Like separate dreams
2019-09-22 04:46Bedlam (1946) is a ballad opera, a horror show of history, and some of the best fanfiction I have ever seen for the art of William Hogarth. It can be all of these things because it was produced for RKO by Val Lewton, the last and far from least of his dark, stylish, haunting B-pictures whose influence on the uncanny genres was incalculable; for the same reason it's also an acid and velvety showcase for Boris Karloff as a most human monster, whose crimes are all terribly sane. You may have to watch this movie from behind a couch, but never because of its mad characters. If it was not an influence on Tanith Lee's The Book of the Mad (1993), it should have been.
The story is sharp with caricature and shadow, like an engraving itself. In the teeming, torch-lit London of 1761, when George III is not yet a mad king and England imagines itself part of a great age of reason, the bold and beautiful Nell Bowen (Anna Lee) enjoys a glittering life as the "protégé" of prominent Tory Lord Mortimer (Billy House), a vast and shallow man introduced chuckling indulgently over the rhyme she has taught her white parrot to recite as they clatter in comfort through the disorderly night streets: "Lord Mortimer is like a pig, his brain is small, his belly big." With her finely cut face and even keener wit, she can turn a jest out of any challenge or contretemps, as bright and seemingly heartless as her hard-won gems, but she finds curiously little to laugh at in the famous "loonies" of "St. Mary's of Bethlehem Asylum" and even less in the dangerous servility of their Apothecary General, the black-browed Master Sims (Karloff) who styles himself a poet and stages a candlelit masque of Bedlamites during which one of his young charges, gilded as thickly as a Bond girl, grotesquely dies. We have already watched, the starry night this story opened, the escape attempt of one desperate inmate end in a warder's licensed cruelty and a fatal drop. We have been treated, too, to the twopenny tour Sims is accustomed to give of the straw-strewn wards of his notorious domain, introducing crying, chained, cringing human beings as "dogs . . . pigs . . . tigers . . . doves," this last group represented by a blankly staring girl whose unresponsive cheek he chucks with condescending suggestion. When Nell's scornful composure breaks with a horrified slash of her riding crop across the madhouse-keeper's face, emotionally we may be right there with her. But she has made an enemy of this tall, stooped man whose cozening voice never shows the calculation in his eyes and even the friendship of the Quaker stonemason William Hannay (Richard Fraser) may not be enough to prevent her own harrowing in Bedlam, especially not once her inconvenient compassion and her pride have removed her from the protection of Lord Mortimer, who after all with his very own eyes watched his ex-mistress place a three-hundred-pound banknote between two slices of bread and take a disdainful bite. "It was a jest," she pleads for understanding from a colder audience than any she faced on the stage. "Permit me to communicate with Master John Wilkes—he will speak for me—" The wigged and powdered gentlemen of the Commission of Lunacy exchange significant glances with one another and with Master Sims, taking in only one thing from the increasing agitation of the slim, clever, no longer so glittering girl before them: "You are not in need of any witnesses but your own sanity—and we shall judge the worth of that."
Lewton's films were famously built out of ready-made lurid titles—Cat People (1942), I Walked with a Zombie (1943), The Curse of the Cat People (1944)—and Bedlam differs only in that I believe it went into production as the more generically ominous Chamber of Horrors. Even its premise of a sane innocent wrongfully incarcerated in an early modern snake pit suggests the simpler, trashier thriller RKO might have expected to get for its $350,000. But it got assigned to Lewton and his stories always went deeper than they had to. Despite its setting in the byword of lunacy, the engine of Bedlam's horror is not mental illness, not even the characters' fear of it which the audience might well be assumed to share. Shocked by her first sight of the shadow-crossed hall where human figures rock or crawl or stare or pray, voices mutter and whimper and a fiddle saws tunelessly, the first words out of Nell's mouth are nonetheless a kind of heartstruck empathy: "They're all so lonely. They're all in themselves and by themselves. They pay no heed to us." As if warmed by her disquiet, Sims widens the divide between his charges and the paying customers who gawk at them from the safe distance of sanity with the bland reassurance, "Ours is a human world—theirs is a bestial world, without reason, without soul. They're animals." It has the ring of patter, like his taxonomy of dogs and doves; it does not produce the expected effect on Nell, whose revulsion only hardens the more she's shown not only of Bedlam, but of its Apothecary General whose care is at best indifferent and at worst self-gratifying, as gloatingly mock-solicitous as his protest as she storms out, "But you haven't seen the other cages!" I had never before seen Lee to notice her, but she's tremendous here as a woman who got herself off the streets, like her pretty, witty namesake, on the strength of her beauty and her brains, but is discovering almost against her will that she can't endure much longer in the rarefied air of the upper classes without her conscience or her heart. "My heart is a flint, sir," she crisply rebuffs Hannay when he gently interrogates her self-protective dismissal of feeling. "It may strike sparks, but they're not warm enough to burn. I have no time to make a show of loving-kindness before my fellow men, not in this life—I've too much laughing to do." And yet she has already shown exactly that, however mixed the gesture with the class struggle in which she and Sims are doubles as much as adversaries; she will do it again inside the sobbing walls of Bedlam, where her newfound reformer's resolve is tested by the necessity to treat the variously troubled inmates not as objects of pity but, indeed, her fellows. The mise-en-scène of this movie is not merely a mechanism for the delivery of chills. Characters may be as pointedly limned as cartoons, but they can also be casually three-dimensional, making the world of the film more real just by being in it. Whatever their DSM codes might be, individuals like the genteel, paranoid lawyer Sidney Long (Ian Wolfe), the mute scrivener Oliver Todd (Jason Robards Sr.), and the sweetly scruffy Dan (Robert Clarke) who "sometimes . . . fancies himself a dog" are rendered with far more warmth than the careless aristocracy at Vauxhall or the sober authority of the Commission of Lunacy. Gin-tippling, beauty-patched Kitty Sims (Elizabeth Russell) enters the story to supplant Nell in Lord Mortimer's affections, but she's shrewd and not without dignity as her uncle's plans and her own part ways. She's part of the same rumbustious London as the tricky radical John Wilkes (Leyland Hodgson), here permitted to originate the famous your-principles-or-your-mistress riposte to the Earl of Sandwich, and the habitués of a printer's shop that runs off Hogarth's own caricature of "That Devil Wilks," a glimpse, like the street scenes of lavender-sellers and link-boys and dandies, of the ecosystem in which Bedlam's cast strive or thrive. So's a character like Varney (Skelton Knaggs, an exquisitely Dickensian name for an exquisitely Dickensian player) who contributes minutely to the film's plot but immeasurably to its atmosphere as Nell's valet and former dresser from her actress days. Diminutive and as much of a dandy as his station allows, we're told he "can plait a tress or twirl a furbelow quicker than a handywoman, but he has no knack with horses," and indeed he sounds much more in his element proudly defending Nell's beloved Poll, "She's been with Mistress Bowen since Mistress Bowen played Aurora in The Rivals. We did very well in that." He has a dreamy, wry, badly pockmarked face and a correspondingly top-storeyed voice with the fine pointing of camp; he's given to staring wistfully into the middle distance and then slipping in commentary as if sidelong to an audience; he is not what anyone including himself would call a strong character, but in classic fashion he comes through for Nell in the pinch, risking the security of a new position for the sake of long friendship. I adore him, obviously, but I also adore that the film has time for him. Hogarth wouldn't have left him out.
It even has time for Master Sims. I don't want to get hyperbolic about Boris Karloff, who had to deal with some ridiculously inflated press in his time, but he is stunning in Bedlam. He generally was when anyone gave him the chance—I just caught him in a remarkable impersonation of pseudo-pious sleaze in Five Star Final (1931), scant months before his career-defining breakout in Frankenstein (1931)—but I have seen two out of his three collaborations with Lewton now and there is something about their texture that really impresses me. It is beside the point whether they are flattering, sympathetic, or even enjoyable parts. They are entirely human. For all that Sims looks like a stock villain in his first scenes, his may be the most carefully cross-hatched shadings of all. "Most people laugh at my ugliness," he says with strategic self-deprecation, and it's true that his severe, strongly marked face is not the fashion in an age of paint and powder, just as his plain dark coat and scratch wig give him a black-beetle look among the rococo gaiety of his patrons. It is not entirely misleading in that he never will be on the inside of their satiny world, but it belies the autocracy of his rule in Bedlam. However low a leg he makes before his betters, however sycophantically he smiles at insults or blows, Sims with no one to gainsay him is as proud and cruel as a hell-reigning Satan and his contest of philosophies with Nell increasingly resembles a battle of souls as he challenges her humanism, deriding her steadfast acts of compassion as "mawkish theories . . . Men are not brothers. Men are not born good and kind. Even the mindless ones are savage and must be ruled with force." When she disproves at least this last misanthropy, Sims' face as he turns from her triumph shows as much bafflement as bitterness, as if she's made an axiom of his universe come out wrong. It makes him more of a threat. He does not lose, ever, in his little kingdom of cages and "remedies." If he cannot change an intelligent woman's mind, perhaps the quickest end to the argument is simply to destroy it. ( Give Master Sims a fair trial. )
I was not, incidentally, joking about Hogarth. Bedlam was produced by Lewton, directed by his regular collaborator Mark Robson, and written by them both, but Hogarth gets story credit based on the final image of The Rake's Progress (1732–35); in fact his influence goes far beyond that scene of Bedlam, which is reproduced faithfully with Nell and Sims in the places of the two female visitors. The film is full of allusions to his satirist's eye, as if his prints and paintings were its cosmology. They dissolve under the credits, slantly illustrating the names of cast and crew. They serve as its intertitles, like visual epigrams. They underlie choices of costuming or staging and I suspect even a couple of characters—I am thinking especially of Pompey (Frankie Dee), the splendidly costumed young "African page" whom Lord Mortimer pampers much as Nell does her parrot Poll. I'm sure I haven't caught all the references. This is a film whose literary shout-outs include Christopher Smart, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, and Richard Sheridan, plus the brazen in-joke of a madman who has invented the flip book and dreams of projecting his drawings "large as life on a wall." Nell's £300 sandwich harks back to a similar stunt of Kitty Fisher's. A literal Tom of Bedlam gazes rapt at the stars—the moon's my constant mistress—in one of the most beautiful shots in Nicholas Musuraca's broadside-noir cinematography. I wish the actor who played Hannay were not conspicuously flatter than the character as written, but even he can't wreck the rich poetry of this movie, which is a nightmare only if the eighteenth century was. I love Cat People, but it does not represent the totality of Val Lewton. I am so glad to find out what else that could look like. This fancy brought to you by my sensible backers at Patreon.
The story is sharp with caricature and shadow, like an engraving itself. In the teeming, torch-lit London of 1761, when George III is not yet a mad king and England imagines itself part of a great age of reason, the bold and beautiful Nell Bowen (Anna Lee) enjoys a glittering life as the "protégé" of prominent Tory Lord Mortimer (Billy House), a vast and shallow man introduced chuckling indulgently over the rhyme she has taught her white parrot to recite as they clatter in comfort through the disorderly night streets: "Lord Mortimer is like a pig, his brain is small, his belly big." With her finely cut face and even keener wit, she can turn a jest out of any challenge or contretemps, as bright and seemingly heartless as her hard-won gems, but she finds curiously little to laugh at in the famous "loonies" of "St. Mary's of Bethlehem Asylum" and even less in the dangerous servility of their Apothecary General, the black-browed Master Sims (Karloff) who styles himself a poet and stages a candlelit masque of Bedlamites during which one of his young charges, gilded as thickly as a Bond girl, grotesquely dies. We have already watched, the starry night this story opened, the escape attempt of one desperate inmate end in a warder's licensed cruelty and a fatal drop. We have been treated, too, to the twopenny tour Sims is accustomed to give of the straw-strewn wards of his notorious domain, introducing crying, chained, cringing human beings as "dogs . . . pigs . . . tigers . . . doves," this last group represented by a blankly staring girl whose unresponsive cheek he chucks with condescending suggestion. When Nell's scornful composure breaks with a horrified slash of her riding crop across the madhouse-keeper's face, emotionally we may be right there with her. But she has made an enemy of this tall, stooped man whose cozening voice never shows the calculation in his eyes and even the friendship of the Quaker stonemason William Hannay (Richard Fraser) may not be enough to prevent her own harrowing in Bedlam, especially not once her inconvenient compassion and her pride have removed her from the protection of Lord Mortimer, who after all with his very own eyes watched his ex-mistress place a three-hundred-pound banknote between two slices of bread and take a disdainful bite. "It was a jest," she pleads for understanding from a colder audience than any she faced on the stage. "Permit me to communicate with Master John Wilkes—he will speak for me—" The wigged and powdered gentlemen of the Commission of Lunacy exchange significant glances with one another and with Master Sims, taking in only one thing from the increasing agitation of the slim, clever, no longer so glittering girl before them: "You are not in need of any witnesses but your own sanity—and we shall judge the worth of that."
Lewton's films were famously built out of ready-made lurid titles—Cat People (1942), I Walked with a Zombie (1943), The Curse of the Cat People (1944)—and Bedlam differs only in that I believe it went into production as the more generically ominous Chamber of Horrors. Even its premise of a sane innocent wrongfully incarcerated in an early modern snake pit suggests the simpler, trashier thriller RKO might have expected to get for its $350,000. But it got assigned to Lewton and his stories always went deeper than they had to. Despite its setting in the byword of lunacy, the engine of Bedlam's horror is not mental illness, not even the characters' fear of it which the audience might well be assumed to share. Shocked by her first sight of the shadow-crossed hall where human figures rock or crawl or stare or pray, voices mutter and whimper and a fiddle saws tunelessly, the first words out of Nell's mouth are nonetheless a kind of heartstruck empathy: "They're all so lonely. They're all in themselves and by themselves. They pay no heed to us." As if warmed by her disquiet, Sims widens the divide between his charges and the paying customers who gawk at them from the safe distance of sanity with the bland reassurance, "Ours is a human world—theirs is a bestial world, without reason, without soul. They're animals." It has the ring of patter, like his taxonomy of dogs and doves; it does not produce the expected effect on Nell, whose revulsion only hardens the more she's shown not only of Bedlam, but of its Apothecary General whose care is at best indifferent and at worst self-gratifying, as gloatingly mock-solicitous as his protest as she storms out, "But you haven't seen the other cages!" I had never before seen Lee to notice her, but she's tremendous here as a woman who got herself off the streets, like her pretty, witty namesake, on the strength of her beauty and her brains, but is discovering almost against her will that she can't endure much longer in the rarefied air of the upper classes without her conscience or her heart. "My heart is a flint, sir," she crisply rebuffs Hannay when he gently interrogates her self-protective dismissal of feeling. "It may strike sparks, but they're not warm enough to burn. I have no time to make a show of loving-kindness before my fellow men, not in this life—I've too much laughing to do." And yet she has already shown exactly that, however mixed the gesture with the class struggle in which she and Sims are doubles as much as adversaries; she will do it again inside the sobbing walls of Bedlam, where her newfound reformer's resolve is tested by the necessity to treat the variously troubled inmates not as objects of pity but, indeed, her fellows. The mise-en-scène of this movie is not merely a mechanism for the delivery of chills. Characters may be as pointedly limned as cartoons, but they can also be casually three-dimensional, making the world of the film more real just by being in it. Whatever their DSM codes might be, individuals like the genteel, paranoid lawyer Sidney Long (Ian Wolfe), the mute scrivener Oliver Todd (Jason Robards Sr.), and the sweetly scruffy Dan (Robert Clarke) who "sometimes . . . fancies himself a dog" are rendered with far more warmth than the careless aristocracy at Vauxhall or the sober authority of the Commission of Lunacy. Gin-tippling, beauty-patched Kitty Sims (Elizabeth Russell) enters the story to supplant Nell in Lord Mortimer's affections, but she's shrewd and not without dignity as her uncle's plans and her own part ways. She's part of the same rumbustious London as the tricky radical John Wilkes (Leyland Hodgson), here permitted to originate the famous your-principles-or-your-mistress riposte to the Earl of Sandwich, and the habitués of a printer's shop that runs off Hogarth's own caricature of "That Devil Wilks," a glimpse, like the street scenes of lavender-sellers and link-boys and dandies, of the ecosystem in which Bedlam's cast strive or thrive. So's a character like Varney (Skelton Knaggs, an exquisitely Dickensian name for an exquisitely Dickensian player) who contributes minutely to the film's plot but immeasurably to its atmosphere as Nell's valet and former dresser from her actress days. Diminutive and as much of a dandy as his station allows, we're told he "can plait a tress or twirl a furbelow quicker than a handywoman, but he has no knack with horses," and indeed he sounds much more in his element proudly defending Nell's beloved Poll, "She's been with Mistress Bowen since Mistress Bowen played Aurora in The Rivals. We did very well in that." He has a dreamy, wry, badly pockmarked face and a correspondingly top-storeyed voice with the fine pointing of camp; he's given to staring wistfully into the middle distance and then slipping in commentary as if sidelong to an audience; he is not what anyone including himself would call a strong character, but in classic fashion he comes through for Nell in the pinch, risking the security of a new position for the sake of long friendship. I adore him, obviously, but I also adore that the film has time for him. Hogarth wouldn't have left him out.
It even has time for Master Sims. I don't want to get hyperbolic about Boris Karloff, who had to deal with some ridiculously inflated press in his time, but he is stunning in Bedlam. He generally was when anyone gave him the chance—I just caught him in a remarkable impersonation of pseudo-pious sleaze in Five Star Final (1931), scant months before his career-defining breakout in Frankenstein (1931)—but I have seen two out of his three collaborations with Lewton now and there is something about their texture that really impresses me. It is beside the point whether they are flattering, sympathetic, or even enjoyable parts. They are entirely human. For all that Sims looks like a stock villain in his first scenes, his may be the most carefully cross-hatched shadings of all. "Most people laugh at my ugliness," he says with strategic self-deprecation, and it's true that his severe, strongly marked face is not the fashion in an age of paint and powder, just as his plain dark coat and scratch wig give him a black-beetle look among the rococo gaiety of his patrons. It is not entirely misleading in that he never will be on the inside of their satiny world, but it belies the autocracy of his rule in Bedlam. However low a leg he makes before his betters, however sycophantically he smiles at insults or blows, Sims with no one to gainsay him is as proud and cruel as a hell-reigning Satan and his contest of philosophies with Nell increasingly resembles a battle of souls as he challenges her humanism, deriding her steadfast acts of compassion as "mawkish theories . . . Men are not brothers. Men are not born good and kind. Even the mindless ones are savage and must be ruled with force." When she disproves at least this last misanthropy, Sims' face as he turns from her triumph shows as much bafflement as bitterness, as if she's made an axiom of his universe come out wrong. It makes him more of a threat. He does not lose, ever, in his little kingdom of cages and "remedies." If he cannot change an intelligent woman's mind, perhaps the quickest end to the argument is simply to destroy it. ( Give Master Sims a fair trial. )
I was not, incidentally, joking about Hogarth. Bedlam was produced by Lewton, directed by his regular collaborator Mark Robson, and written by them both, but Hogarth gets story credit based on the final image of The Rake's Progress (1732–35); in fact his influence goes far beyond that scene of Bedlam, which is reproduced faithfully with Nell and Sims in the places of the two female visitors. The film is full of allusions to his satirist's eye, as if his prints and paintings were its cosmology. They dissolve under the credits, slantly illustrating the names of cast and crew. They serve as its intertitles, like visual epigrams. They underlie choices of costuming or staging and I suspect even a couple of characters—I am thinking especially of Pompey (Frankie Dee), the splendidly costumed young "African page" whom Lord Mortimer pampers much as Nell does her parrot Poll. I'm sure I haven't caught all the references. This is a film whose literary shout-outs include Christopher Smart, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Dekker, and Richard Sheridan, plus the brazen in-joke of a madman who has invented the flip book and dreams of projecting his drawings "large as life on a wall." Nell's £300 sandwich harks back to a similar stunt of Kitty Fisher's. A literal Tom of Bedlam gazes rapt at the stars—the moon's my constant mistress—in one of the most beautiful shots in Nicholas Musuraca's broadside-noir cinematography. I wish the actor who played Hannay were not conspicuously flatter than the character as written, but even he can't wreck the rich poetry of this movie, which is a nightmare only if the eighteenth century was. I love Cat People, but it does not represent the totality of Val Lewton. I am so glad to find out what else that could look like. This fancy brought to you by my sensible backers at Patreon.
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