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Weird, ain't it?
In case it is not enough to praise the picture for its ambiguously supernatural, female-forward wit and shiver, I have not seen a better argument for the collective authorship of the Lewton unit than The Falcon and the Co-eds (1943).
It was not produced by Val Lewton, nor did it involve most of his usual collaborators behind the scenes. Their catalogue is sufficiently extensive that merely through the interchangeable manufacture of the studio system one might reasonably expect a chip-in from DeWitt Bodeen, Jacques Tourneur, Mark Robson, Nicholas Musuraca, Robert De Grasse, John Lockert, Robert Wise, J.R. Whittredge, or Lyle Boyer, but nope. Like the majority of the popular B-series devised by RKO to capitalize on the success of their Saint films without having to cut a check to Leslie Charteris, The Falcon and the Co-eds was overseen by Maurice Geraghty and directed by William Clemens; it did have a one-off Lewton veteran in its DP J. Roy Hunt, but not in its cutter Theron Warth. Three of its stars had featured prominently in the quartet of shadowy, literate, enigmatically haunting titles that then comprised the CV of the Lewton unit—Cat People (1942), I Walked with a Zombie (1943), The Leopard Man (1943), and The Seventh Victim (1943)—but as contract players on the efficient factory floor of B-reliant RKO, Tom Conway, Jean Brooks, and Isabel Jewell were just as likely to be found on the set of another installment of the Falcon, especially Conway who had taken over the title role from his real-life brother George Sanders the previous year and would run with it for another three. It doesn't matter. The somberly thrilling sensation that this sunlit Gothic could at any second plunge off the California cliffs where its gentleman detective is suavely investigating a rumor of murder in the seaside hothouse of an all-girls school comes straight from the woman who wrote four screenplays for the Lewton unit—more than any other writer except Lewton himself—before her phosphorescent career was derailed first by the unit's dissolution in 1946 and then by her own blacklisting in 1948, the indispensable and still too often overlooked Ardel Wray.
Because Wray left so few traces on film outside of Lewton's productions, it would be chauvinistically easy to conclude that The Falcon and the Co-eds represents his auteurial imprint on her creativity, as opposed to the greater likelihood that it showcases the reasons her own interests and sensibilities meshed so fruitfully with the coalescing house style of the Lewton unit. With Conway's Falcon practically wading through ladies on his rounds of the Bluecliff Seminary for Girls, deftly pirouetting around student crushes and the submerged reefs of more adult passions which he navigates with the self-deprecating aplomb of quips like "Happens I have a phobia about being shot at," the film does not exceed the series brief of urbane light thrillers, but underneath the effervescence of amateur theatricals and midnight snacks and the sailor-suited trio of close-harmony troublemakers who gaggle after Tom Lawrence like self-appointed Bluecliff Irregulars, the doomier, dreamier atmosphere of the story soaks out of the slow-curling waves that crash at the foot of a smuggler's cove, the swirling glissandi of a concerto played like a residual haunting by the recording of a famous suicide. Loneliness is part of it, the alienation diagnosed by Tom as he surveys the sadly self-sufficient, book-muddled quarters of Alex Jamison, the poet-professor whom none of the girls can believe died of the natural causes on his death certificate:
"A man puts a good deal of himself into poetry . . . A man who perhaps demanded too much from people and had to live in books to get it. A quiet man who spent most of his time alone. A shy man who didn't try to assert himself, never thought of impressing people. Instead he probably took refuge in a world of his own imagination. How easily a man like that could have been dominated by others."
Everyone at Bluecliff seems to live in their separate imaginations, even the fussily no-nonsense dean concerned more with the effects of the scandal on the school's finances than with the possibility that a murder not only occurred on her campus but was uncannily foretold. Jewell's Mary Phoebus looks like a sleepwalker constantly startled awake behind the shield-glints of her glasses, her namesake-blonde curls and her breathless voice lending a china-doll air to her timid music teacher who seems curiously innocent of the implications of being caught rifling a dead colleague's desk when she explains it was only the manuscript of his poems she was trying to preserve. As if sheltered by the solidity of his own opinions, George Givot's Dr. Anatole Graelich with the dueling scar of his Mitteleuropean education on his brow holds psychologically forth like the sole practitioner of rationality on staff and freely confesses to testing the student body for telepathy with his pack of Zener cards. The clearest head for miles actually seems to belong to Brooks' Vicky Gaines, the wryly introduced drama teacher who feints and wrong-foots the Falcon as neatly as if she were lessoning him in stage combat, but even this unsentimental character has a habit of niching herself into the sea-cliff to lose herself in the ceaseless wind and the sea-swell, a kind of self-searching cosmicism: "I can't explain the sense of freedom it gives me. I watch the waves beating to the shore—I wonder if Nature's putting on a show just for me. To let me know how powerful she can be." Most obviously in danger of detaching herself from consensus reality is Rita Corday's Marguerita Serena, the darkly sensitive, allegedly clairvoyant student tormented by the conviction of following in the path of her father's insanity. "Beautifully, at times," she bitterly recalls him playing his own avant-garde compositions. "Other times strangely, wildly—" The moments when The Falcon and the Co-eds slips into her fragile subjectivity are some of its eeriest and most powerful, as when the shadow-treed soughing of the wind shapes itself into a deathly enticement to follow or, far worse for a drowned man's daughter, she hears clearly at last the spume-hoarse voice rasping itself out of the combers that burst salt-white on the rocks far below, Insane . . . only one answer . . . the sea . . . At the climax wherein the killer seeks to transfer her own unstable guilt into Marguerita, framing the girl as if by sympathetic magic to take the fall of the death by water in which madness ends, the film admits without forcing the scene's sapphic frisson. Nor can the accuracy of her premonitions really be explained by the murderer taking advantage of her morbid fantasies when she is seen absentmindedly doodling in order the symbols of the Zener cards which have yet to be dealt. The jokey blare of the ending propels the action on to the next picture with the usual tag of a damsel in flirtatiously accepted distress, but the elusive unease raised by its elemental setting, its frank talk of despair and suicide, even the casually piratical legends of the Devil's Ladder is not so easily left behind.
The Falcon and the Co-eds does not always blend glitchlessly into its series, compliance with which seems to account for Wray sharing her screenplay credit with established Falcon scribe Gerald Geraghty, although the original story was hers alone. A phone call apparently placed by a dead man is spookier than a student who faints at the drop of a foil is funny. Ruth Álvarez, Juanita Álvarez, and Nancy McCollum never feel over-egged as the precocious "Ughs" who rattle off their dialogue with tripartite enthusiasm and can swing a nursery rhyme like the Andrews Sisters, but Cliff Clark's Inspector Timothy Donovan and Edward Gargan's Detective Bates feel so out of place despite their standing as recurring characters that their most believable scenes are engulfed in an impassable whirlpool of schoolgirls or chased down the stairs by a bevy of indignant housemothers as if maenads are happening any second—accused of hiding behind their badges, they protest, "Lady, if we knew any place to hide, we'd be there!" The dorm party lit like a séance would fit right into the Lewton oeuvre, but the mercifully brief battle-of-the-sexes spanking would not. It is nonetheless functionally impossible to watch this picture without phantom consciousness of its Lewton unit version, backing off the hijinks and fully embracing the destabilizing poetry that edges it out onto the soft-spoken brink of horror even so. Conway in particular handles himself just fine as the droll and gentlemanly Falcon, but isn't it enticing to imagine him rolling up to Bluecliff in yet another inexplicable reprise of his Lewton-signature role of trash psychiatrist Dr. Judd, Satanist manqué and deserved recipient of one of the silver screen's best big cat maulings for trying to screw crazy sane? The effect on his professional fencing with Dr. Graelich would be suitably saturnine, especially in their discussion of the paranormal: "After all, psychic phenomena is an outpost in my profession and I don't have to tell you that Bluecliff has always been ultra-conservative." His inquisitive triangulation between the two female teachers would be shaded with as much audacious sleaze as apologetic courtliness, double-edging his compliment to Vicky, "It takes a very unusual woman to be rude and charming at the same time." His kindness to Marguerita might remain unaltered, much as one of his incarnations once treated an innocent abroad in the wildwood of the city with unexpected care. Nothing would change about Hunt's shadow-laced photography in which splashes of light are as unnerving as blood and the ocean surges and coils like a live thing in a dream. It feels unfair to Roy Webb who scored all eleven of Lewton's films for RKO that The Falcon and the Co-eds should employ him only as a highly recognizable, uncredited library clip.
I have no idea how Wray got from the Lewton unit to the Falcon series and back. It may not have been as much of a departure as it looks from this distance, when her seeming inseparability from Lewton is partly the survivorship bias of films that were actually produced—per Clive Dawson, RKO did announce her for other projects outside the unit that just fell through. It happened within the unit all the time: as much as I can find to admire in the somewhat mutilated Isle of the Dead (1945), I would give even more for their never-realized Carmilla. Their partnership continued beyond RKO, but she looked set to reestablish herself independently when he moved on to MGM while she was still under contract to Paramount. The project whose co-writing was still in the preliminary stages when her refusal to name names instantaneously ended her film career was the crime picture about postal inspectors which would eventually reach the screen as the much reassigned and rewritten Appointment with Danger (1950). It is as maddening as all the wasteful rest of McCarthyism: while I have no grounds for speculation on the particulars of an Ardel Wray-penned Dead Letter, I have no doubt that she would have thrived in the dark-drenched, dream-slant, nationally haunted environment of film noir. That she did not get the chance is a loss to more than my fantasies. Of the graduates of the Lewton unit, she is very much the one that got away.
To sum up, The Falcon and the Co-eds plays a great deal like its series detective took a wrong turn at the end of The Falcon in Danger (1943) and stumbled somewhere between the sugar fields of Saint Sebastian and the footlights of El Pueblo and while he may solve the crime, he leaves unplumbed this women's world where the key to two murders is a marriage and the sea speaks louder than a man. I got it from TCM and God bless the Internet Archive. None of its students are by definition co-eds, but the uncredited one with the glasses is the screen debut of Dorothy Malone. When Tom Lawrence casts the line of describing her favorite sea-view as lost and searching, Vicky leaves the bait dangling like philosophy: "Who isn't?" This show brought to you by my powerful backers at Patreon.
It was not produced by Val Lewton, nor did it involve most of his usual collaborators behind the scenes. Their catalogue is sufficiently extensive that merely through the interchangeable manufacture of the studio system one might reasonably expect a chip-in from DeWitt Bodeen, Jacques Tourneur, Mark Robson, Nicholas Musuraca, Robert De Grasse, John Lockert, Robert Wise, J.R. Whittredge, or Lyle Boyer, but nope. Like the majority of the popular B-series devised by RKO to capitalize on the success of their Saint films without having to cut a check to Leslie Charteris, The Falcon and the Co-eds was overseen by Maurice Geraghty and directed by William Clemens; it did have a one-off Lewton veteran in its DP J. Roy Hunt, but not in its cutter Theron Warth. Three of its stars had featured prominently in the quartet of shadowy, literate, enigmatically haunting titles that then comprised the CV of the Lewton unit—Cat People (1942), I Walked with a Zombie (1943), The Leopard Man (1943), and The Seventh Victim (1943)—but as contract players on the efficient factory floor of B-reliant RKO, Tom Conway, Jean Brooks, and Isabel Jewell were just as likely to be found on the set of another installment of the Falcon, especially Conway who had taken over the title role from his real-life brother George Sanders the previous year and would run with it for another three. It doesn't matter. The somberly thrilling sensation that this sunlit Gothic could at any second plunge off the California cliffs where its gentleman detective is suavely investigating a rumor of murder in the seaside hothouse of an all-girls school comes straight from the woman who wrote four screenplays for the Lewton unit—more than any other writer except Lewton himself—before her phosphorescent career was derailed first by the unit's dissolution in 1946 and then by her own blacklisting in 1948, the indispensable and still too often overlooked Ardel Wray.
Because Wray left so few traces on film outside of Lewton's productions, it would be chauvinistically easy to conclude that The Falcon and the Co-eds represents his auteurial imprint on her creativity, as opposed to the greater likelihood that it showcases the reasons her own interests and sensibilities meshed so fruitfully with the coalescing house style of the Lewton unit. With Conway's Falcon practically wading through ladies on his rounds of the Bluecliff Seminary for Girls, deftly pirouetting around student crushes and the submerged reefs of more adult passions which he navigates with the self-deprecating aplomb of quips like "Happens I have a phobia about being shot at," the film does not exceed the series brief of urbane light thrillers, but underneath the effervescence of amateur theatricals and midnight snacks and the sailor-suited trio of close-harmony troublemakers who gaggle after Tom Lawrence like self-appointed Bluecliff Irregulars, the doomier, dreamier atmosphere of the story soaks out of the slow-curling waves that crash at the foot of a smuggler's cove, the swirling glissandi of a concerto played like a residual haunting by the recording of a famous suicide. Loneliness is part of it, the alienation diagnosed by Tom as he surveys the sadly self-sufficient, book-muddled quarters of Alex Jamison, the poet-professor whom none of the girls can believe died of the natural causes on his death certificate:
"A man puts a good deal of himself into poetry . . . A man who perhaps demanded too much from people and had to live in books to get it. A quiet man who spent most of his time alone. A shy man who didn't try to assert himself, never thought of impressing people. Instead he probably took refuge in a world of his own imagination. How easily a man like that could have been dominated by others."
Everyone at Bluecliff seems to live in their separate imaginations, even the fussily no-nonsense dean concerned more with the effects of the scandal on the school's finances than with the possibility that a murder not only occurred on her campus but was uncannily foretold. Jewell's Mary Phoebus looks like a sleepwalker constantly startled awake behind the shield-glints of her glasses, her namesake-blonde curls and her breathless voice lending a china-doll air to her timid music teacher who seems curiously innocent of the implications of being caught rifling a dead colleague's desk when she explains it was only the manuscript of his poems she was trying to preserve. As if sheltered by the solidity of his own opinions, George Givot's Dr. Anatole Graelich with the dueling scar of his Mitteleuropean education on his brow holds psychologically forth like the sole practitioner of rationality on staff and freely confesses to testing the student body for telepathy with his pack of Zener cards. The clearest head for miles actually seems to belong to Brooks' Vicky Gaines, the wryly introduced drama teacher who feints and wrong-foots the Falcon as neatly as if she were lessoning him in stage combat, but even this unsentimental character has a habit of niching herself into the sea-cliff to lose herself in the ceaseless wind and the sea-swell, a kind of self-searching cosmicism: "I can't explain the sense of freedom it gives me. I watch the waves beating to the shore—I wonder if Nature's putting on a show just for me. To let me know how powerful she can be." Most obviously in danger of detaching herself from consensus reality is Rita Corday's Marguerita Serena, the darkly sensitive, allegedly clairvoyant student tormented by the conviction of following in the path of her father's insanity. "Beautifully, at times," she bitterly recalls him playing his own avant-garde compositions. "Other times strangely, wildly—" The moments when The Falcon and the Co-eds slips into her fragile subjectivity are some of its eeriest and most powerful, as when the shadow-treed soughing of the wind shapes itself into a deathly enticement to follow or, far worse for a drowned man's daughter, she hears clearly at last the spume-hoarse voice rasping itself out of the combers that burst salt-white on the rocks far below, Insane . . . only one answer . . . the sea . . . At the climax wherein the killer seeks to transfer her own unstable guilt into Marguerita, framing the girl as if by sympathetic magic to take the fall of the death by water in which madness ends, the film admits without forcing the scene's sapphic frisson. Nor can the accuracy of her premonitions really be explained by the murderer taking advantage of her morbid fantasies when she is seen absentmindedly doodling in order the symbols of the Zener cards which have yet to be dealt. The jokey blare of the ending propels the action on to the next picture with the usual tag of a damsel in flirtatiously accepted distress, but the elusive unease raised by its elemental setting, its frank talk of despair and suicide, even the casually piratical legends of the Devil's Ladder is not so easily left behind.
The Falcon and the Co-eds does not always blend glitchlessly into its series, compliance with which seems to account for Wray sharing her screenplay credit with established Falcon scribe Gerald Geraghty, although the original story was hers alone. A phone call apparently placed by a dead man is spookier than a student who faints at the drop of a foil is funny. Ruth Álvarez, Juanita Álvarez, and Nancy McCollum never feel over-egged as the precocious "Ughs" who rattle off their dialogue with tripartite enthusiasm and can swing a nursery rhyme like the Andrews Sisters, but Cliff Clark's Inspector Timothy Donovan and Edward Gargan's Detective Bates feel so out of place despite their standing as recurring characters that their most believable scenes are engulfed in an impassable whirlpool of schoolgirls or chased down the stairs by a bevy of indignant housemothers as if maenads are happening any second—accused of hiding behind their badges, they protest, "Lady, if we knew any place to hide, we'd be there!" The dorm party lit like a séance would fit right into the Lewton oeuvre, but the mercifully brief battle-of-the-sexes spanking would not. It is nonetheless functionally impossible to watch this picture without phantom consciousness of its Lewton unit version, backing off the hijinks and fully embracing the destabilizing poetry that edges it out onto the soft-spoken brink of horror even so. Conway in particular handles himself just fine as the droll and gentlemanly Falcon, but isn't it enticing to imagine him rolling up to Bluecliff in yet another inexplicable reprise of his Lewton-signature role of trash psychiatrist Dr. Judd, Satanist manqué and deserved recipient of one of the silver screen's best big cat maulings for trying to screw crazy sane? The effect on his professional fencing with Dr. Graelich would be suitably saturnine, especially in their discussion of the paranormal: "After all, psychic phenomena is an outpost in my profession and I don't have to tell you that Bluecliff has always been ultra-conservative." His inquisitive triangulation between the two female teachers would be shaded with as much audacious sleaze as apologetic courtliness, double-edging his compliment to Vicky, "It takes a very unusual woman to be rude and charming at the same time." His kindness to Marguerita might remain unaltered, much as one of his incarnations once treated an innocent abroad in the wildwood of the city with unexpected care. Nothing would change about Hunt's shadow-laced photography in which splashes of light are as unnerving as blood and the ocean surges and coils like a live thing in a dream. It feels unfair to Roy Webb who scored all eleven of Lewton's films for RKO that The Falcon and the Co-eds should employ him only as a highly recognizable, uncredited library clip.
I have no idea how Wray got from the Lewton unit to the Falcon series and back. It may not have been as much of a departure as it looks from this distance, when her seeming inseparability from Lewton is partly the survivorship bias of films that were actually produced—per Clive Dawson, RKO did announce her for other projects outside the unit that just fell through. It happened within the unit all the time: as much as I can find to admire in the somewhat mutilated Isle of the Dead (1945), I would give even more for their never-realized Carmilla. Their partnership continued beyond RKO, but she looked set to reestablish herself independently when he moved on to MGM while she was still under contract to Paramount. The project whose co-writing was still in the preliminary stages when her refusal to name names instantaneously ended her film career was the crime picture about postal inspectors which would eventually reach the screen as the much reassigned and rewritten Appointment with Danger (1950). It is as maddening as all the wasteful rest of McCarthyism: while I have no grounds for speculation on the particulars of an Ardel Wray-penned Dead Letter, I have no doubt that she would have thrived in the dark-drenched, dream-slant, nationally haunted environment of film noir. That she did not get the chance is a loss to more than my fantasies. Of the graduates of the Lewton unit, she is very much the one that got away.
To sum up, The Falcon and the Co-eds plays a great deal like its series detective took a wrong turn at the end of The Falcon in Danger (1943) and stumbled somewhere between the sugar fields of Saint Sebastian and the footlights of El Pueblo and while he may solve the crime, he leaves unplumbed this women's world where the key to two murders is a marriage and the sea speaks louder than a man. I got it from TCM and God bless the Internet Archive. None of its students are by definition co-eds, but the uncredited one with the glasses is the screen debut of Dorothy Malone. When Tom Lawrence casts the line of describing her favorite sea-view as lost and searching, Vicky leaves the bait dangling like philosophy: "Who isn't?" This show brought to you by my powerful backers at Patreon.
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I would read that fanfic about Sam Wilson.
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I'm so glad there's a freely available copy.
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I would give even more for their never-realized Carmilla.
Oh wow.
the uncredited one with the glasses is the screen debut of Dorothy Malone
And oh wow!
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Enjoy! It is solid Wray. It's just nuts that there wasn't more of her.
(I can recognize Jean Brooks outside of The Seventh Victim, but who looks at her face when she has that hair?)
Oh wow.
Right?! Dawson notes that elements of Carmilla were transposed into the original script for Isle of the Dead, but it's not the same thing.
And oh wow!
She has like two lines and is recognizable as herself!
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Thank you!