Director: Mark Robson
The longevity of Valley of the Dolls‘ status as a cult film undoubtedly has to do with its tonal incongruities—while one expects a cynical exposé about women in show-biz, the consistency with which it hurls its idiosyncrasies has a magnetic appeal. As a drama, the film is a slow, often ridiculous bore. But when Patty Duke shouts the show-stopping “It’s Impossible” number, dressed business-casual and framed by a backdrop of a cystic fibrosis telethon, the film at once revels in extravagance while humorously accompany the material with a decidedly deglamorized, ridiculous aesthetic. The effect is as startling as when, later in the film, a dramatic scene involves lines such as, “Boobies, boobies, boobies… nothin’ but boobies!” Directed by a 53-year-old and adapted for the screen by women older than that, the film is at peace with old Hollywood in its sincerity, yet the contrast between that very sincerity and the inherent discomfort of witnessing the film’s ludicrous hysterics suggests something closer to the experimental modes of storytelling to come to Hollywood in the late-60s. Valley of the Dolls is too pained and knowing to rank it alongside such naive exposés such as Reefer Madness, and yet its evocation of similar over-the-top dramatizations invites that sort of cult criticism. While many “bad” films fade away in memory, Valley of the Dolls has endured because it simultaneously plays as both heartfelt masterpiece and utter farce, ultimately too provocative to disregard as trash.
Director: Mark Robson
It is more than a little unusual that the title cards of Bedlam refer to the shocking mistreatment of the mentally ill in the eighteenth century. This justification for a film seems absurd–the war had just ended, so certainly there were more pressing social issues to discuss than centuries old psychiatric facilities? But mental health reform is largely a MacGuffin in Val Lewton’s most overtly feminist film, which casts a strong heroine (Anna Lee) who has the gull to speak out against a largely male institution and finds herself–well–institutionalized for it. Her adversary is brilliantly played by Boris Karloff, who must have appreciated having someone to go toe-to-toe with. The best element of the film is that Karloff becomes increasingly obsessed with testing Lee’s convictions, suggesting that she is a hypocrite when she spends her time in the facility staying far away from the more disturbed inmates and instead mingling within the upper class of the madhouse hierarchy. Bedlam itself is memorably rendered–the straw floor, the endless wailing of those suffering within its walls–but the film’s horrors are more linked with social injustice than the supernatural, deathly kind of Lewton’s other productions. The film flounders in the early goings and Mark Robson’s direction is not particularly inventive, but even if it is perhaps the least of the Lewton pictures, it is still damn good in its own right, if only for the fireworks between Lee and Karloff.
Director: Mark Robson
Death casts a heavy shadow over each of producer Val Lewton’s terror films, suggested in the appearances of supposedly supernatural beings (I Walked With a Zombie, Cat People) or the characters’ slow crawl into a darkness that will consume them (The Body Snatcher). None of the nine horror films that Lewton produced is quite as grim as Isle of the Dead, which reeks with the stench of the dead. If deaths in Lewton’s films are often quick and vicious, Isle of the Dead concerns characters who are slowly rotting away, both in a very literal sense and psychologically. As General Pherides, whose primary motive is to protect (which becomes perverted as the film goes on), Boris Karloff brilliantly descends into madness while maintaining a beautiful sense of tragedy. Ardel Wray’s screenplay concerns itself with conversations regarding faith–whether the suffering on the island is due to an ancient vampire-like being or by something with a messier, less clear answer. The General turns to superstitions, seduced by a native woman’s (Helen Thimig) reasoning, and is met with the deadly “resurrection” of the girl he buries. If Isle of the Dead is somewhat ponderous and shapeless in parts, it is Lewton’s most brutal, oppressively hopeless endeavor.
Director: Mark Robson
Early on in The Seventh Victim, Mary Gibson (Kim Hunter) encounters Gregory Ward (Hugh Beaumont), a man that she learns to be her missing sister’s (Jean Brooks) boyfriend. He reveals that although her sister spoke much of suicide, he believed that she wasn’t actually serious about it and that it was he who bought the rope that she meant to hang herself with. This is a world of dread and death, where menace lies in the everyday and suicidal tendencies are almost expected (fittingly, the last line of the film is from poet John Donne: “I run to Death, and Death meets me as fast, and all my pleasures are like yesterdays”). Even if The Seventh Victim is tough to classify as a horror film, there are terrors that lie in the incongruities of its world. A room doesn’t house the missing woman, rather a lone noose. A drunken man on the subway is actually a corpse. And, of course, Greenwich Village is populated by a group of Satanists known as the Palladists. That the Palladists are represented as an everyday bourgeois entity–like anyone else, they have a well-defined code with which they approach the world–is demonstrative of the film’s dark oppression, where even a seemingly typical urban environment contains a cafe grimly called Dante’s.
Director: Mark Robson
Richard Dix’s career was in the downswing by the time he made The Ghost Ship in 1943. Although he was an enormously successful silent star and even had a fairly graceful transition into talkies (his career highpoint was an Academy Award nomination for Cimarron), he had become mostly relegated to B-pictures and serials by the early 1940s. One of his very best roles is in this Val Lewton produced horror picture in which he plays a sea captain who is going mad. He utilizes his stoic, calm demeanor to great effect in the earliest sequences, but by the end transitions into a convincing portrayal of madness. A great example of the quality of suspense in Lewton pictures occurs in a terrific sequence in which Russell Wade, suspecting that Dix is on his way to murder him, spends a sleepless night trying to rig an alarm system in his room. Director Mark Robson brilliantly plays with sound and the absence of it–things become more frightening when the sound is gone and there is nothing to be seen. When Wade emerges from his cabin to observe a door just outside of his room, the door takes on a threatening quality of its own, looming at the end of the hallway and obscuring the horrors lurking behind. It’s minimalist suspense at its finest.
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