The genius of Val Lewton

So let's all return to Shutter Island.  Or, rather, to one of the inspirations behind Martin Scorsese's latest film, whom I briefly mentioned in a post on Monday – Val Lewton.  Forgive me if you've already come across the name before.  But, for those who haven't, Lewton was a Hollywood film producer who made a series of defining chillers in the 1940s.  Lewton's studio, RKO, burdened the films with small bugdets and corny titles – Cat People (1942), I Walked With a Zombie (1943), The Leopard Man (1943), and so on.  But Lewton worked within these constraints, and with what was then generally regarded as "B-movie" talent, to create some of the most rewarding movies ever to flicker across the silver screen.  

Indeed, Lewton's influence is such that he's one of the few producers afforded the same kind of auteurist treatment generally reserved for directors or, sometimes, actors.  Good People of my acquaintance often wax enthusiatic about a "Val Lewton film" as though they're talking about Murnau, Ford, or someone like that.  And Scorsese's a fan, a big fan – he produced a documentary on Lewton in 2007.

There's far too much to say about Lewton than will fit in one blog post, so I'll probably return to him in future.  But, for now, it's worth pointing out how most of his films operate within the fragile realm of the human mind.  Unusually for the time, many of them feature psychiatrists as main characters.  And many of them probe the boundaries between science and the supernatural.  Are there monsters in the shadows?  Is it just a trick of the light?  Or, worse, are we actually going mad?  Needless to say, Scorsese wades through similar gloom on Shutter Island.

Given all that, it's probably not too surprising that Lewton produced (and wrote) a film set in an appalling mad-house: Bedlam (1946).  I've embedded a clip below – but the full film is available in this US box-set, which might well be my desert island DVD pick.  It contains five utter masterpieces (Cat People, The Leopard Man, The Seventh Victim (1943), Isle of the Dead (1945), and The Curse of the Cat People (1944)); three great films (Bedlam, I Walked With a Zombie and The Body Snatcher (1945)); one solid effort (The Ghost Ship (1943)); and that Scorsese documentary.  And, what's more, it works on UK DVD players.  So, go ahead: click, buy, watch, and then let's talk Lewton once again.

    
P.S. I wrote about the Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur film The Leopard Man for a selection of Halloween films a couple of years ago.