or care half so much about movies or human beings as [Lewton] does," and I pretty much agree with that.
The movie does feel a little outside the Lewton norm, which is probably a factor of its origins. It was directed by Jacques Tourneur from a screenplay by Ardel Wray and Edward Dein, who in turn adapted it from Cornell Woolrich's Black Alibi (1942), and for all its densely imagined dread it is essentially a murder mystery. As such, it is generically conventional in a way that other films I've seen produced by Lewton are not—The Seventh Victim (1943) comes closest and it still isn't really a detective story, just the hook of one before it drifts away into something much more existential, much less easily answered, whatever the question might have been. The Leopard Man follows through to the end of the investigation where the murderer is revealed and some kind of justice done. It just leaves a lot lingering around the edges, including the fact that whatever an audience in 1943 would have made of it, seen now it is an early and unmistakable serial killer film. It isn't the earliest, of course, because M (1931) got there ahead of everybody, but I am trying to decide if it could be Hollywood's first. Certainly it brings the now-codified sense of pattern as well as compulsion, the recapturing ritual of trauma and the trigger that makes so many serial killer stories what Gemma Files has evocatively described as werewolf stories (per Webster: Said he was a wolf, only the difference / Was, a wolf's skin was hairy on the outside, / His on the inside), so that the title isn't misdirection after all; it is fleetingly but startlingly explicit about the sexual aspects of its killer's pathology; and beyond that, especially in hindsight of the genre, it is absolutely fascinating to see a serial killer movie that is ultimately not very interested in its killer. I don't mean that he's an enigma. Any explanation of his behavior has to be construed in hindsight of his blurt of last words, but it's diagram-clear:
"I couldn't rest. I couldn't sleep. All I could see was Teresa Delgado's body—broken, mangled. I saw it day and night. It was waiting everywhere I turned . . . I didn't want to kill! But I had to. I heard the little girl in the cemetery, talking to the man in the auto. When he went away, I thought I was going to help her get over the wall. I can't remember. I looked down. In the darkness I saw her white face, the eyes full of fear. Fear, that was it. The little frail body—the soft skin—and then she screamed—"
The movie anticipates Peeping Tom (1960) in that its arousal-murder trigger is the sight of a woman frightened, just as it anticipates Psycho (1960) in the next-door ordinariness of its killer, but unlike both of those movies it does not seem concerned with what might have primed the man who makes this muttered, almost perplexed confession to leap from witnessing a gruesome murder to repeating it. No childhood demons, no adult ordeals. Past a cursory mention of historical "men with kinks in their brains . . . Bluebeard in France, Jack the Ripper in London," the script doesn't even waste much time on the general question of where serial killers come from. They're real, is mostly what matters about them, and they can look like anyone, even genial, slightly dusty museum curators who are neither spellbinding nor grotesque. Having seen him now in at least four movies where I noticed and then failed to connect him with any of his other roles, I am forced to conclude that James Bell is no minor chameleon for his pleasant professional face; it works nicely for a character like Galbraith, who has no obvious tells. For most of the movie he's one of these small-time scholarly characters that are usually helpful, sometimes quirky, often endearing. It is not any of those things that he almost manages to palm the guilt of the murders off onto Charlie How-Come, but he does it in the light style of a joke and it registers as an unkind tweak of Jerry's theories of human evil, not as murderous camouflage. He's much less at ease around Kiki, notably fumbling a compliment before her performance, but it's a degree of awkwardness that falls within the sadly normal limits of men who haven't yet realized that you just talk to women like people, not a proto-incel red flag. He has a bit of a hangdog look about him, but that might just be the shyness. When his own night walk home turns into a dark ride of memory, it's the most the movie has put itself into his perspective and it is strictly a conscience-catching trick. It's careful to make him a person. I just don't think it cares about him the same way it cares about the women he kills. Even pursued down an empty black street by the ghost-rattle of castanets and a girl's voice softly crying, Galbraith doesn't get the revenge-nightmare sympathy of Teresa sent out for a bag of cornmeal that isn't worth her life, the tender affection of Consuelo not quite sneaking out to meet her boyfriend in a graveyard on her eighteenth birthday, the vital appreciation of Clo-Clo who looks for a rich man in the cards, but when she meets one actually enjoys one of the warmest, most honest and human connections in this isolating film. It plays now like a rebuke to a history of slashed and fridged women; it predates them. It's still refreshing. This order of priorities may come from Woolrich, who after all gave us the night-stalking heroine of Phantom Lady (1944), but it matches Lewton's attentiveness to marginalization and it leaves a better taste than other films full of women's bodies I've seen. Maybe it's just that no one dies shallowly in a Lewton story. Death's too intimate to be a cheap effect.
I had never heard of The Ghost Ship (1943) before I started looking into Lewton's back catalogue; it has something of a spectral, maudit reputation itself, having been pulled from distribution for half a century following a plagiarism suit and then bewildering fans slightly on its return. Written by Leo Mittler and Donald Henderson Clarke and directed by Mark Robson, it's among the Lewton unit's least supernatural stories, concerning the green third officer of a merchant freighter who becomes convinced that his briskly lonely, authoritative captain is a power-mad murderer. I'd like to rewatch Isle of the Dead (1945) before making this claim seriously, but The Ghost Ship may be their purest mood piece, a stripped-down, fog-bound chiller whose 69 minutes are almost all devoted to building an atmosphere of wide-open confinement, flat sky, flat sea, flat steel and swinging shadows. Its very sparseness means that whatever happens feels charged, unmissable. There's ambiguity in it, but there's more old-fashioned suspense, the stomach-curdling and politically relevant fear of inescapable authority abused. "Aboard ship, you better believe in the captain and forget logic . . . The captain's got more law at sea than any man on land has got, even the King of Siam or the President of the United States." Coiling a rope sunwise may be an innocently superstitious observance, but claiming "rights of risk" over the lives of a crew begins to edge into the kind of blasphemy practiced by Captain Ahab. Try as you might to warn the rest, if you're not the ship's master, who'll listen? Look how well it worked out for Starbuck.
The production was originally conceived to take advantage of a shipboard set left over from RKO's earlier adventure Pacific Liner (1938) and I'll admit I don't find it as successfully sea-soaked as something like The Long Voyage Home (1940): I never quite believed in the reality of the SS Altair as a live thing of rivets and funnels and rigging except for a couple of vital scenes, as when the natural roll of a ship under way becomes the engine of a clanging, chaotic torture like an outtake from Poe. Maybe it's just not wet enough. I have a similar difficulty with Russell Wade's Tom Merriam. I appreciate that his job is to be, not the star of the bildungsroman, but the endangered innocent, slim and straight in his new officer's uniform and transparent as a boy who will learn to shudder, but he's not as compelling to me as similar archetypes by Kim Hunter or Anna Lee—not as luminous, not as fierce. He improves with wear and tear, branded a Jonah for his suspicions and increasingly, jumpily, not irrationally afraid he'll be next in the string of incidents and accidents that have gained the Altair the name of a "bad ship." He heard as much from the blind street singer whose hurdy-gurdy rendition of "Blow the Man Down" opened the film over a remarkable, bristling display of knives in the after-hours window of a seamen's outfitting company, like the trophies of sharks' or whales' teeth; he didn't listen any more than your average tragic hero heeds Teiresias. His first meeting with Richard Dix's Captain Stone even plays with the kind of paternal appraisal that often prefigures the other genre, the two men facing each other like flattering mirrors of themselves. "Your history could have been my own at your age—an orphan, serious, hardworking, anxious to get somewhere." On the wall is a third mirror, a polished plaque reading Who Does Not Heed the Rudder Shall Meet the Rock. The viewer may thence expect the ever more inflexible Stone to run aground on himself before the denouement, but when Merriam finds his berth still in disarray from his predecessor who died in it, when the roll call turns up a body even before the Altair leaves port, when the captain's mildly stated preference for a "neat ship" leaves the massive pendulum of a freshly painted cargo hook lashing and bucking against the storm-blown sky like Thor fishing for Jörmungandr while the crew scramble frantically to secure it and the captain looks on with the kind of expectant satisfaction traditionally assigned to spectators of gladiators and lions, the more immediate question becomes how many of the crew he'll take with him first. The drowning rattle of tons of anchor chain pouring into a locker with no exit and a screaming man inside makes a bad answer. The crew overall are not drawn as deeply as some other communities in Lewton's films, but they register in crisp quick sketches whenever they need to come to the fore—Sir Lancelot from Trinidad with the calypso to prove it, Paul Marion as a Greek player of bagpipes, Lawrence Tierney not yet against type as a smart-mouthed sea-lawyer. Edmund Glover carries more weight as the collegiate radio officer who dubs his new shipmate "Tertius" and offers to teach him Latin and cheat him at cards, but adamantly closes his ears at the first sign of trouble: "Not me. Don't tell me. I like my job and I want to keep it." In case you are wondering, there are two women in this story and one of them appears only in silhouette. The other is played by Edith Barrett and she's as instantly vivid, sparrow-faced, sadly wise, not resigned, as some of the men around her are only suggested. She loves Will Stone; he is supposed to feel the same way about her. "Give me a chance to get over this—this feeling that I don't know myself," he urges her gently, the night that was set for their long-desired reunion. The possibility that the captain is aware of his own disintegration raises pathos; it does not guarantee that he can stop it, or that he even wants to. He has certain "theories" he would like to prove. He smiles now at Merriam just as he smiled at the last man who challenged him, who was crushed beneath fathoms of iron: "You know, there are some captains who would hold this against you."
Having just been treasuring Skelton Knaggs in Bedlam (1946), I was made extremely happy to find him here in an elliptically substantial role, at once at the edges of the action and the heart of the story. He is our introduction to the Altair proper, a small figure in a seaman's dark jersey leaning on the rail at the top of the gangway, steadily sharpening a knife nearly as long as his forearm. He looks like a doorman of the sea-roads, one of those liminal figures never encountered above the tide-line; he looks like a figurehead with his weathered face starkly side-lit so as to show the scars and the gnarls and the beauty of the salt-papered bones. Asked for directions to the captain, he gestures with the knife as another man might hook a thumb over his shoulder, its shadow falling like a sundial's motto across the startled Merriam. He looks like a silent clown, especially with his subtle almost stoneface and his watch cap folded eccentrically over on one side. He looks like he shipped out of Innsmouth or drowned on the last voyage home. His name according to the bosun's roll call is Paulo Lindström, but he's only ever called "the Finn" or, once, a "dummy": like so many sea-things come ashore, he's mute. Deliberately poetic and visionary, his thoughts will provide one of the few voiceovers in cinema I don't virulently hate. He never repeats what the audience can see for themselves; he speaks instead of half-seen things, whose knowledge might be insight and feels more like second sight. "The man is dead. With his death, the waters of the sea are open to us. But there will be other deaths, and the agony of dying, before we come to land again." Just as often the camera will observe him going about his business as practically as any fo'c'sle hand, standing watch, tending the wheel, ringing the hours on the ship's bell. The downturned shrug he gives to the question of what he wants with a radiogram when he can't read is marvelously funny and, under the circumstances of the paper's importance, nerve-spiking. Even in Lewton, it is not to be expected that a character so weird and marginal should prove so central to the resolution of the plot, but The Ghost Ship carries it off as neatly as Dickens and with something of the same violently tender doubling. It may not be as mysterious a film as some of its fellows, but that doesn't mean it's not still strange. It does what it needs to, which is never what any of the studio bosses at RKO asked Lewton to do. "All's well."
I can think of several reasons why these two movies might have been paired by the HFA: they are less frequently seen and often lesser-regarded Lewton, they offer unusual takes on murder and madness, they look like noirs with their liquid low-key cinematography by Robert De Grasse and Nicholas Musuraca and they may well at least Venn into the definition. Mostly I am just glad to have seen them on film, with no intermission and all the slight scratches and stutters and flickers of the 35 mm B-picture experience. Now if I'm lucky, someone will run The Body Snatcher (1945) for Halloween and I can further complete my set. This chiaroscuro brought to you by my suggestive backers at Patreon.
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I don't know. Again it's a case where the writers have major-market columns and therefore a ready-made audience, but I could probably ask at least one of them. [edit] I am aware that I have regular readers! I just assume it's not as many people as patronize Tor.com.
Admittedly a different genre, but it being more difficult to find out about films than books, more difficult to dip in, etc., should make reviews more important, not less.
Thank you. You make me wonder if there are different audiences of people who read criticism for pointers and people who read criticism for fun. (If so, obviously there is overlap.)