This Industry Ain't Big Enough For Two Tarzans!

Surely as the mighty Metro lion cleared paths through boxoffice jungles to sell its Tarzan series, so too did scavengers close behind, their penurious State’s Rights merchandise confusing audiences and causing no end to frustration for MGM’s sales force. The studio’s license in the Tarzan character was non-exclusive. Edgar Rice Burroughs had entered into prior commitments for the property, and would continue doing so. The result was interloping serials and features adapted therefrom, several of which followed in the wake of Metro releases and diminished a public’s confidence in the name brand. Tarzan, The Ape Man introduced an all-talking ape-man in 1932. Burroughs turned Sol Lesser loose on his character the following year. Tarzan The Fearless emerged a catchpenny independent and gathered coin based largely on patron excitement generated by Weissmuller’s portrayal. MGM separated themselves from said low-grade venture by identifying Johnny Weissmuller as the Original Tarzan (as shown below in a trailer frame), thus putting Hollywood’s most powerful distributor on the defensive and keeping them there. Metro spent a near decade trying for end-runs against competing junk peddlers. Do Not Confuse It With Any Other Tarzan Production You Have Ever Seen!, said the preview for MGM’s third in their series. By then, Burroughs had himself co-produced a rival product available in a dizzying variety of formats. The New Adventures Of Tarzan would play as a serial --- a part feature/rest serial --- then two features scrounged from the initial two. Plenty there to skim off gravy and goodwill engendered by Metro’s efforts. This was Spring and Summer of 1935. Tarzan and His Mate was finishing its run, and public enthusiasm was at a new pitch. Handy coattails to ride for a haphazard producing partnership barely able to get their serial finished. Five months were spent in a Guatemalan hell-hole dodging payrolls, exploiting natives (at a nickel a day!), and embracing every tropical disease known to that benighted region. Herman Brix lived (one hundred years) to tell about it. They paid him seventy-five dollars a week to cut bare feet to shreds and watch fever blighted legs swell to the size of pumpkins. Jiggs the chimp got two thousand for pitching in on the expedition. Add up the paid hours and he/she/it could no doubt have bought drinks for hapless Brix. The New Adventures Of Tarzan plays like something Carl Denham shot and brought back aboard the Venture. It was sure enough a crazy voyage for that crew of twenty-nine (and I’m betting several are still down there!), with snakes and ticks aplenty. Brix said they ate turtles after food ran out. One of those snappers latches on to the arse of a particularly risible comic reliever and leads us a merry chase just ahead of the microphone’s capacity to properly record sound. Considering that menu as described by our star, this may be the only known instance of a bit player being eaten by cast and crew at the conclusion of a work day (and who’s to say turtles aren’t palatable enough when you’re starving in the jungle?).

There’s lots to like in The New Adventures Of Tarzan. Brix’s vine swinging is exemplary. He could as easily leap off the Chrysler Building for feats performed here, handily trumping trapeze artist doubles MGM used. He also outswims that alligator that was supposed to have his mouth wired shut but didn’t. Gentle Jackie (the lion) wrestles with Brix just as he had (and would) on numerous other occasions between the silent era and 1953. Anytime you see a big tame cat pushed around by Harold Lloyd, Betty Hutton, or some other star name, it’s probably Jackie (he’d again be bested at pension age by Victor Mature in Samson and Delilah). Jiggs the Chimp is allegedly still with us, presumably the last surviving cast member of any number of thirties films he enhanced during early performing years. He liked to drop on Brix from twenty feet above and dig his nails into the actor’s scalp. There’s a scene wherein his grunting elicits a startled reaction from Tarzan --- What’s that? Prisoners in the lost city? --- and sure enough, that’s what they find. Everyone’s chasing after a cumbersome box said to contain The Green Goddess, lately filched from inhabitants of said lost city. The latter pile on Brix from time to time with every apparent intention of taking his head off. Native extras got a fifteen-cent bonus when they fought Tarzan. I’m not sure these guys understood they were only play-acting, as Herman looks pretty desperate amidst these set-to's. He never engages one when a dozen will do. No Ape-Man before Gordon Scott would command such respect for dare deviling amidst real location hardships as opposed to backlot trappings five minutes from Metro’s commissary. The New Adventures Of Tarzan achieves moments of real spectacle and grandeur, effects we admire all the more for having come of genuine hazard and privation. Producer Ashton Dearholt assumed the onscreen villain role. He carries that Green Goddess around like Pilgrim’s Progress. Seems the idol’s no good without a codebook that goes with it, and the codebook’s useless without the idol. Why bother with either? Tarzan explains it holds a formula for the world’s most powerful explosive, thereby justifying endless push pulling we invariably get with serials long on padding and short on conviction. Pursuers include the earlier mentioned comic relief, a flunky who joins the expedition to be near his idol, Tarzan (as described in introductory titles). Modern sensibilities would encourage this character’s polite removal to a Group Home environment, as he seems genuinely brain-damaged (could that turtle meat diet have been to blame?). Villains at the top are referred to as unscrupulous munition manufacturers, which left me to ponder if indeed there were ever munition manufacturers who weren’t unscrupulous, leastwise in movies. The New Adventures Of Tarzan was mostly seen during later years in truncated feature form. Sometimes they overlapped and highlights from one appeared also in the other. Here’s a drive-in ad pushing both. Patrons must have scratched heads over prospects of watching much the same movie twice under differing titles. The features were included in a television package making syndicated rounds from the sixties on. Thunderbird Films of Los Angeles discovered a 35mm print of the now public domain serial version and sold it to collectors in the seventies. Virtually every video and DVD derives from this. Be prepared to squint and call upon your ear trumpet should you engage these twelve chapters, but also be assured of seeing action extraordinary and quite unlike anything else (Tarzan or otherwise) you’ve encountered previous. JUST IN! What follows are the reminiscences of longtime collector and historian Kingsley Candler, who was actually employed by Tom Dunnahoo and Thunderbird Films shortly after they acquired that rare 35mm print of The New Adventures Of Tarzan back in the seventies. I’ll leave it to Kingsley to tell the following story in his own inimitable words.

Many thanks, Kingsley!

Regarding the Tarzan serial, it was already in the catalog when I arrived for duty on the good (pirate) ship Thunderbird. I well recall a list of 35mm holdings left over from an independent film exchange in Tennessee from which I requisitioned many other titles, including Poppin’ The Cork and other Educational shorts, two other serials The Clutching Hand and The Black Coin, a Cinecolor print of Caribou Trail which suffered from dye bleed-thru and was not copied, and the 1930 Sennett 2-color The Bluffer which was in great shape. I'm absolutely positive that The New Adventures Of Tarzan was on that list and that this was the 35mm source material (oh, how I wish I had made copies of that list and so many other things, they would have made a great read). I think he had Tarzan and The Green Goddess as well. I don't remember the name of the exchange but I do remember the contact name as I thought it a coincidence: Chuck Jones. The deal was the loan of the 35mm for a 16mm print of the same title, or comparable length if he had no interest in the loaner. He was wonderful to deal with and had hundreds of titles, most of which were unseen and unknown at that time. If something like iMDB.com had been available things may have been very different. I had no idea The Bluffer was color until it arrived, and believe it proved to be the only surviving print. I imagine many of the titles he had are now lost as well - there was only so much $ to create new negatives, and some enticing sounding titles just didn't sell. Tom was really good at recalling all the old B westerns he saw as a kid. When I arrived, another employee was an Encyclopedia-On-Legs and did all the catalog paste-ups as well as supplying a lot of 16mm for copying. There was also a co-worker doing most of the descriptive write-ups. I remember he adamantly refused to watch a short called Fonteyn Dances and for the catalog wrote simply the world-famous ballerina struts her stuff! I was 24 when I started working for Tom and left a very comfortable life in San Diego managing a used record store downtown during the day and doing projection at a 16mm revival house called the Cinema Leo in Pacific Beach at night. Surfing all off-hours, had a 1 bedroom apt a half block from Ocean Beach. Gave it all up (along with a MASSIVE hit to my income) to pursue a career in "Film Preservation" - way before it was cool OR honorable.

MGM seethed over independent poaching of jealously guarded franchises, but in this instance, what could they do? Plenty, if we choose to believe anecdotal evidence passed down by exhibitors spanked for negotiating with second string Tarzans. Suppose you’re booking an entire season of Metro product for your house, but elect to play The New Adventures Of Tarzan over twelve Saturdays. The MGM salesman notes your marquee and reports back to his field supervisor. That next visit from The Friendly Company (as Metro liked to characterize itself to exhibs) is less friendly. Maybe you’ll get the forthcoming Tarzan Escapes and maybe you won’t. Perhaps a competing house can use the latest Clark Gable or MacDonald/Eddy special. Anyway, you’d soon be sorry for having bought The New Adventures Of Tarzan. MGM was like any other powerful corporation, with ways all their own of squeezing out competition. I have no doubt this serial would have performed better in a more congenial distributing environment, as word indicates it did have considerable success in foreign territories. Metro’s own Tarzan Escapes, finally released November 1936, was a quilt whose sections included one feature made, then virtually remade, by directors seated on musical chairs (that’s credited Richard Thorpe sharing a break with Maureen O’Sullivan on the set). William Wellman was among those taking a shot at wrapping this troubled project. Studio arrogance or plain cynicism bred a finished movie with stock footage content approaching that of a post-war Republic serial. Watching Tarzan Escapes on a typical Sunday afternoon TV broadcast alerted viewers to shameless economies routinely practiced by MGM producers. Wasn’t it just last week we saw Johnny’s aqua-struggle with that same alligator (in Tarzan and His Mate)? Tune in next week, for he’ll repeat it in Tarzan’s Secret Treasure (and yet again in the 1959 remake of Tarzan, The Ape Man). Tarzan Escapes is a handsome production, and stark contrast to those prehistoric New Adventures Of Tarzan, but stampeding elephants during the climax look mighty familiar, having plowed that backlot foliage previously in Tarzan, The Ape Man. Numerous placement of library set pieces adorn Tarzan Escapes. Very little of the action was original to this show. The biggest thrill, and a sequence everyone considered the best in the movie, had to be removed. Sufficient traces remain to frustrate us all the more over a loss of what might have been the most exciting and bloodthirsty highlight in the whole of MGM Tarzans….

Giant vampire bats have been woefully underemployed by movies. The ones designed for Tarzan Escapes sound inspired. Metro engineers gave them moving heads, working jaws, and lighted eyes (for more, see Rudy Behlmer’s excellent Tarzan articles for American Cinematographer). The results supposedly reduced children to screaming fits. Preview reaction demanded it be scuttled, but what spectacle this must have been! The swamp cavern itself was a triumph of creepy and unsettling design. We still at least have that and oversized lizards on view in our truncated Tarzan Escapes, but imagine those bats swooping down and carrying off victims in their bloody jaws. This alone would have elevated Tarzan Escapes to pride of place among the series’ best. The fact this sequence was excised and then discarded may be counted a tragic loss alongside similarly junked footage, considered in its day too horrific or intense, from the 1925 Phantom Of The Opera, The Most Dangerous Game, and others. More frustrating still was Metro marketer's failure to adjust their campaign to reflect pre-release cuts. Ads (one shown here) were now misleading in the extreme --- Giant vulture bats swooping from the sky make their ferocious attack … Note also the pressbook suggestion for a lobby display --- again those vampire bats are called upon to entice patrons. There’s no indication this footage was ever exhibited to the public, outside of those disastrous previews, so how did showmen answer when disgruntled customers inquired post-show as to the dearth of killer bats on screen? Nearly twenty years later, studio blinders were still on. Metro had a successful reissue of Tarzan Escapes in 1954 (with eventual profits of $172,000). Poster art displayed (prominently) the same scene. Those bats may not have survived the final cut of Tarzan Escapes, but they surely hung on for decades in printed publicity. The feature itself couldn’t scale the heights of Tarzan and His Mate (what could?), but there’s plenty yet to enjoy. That tree house is a marvel of art department ingenuity, and pacing seldom flags. There’s never been a romance of the jungle so captivating as that of Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O’Sullivan, a benefit that runs throughout the MGM series (to be sorely missed afterward). Tarzan Escapes was budgeted at a modest $335,000, but additional expense generated by reshooting ballooned negative costs to a million. Domestic rentals were $776,000, with foreign its usual high number for a Tarzan --- 1.1 million. Final profits were $209,000, an improvement upon Tarzan and His Mate ($161,000), but well below socko gains made by Tarzan Finds A Son three years later. Those profits of $528,000 would increase still further with Metro’s final two, Tarzan’s Secret Treasure ($866,000) and Tarzan’s New York Adventure ($985,000). New York Adventure was, in fact, the most lucrative of Metro’s six. Indeed, this is a series that might well have continued at MGM, despite the loss of wartime foreign markets and resulting lack of studio interest. Sol Lesser and RKO would now pick up the baton and run with it. Their initial numbers for 1943’s Tarzan Triumphs suggest MGM should have stayed in the game a little longer, as Triumphs handily equaled New York Adventure's worldwide rentals of 2.4 million.

Holidays

Paddington Bear really can be found at Paddington Station.

I am off on summer holidays so more of London when I return.

Bon Vacances

Buzzsaws and Body Snatching In St. Louis --- The Lewton Conclusion

We can sit home with our DVD’s and think we’ve seen The Body Snatcher, but that’s like steak without garnishment compared with banquets 1945 audiences reveled in. Do note the front displays for that St. Louis premiere. It was the only major launch RKO sprung for on behalf of a Lewton film. The Sales Department must have recognized a winner early on, because they ran with gusto on this one like no other in the series. Trade ads were lavish and plentiful. That Missouri Theatre opening (3600 seats!) became the centerpiece of suggested campaigns in the pressbook. Showmen this time really had something they could latch onto. The name Dr. Neff may not ring a lot of bells today, but in his glory years, this was the absolute dean of spookmeisters. As if a world premiere of The Body Snatcher weren’t enough, St. Louis also got Neff’s live act that served as vanguard for the new movement toward all-out audience participation screamers, a format in which he was unsurpassed. Bill Neff began doing teenage magic acts with Indiana hometown pal James Stewart. Their lives took divergent paths, though crowds might have said in the late forties that Bill achieved at least as much glory in his field as did Jim thesping. Neff carried sets worthy of DeMille. Nobody came away from his shows with less than exultant praise. Bela Lugosi sought Bill for a stage partner when the vampire king took his show on the road in 1947. Those sad stories we've heard of Bela sharing degradation with guys in tattered gorilla skins didn't apply here. Neff’s act went beyond mere stage illusion. He dragged girl plants out of the crowd and buzz-sawed off their heads. Bloodthirsty teens blew a gasket when his crew came to town. The thought of getting all this plus The Body Snatcher first-run amounts to nirvana in any fan’s language. I checked St. Louis archives for press accorded the World Premiere. Guess they were more sanguine about such things then, for Dr. Neff and The Body Snatcher received but one multi-column display ad as shown here (on February 14), plus holdover into a second week. Unlike the Memphis premiere of Brides Of Dracula, there were no post-opening reports from the front. Ah, the stuff they took for granted then …

There were complications. Manager Harry Crawford had a warrant served on him for disturbing the peace. Seems his ideas for a set piece to adorn the top of the Missouri’s marquee unsettled nearby tenants and otherwise sedate passerbys. Why should a mechanical dog howling at one-second intervals annoy anyone? asked Harry. Gendarmes advised him to tell it to the judge. A fifteen-foot square lobby display (shown here) featured a motorized Karloff figure dragging a female corpse out of its tomb, while a "hundred-year-old hearse" carried dummy cadavers thither and yon with the assist of what was described as two decrepit horses. As The Body Snatcher opened on February 14, valentines were dispatched about town, showing Boris strangling Bela with the caption, Please Give Me A Piece Of Your Heart. RKO’s New York office supervised the campaign. There were horrors staged live that Lewton’s denuded by the Code feature couldn’t begin to duplicate. Kids doubtlessly got more genuine scares out of Neff’s pageant and accompanying front displays than The Body Snatcher would deliver, yet here at last was a solid hit that demonstrated what Val Lewton could do when he turned his hand toward baser shocks. Its success would enable others with a morbid line of goods to sell. Peter Lorre enhanced Body Snatcher presentations (as advertised on a carriage back here) with a ghoulish monologue he’d commissioned specifically for vocal talent plied in Hollywood thrillers over the last decade. The Man With A Head Of Glass was recited by the actor in hushed auditoriums, followed by bursts of applause and demands for repeated curtain calls. Lorre had initiated the routine in August, 1944, and continued with it on and off for several years thereafter. His would have been an ideal stage warmer for a horror film. The Body Snatcher’s negative was on the high-end at $221,000, but domestic rentals rang up a satisfying $317,000, with foreign money the best ever for this series --- $230,000. Profits amounted to $118,000, the most since I Walked With A Zombie. Were it not for a higher cost, The Body Snatcher would have been the most lucrative of all Lewtons. As it is, the film stands as the biggest single grosser of the nine.

You’d have thought Universal producer Jack Gross would ride herd over Val Lewton once he assumed supervisory duties at RKO, but the man behind Universal’s recent monster sequels seems to have pretty much left VL alone. Gross is credited as Executive Producer on Isle Of The Dead. Lewton portrayed him as another of those studio troglodytes with his cigar in one hand and a racing form in the other. Evidence of those last three in the Lewton series belie such an image. They are, in fact, among the artiest of the nine. Isle Of The Dead took its inspiration from a painting (of the same name) by one Arnold Bocklin, who set his gothic scene to canvas five different times. That’s right, five near-identical "originals" are hanging in galleries worldwide (cue Maxim DeWinter’s incredulous quote, You mean he painted the same tree over and over again?). Boris Karloff assumed patron of the arts duty for a field trip to New York’s Metropolitan Museum, where he was photographed standing alongside one of them. It pleased and flattered Karloff to keep company like this. He was a cultivated man and appreciated that quality in others. Whatever misgivings Lewton had about using this actor dissolved once they met. The producer frequently called upon memories of creepy art he’d been exposed to as a child (that generation’s equivalent of our monster magazines, perhaps?) and Isle Of The Dead would emerge as very much a tribute to things that went bump in Lewton’s boyhood nights. Karloff was the first real star to do a Lewton movie. You could wish he’d been in more than just three, but did RKO really pay him a mere $600 per week as I’ve read? There was a serious delay when BK fell out due to back problems. A spinal operation laid him up for months; time enough for the project to lose momentum and Lewton’s interest to wane. A complete mess, he now called it, but Isle Of The Dead always rang the bell for me. Slow indeed it is, but isn’t that the case with most Lewton merchandise? Amazing how all nine have their adherents. I’ve read passionate arguments crediting each as best in the series. Life was simpler when they were new. Showmen thought Isle Of The Dead dragged at first, but relished patron screams when a woman gets buried alive in the second half. Even that may not have been enough to offset continuing inertia at ticket windows, as Isle Of The Dead was way down from stellar numbers recorded by The Body Snatcher. A $246,000 negative cost was the highest yet for a Lewton horror, and way more than they were spending for other "B" pictures. Domestic rentals amounted to $266,000, with foreign $117,000. RKO’s profit was the lowest so far --- $13,000. These were slim pickings during a year when expectations ran high, as one couldn’t help making money off movies in 1945. Was the public tiring of horror films, or just Lewton’s horror films?

Bedlam was first to actually go into the hole. It mattered no longer that his was an eccentric approach to the genre. Pictures like these were headed south. Maybe folks were just waiting for someone to spoof excesses endured with recent Universal monster rallies. Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein would answer that call, but not for another two years. In the meantime, there was ongoing tepidity of a She-Wolf Of London and The Spider Woman Strikes Back sort. Was Universal surrendering the field to rivals? If so, RKO wasn’t taking the bait. Kids wanted screen shows gruesome as Dr. Neff with his tossed heads. They instead got extravagant promises and timid fulfillment of same, but that was the PCA applying brakes, not producers. Lewton had no end to censor problems with The Body Snatcher. Indeed, his career might have better flourished had he come along in the sixties. The Innocents from 1961 plays like one of his, and certainly The Haunting (directed by Robert Wise) was nothing if not a homage to Lewton’s technique. Film noir reflected a new toughness in crime thrillers. Horror films could do with a bit less reading between the lines as well. It would seem to me that audiences were ready for Hammer Films ten years before Hammer Films were ready for them. Had these two gotten together sooner, we might well have had a post-war horror boom. Bedlam, like other late-in-the-day chillers, was a tough sell. Neither fish nor fowl was this. A problem picture about lunatic asylums sounds fine when Olivia DeHavilland’s your inmate, but Boris Karloff presiding could mean only one thing, and therein lay the disconnect. Bedlam’s star didn’t help when he insisted it wasn’t a horror film at all. A historical picture, said Karloff. Negative cost reflected steady rises in expense these shows generated. Modern writers claim Lewton had a budget of $350,000 plus extended pre-production time, but RKO ledgers indicate $264,000, a more likely figure. Domestic ($257,000) and foreign ($98,000) rentals were sufficiently eroded as to result in $40,000 lost on Bedlam. It’s no disgrace to any filmmaker when his series winnows out. The fact Lewton managed nine horror features, and nine of such extraordinary quality, within confines of a formula-driven system like RKO’s, is some kind of miracle. His standards remained high, even if the boxoffice didn’t. No one else in Hollywood was making chillers so intelligent and stimulating as Lewton’s. You can pick at any and find minor fault, but who even bothers over most of the stuff Universal was doing after 1942 (Captive Wild Woman, anyone?). Looking at this series during the last several weeks made me realize once again what a unique talent his was.

Lewton might have taken solace over evergreen status these films achieved were it not for his 1951 death. RKO kept the series in circulation for as long as that company remained afloat. Even after closure, Lewton horrors made theatrical rounds via independent franchisees renting them into the mid-sixties. Cat People had a 1952 reissue that scored domestic rentals of $125,000 and resulting profits of $65,000. Most of the others were back as units in double-feature packages. Isle Of The Dead returned with Mighty Joe Young. I Walked With A Zombie supported King Kong in 1956. The only two not reissued were The Ghost Ship and Bedlam. Fifties circulation of Lewton features meant safety prints in 35mm. If you grew up then, chances are you saw some of them theatrically. Television lumped the series into enormous packages of RKO features. Stations purchasing smaller groups might get two or three Lewtons, but seldom all, unless they sprung for C&C’s bulging library of 741 titles. That May 1963 syndicated release mentioned in Part Two was the first opportunity many stations had to unspool all the available Lewtons on respective late-night horror shows. United Artists’ package of 58 features combined sci-fi and monster offerings from backlogs controlled by UA at the time, thus we had Warner’s Doctor X, Beast With Five Fingers, and The Walking Dead, UA’s own Beast Of Hollow Mountain, Hound Of The Baskervilles (from Hammer), along with the Lewtons and other RKO favorites (King Kong, The Thing). This was next best to having Screen Gem’s Shock and Son Of Shock groups. Non-theatrical rental went through Films, Inc. Their daily rates reflected critical hierarchy within the series. The rental company’s lavish 1971 Rediscovering The American Cinema catalogue devoted a page (shown here) to the Lewtons (note their promise to add The Ghost Ship among future listings). Worth noting is the fact that Bedlam, The Seventh Victim, and The Leopard Man were available at lower rates than the rest. Could these, then, have been regarded weakest by opinion makers of the day? A check of the Films Inc. second edition (1977) of Rediscovering The American Cinema does include The Ghost Ship, which makes me wonder if it was indeed made available then. Did anyone out there actually rent this title in 16mm?

More On Val Lewton

Insofar as artistic pretensions went, Val Lewton made Orson Welles look like a piker, so how come VL to survive for eleven pictures as opposed to Welles’ measly three? Possibly it was due to far less noise he made. Lewton (shown here in his projection room) wasn’t one to seek press. Newspapers and popular mags weren’t paying a lot of attention to horror producers in any case. Treading lightly below the radar served him well, but there was slippage evident by late 1943 and The Seventh Victim. We must have been the eighth victim; patrons walked out. Business poor. Some of the kids would not sit through it. This from N.C. Hillburn of the State Theatre in Inman, SC. A lot of exhibitors avoided chillers when they could. Too many complaints of kiddie nightmares and headaches all around. Others limited genre stuff to every third or so month. What they hated most were horrors failing utterly to deliver on the promise of poster art. This is without doubt the most unsatisfactory picture we have any recollection of, said A.C. Edwards (Scotia, CA) re The Seventh Victim. Diminished profits reflected exhibitor hostility. $59,000 in black ink was a long way down from Cat People, this despite reduced negative costs for The Seventh Victim ($130,000). The problem arose from domestic rentals reduced by a third from The Leopard Man, itself down from numbers scored by Cat People and I Walked With A Zombie. Marquees trumpeted Tom Conway and little else. For all their moronic scripts and (now) pedestrian sequels, Universal could at least boast of pre-sold horror names in its stables. Often as not, Lewton films were serving as rearguard for rival studio "B’s" --- in the ad shown here, it’s Universal’s Top Man. Meanwhile, Lewton was mapping out an "A" comedy to spotlight Conway as Casanova (imagine the possibilities!), but like any number of proposed projects, it came to naught. Could this have been the point where RKO began negotiating its multi-picture deal with Boris Karloff? Lewton’s masterpiece may well be "The Seventh Victim", declared Carlos Clarens in that groundbreaking 1967 book, An Illustrated History Of The Horror Film (the cover of which shown here). Rarely has a film succeeded so well in capturing the nocturnal menace of a large city, the terror underneath the everyday, the suggestion of hidden evil. Not having seen the film upon acquiring the book, I breathlessly awaited coming TV broadcasts. My bafflement after watching was seeming proof I didn’t breathe the same rarified air as Clarens. Was I was too obtuse to get it? Forty years later, I’m still wondering. Is The Seventh Victim a picture we’re supposed to like as means of demonstrating our grasp of Lewton’s deeper meanings? Play it to general audiences at your peril. Carlos Clarens concluded by referring to The Seventh Victim as a hauntingly oppressive work. 1943 exhibitors might have agreed with him, though for reasons he’d not have imagined.

Val Lewton used second-hand furniture. This much I knew from multiple references to that Magnificent Ambersons staircase in Cat People. Good Lewton sets usually have their origins in someone else’s movie. 1939’s The Hunchback Of Notre Dame was cannibalized for a number of them. It was the producer’s policy to dress up one or two backgrounds for maximum effect and stage much of the key action therein. The Ghost Ship borrowed a vessel built for Pacific Liner, a modest-to-begin-with actioner released in 1939. This show as much as any demonstrates the miracles Lewton wrought with low budgets. It may be the only contemporary sea story produced that year (1943) without a single wartime reference. The Ghost Ship made me long for a film noir unit Lewton should have eventually helmed. What magic he’d have made with Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, Robert Ryan, and the rest. As it is, we have the Lewton imprint on noirs his directing pupils gave us --- Jacques Tournear and Out Of The Past, Robert Wise with Born To Kill, The Set-Up, etc. Much of the look and mood of these can be traced to lessons taught by Lewton. The Ghost Ship provides proof positive of his expertise with subjects other than horror, despite a title promising more of the same. You’d not go far afield calling it the tightest and most efficient in the series. I found those sixty-nine minutes mighty taut going, and wondered if anyone could surpass Richard Dix as the deranged captain. Profits for The Ghost Ship were actually up, as its negative came in the lowest of any Lewton production --- $116,000. Profits of $105,000 resulted from domestic rentals of $272,000 and foreign receipts of $130,000. Clear sailing but for a lawsuit brought by a writing pair who’d submitted a remarkably similar play supposedly received, but not read, by Lewton’s office. The mess could have been settled for seven hundred dollars, but Lewton stood on principle and insisted upon trying the thing out. Twelve men good and true came back with $25,000 for the plaintiffs, which appeals courts let stand despite Lewton’s disavowal of allegations made (the claimants were, by his account, charlatans and extortionists). The fallout was serious. I suspect this, as much as anything, helped put skids under Lewton. Sadder still was the fact his excellent movie had to be withdrawn and buried for generations to come. The Ghost Ship became itself a wraith largely unseen. It was in the C&C Movietime package of RKO features from 1956 into the early sixties, but someone in legal must have eventually checked the file, for by the time United Artists repackaged the Lewtons into a 58 title horror group for May 1963 syndicated release, The Ghost Ship was out. There were a (very) few 16mm prints from older packages floating amongst collectors. Harris Films out of England was U.K. rights holder for RKO, and a number of Ghost Ships ventured our way when Harris shelves were cleared in the late eighties. The issue became moot in any case when an early nineties clearance of rights permitted Turner to finally put it back in circulation. Purchasers of the Lewton DVD box set are likely unaware of what a scarce collectable this once was.

UPDATE 9/16/07: Here's an interesting postscript supplied by Robert Cline. He discovered an August 23-24, 1957 booking for Ghost Ship at the Highway 601 Drive-In in Salisbury, NC, playing a dusk-to-dawn with Lost Women, Fire Maidens From Outer Space, and Abbott and Costello Meet The Killer. Guess some of those RKO prints managed to slip through the cracks after all.

Every appreciation of Curse Of The Cat People begins with an apology for its title. Were it not for that baleful thing heralding the credits, this might be regarded one of the forties’ permanent film classics. Lewton wanted to call it Amy and Her Friend, which might only have hastened his departure off RKO premises, but surely he’d have gotten recognition richly deserved for what many (myself included) consider his very finest work. The child’s dream world depicted here is much like the one a lot of us occupied and shared with this movie during late night viewing in the sixties. The spell it cast was something special after house lights were down and parents abed. Were Amy’s spectral companions so different from those we welcomed on Shock Theatre each week? No other Lewton, indeed no other fantasy film, calls up such intense emotion. I cried with it at thirteen and again today. It’s impossible to imagine such delicate and (yes, damnit!) poetic filmmaking coming from any other major studio (and during WWII!). RKO may have mutilated The Magnificent Ambersons two years before, but redemption was surely theirs for enabling a small masterpiece like Curse Of The Cat People. DeWitt Bodeen maintained the producer junked his writer’s ending due to front office pressures, but from what I’ve read of said finish, it would seem Lewton came to the rescue of what might have been a botched and melodramatic original as conceived by Bodeen (it was the last time these two would work together). James Agee again sang Lewton’s praises, claiming to have sat among hardened Rialto patrons through what he expected would be a film disappointing to them, only to be relieved by a burst of applause at the end. Who says horror fans have no sensitivity? I can’t help believing MGM was watching as well, for what is Meet Me In St. Louis’ Halloween segment but a glossier recap of Ann Carter’s frightful walk through the night? Atmospheric, set-bound parallels between the two features are striking. For the record, Curse Of The Cat People was shot during August and September of 1943. Meet Me In St. Louis followed with production beginning November 1943 and extending into Spring of the next year. Did someone at RKO give Vincente Minnelli a peek at Lewton’s handiwork? Judging by evidence at hand, I’d say they did. And what of the remarkable Ann Carter? Her performance has Margaret O’Brien beat like a drum, but little came of it but decades of wondering what had become of the seven-year-old actress. Never underestimate determination of fans raised on vintage horror, however, for their ceaseless efforts have rooted out players long retired to private life. I didn’t know until today of Ann Carter’s rediscovery, let alone her upcoming interview on a Lewton documentary to be shown later this year on TCM. Imdb’s page on the former child actress tells of her whereabouts. Curse Of The Cat People was the sixth release in Lewton’s RKO horror group. It also performed the poorest of any thus far. The first of the chillers to pass a negative cost of $200,000, this required $212,000 to finish, a figure not likely to endear Lewton to his employers. Domestic rentals ($268,000) surpassed The Seventh Victim and The Ghost Ship, but profits added up to a paltry $35,000. All six entries in RKO’s recent Tim Holt "B" western season did better. New directions were clearly needed if Lewton’s series was to continue.

Lewton longed to produce "A’s", but sadly got only so far as a pair of oddball non-horrors that lost money for RKO and likely put paid to dreams of graduation from low-budgeters. Ironic that directors he’d mentored would move up prestige ladders while Lewton ran in place. Jacques Tournear’s Experiment Perilous was reward for that director’s outstanding work on Cat People, I Walked With A Zombie, and The Leopard Man, and the studio’s borrowing of MGM heavyweight Hedy Lamarr assured concentrated effort toward bookings better than any of Lewton’s offerings might receive. Trade support for Experiment Perilous confirmed its position as one of RKO’s top 1944 releases. Lewton’s Youth Runs Wild fell into line with juvenile delinquency melodramas being turned out en masse by not only the mini-majors, but straight-out exploitation producers as well. Columbia offered Youth On Trial. State’s Rights distributors peddled Youth Aflame for those who preferred teen problems more explicitly dissected (minus a Code seal, these cheapies delivered on baser promises). Where Are Our Children? and Are These Our Parents? would seem to have answered similar lines of inquiry. Why see them both? Indeed, why see Youth Runs Wild, especially with a title that would, by comparison, confer dignity even upon I Walked With A Zombie? RKO took the post-production scissors route. Lewton called that which remained a stinker. Youth Runs Wild had a negative cost of $291,000 (the prospect of an audience beyond kids having loosened RKO purse- strings), but JD problem pictures made little impression on foreign markets already hobbled by the war, thus overseas rentals were a low $50,000. A final loss of $45,000 couldn’t be blamed on Lewton, for this market was nearly as glutted with teenage troublemakers as theatres would be in the mid-fifties. Worse to come was Lewton’s non-genre Mademoiselle Fifi, with measly domestic rentals of $150,000 (foreign $48,000) against a negative cost of $228,000. The loss this time was worse --- $110,000. It was clear RKO had no confidence in Fifi. Judging by its invisibility in the trades, you’d hardly know it was out there. Accustomed lower berths (of the sort shown here) did not bode well for Lewton’s effort at a more sophisticated product, so it was back to the horror grind, but now with a twist. If Lewton wouldn’t look to Universal for inspiration, RKO would bring Universal to him. Jack Gross was a producing vet at the latter who liked his monsters straight up and uncomplicated. Commercial lure Boris Karloff was brought on to resuscitates the boxoffice. Lewton was adamantly opposed to them both, at least at the beginning. How could he know this partnership would result in the biggest grosser of his entire RKO sojourn; indeed, the only one of the bunch that would give showmen and their customers precisely what they wanted in the way of horror. The Body Snatcher, its gala premiere and success, follows in Part Three.

A taste of the East

Londoners take full advantage of the wonderful parks in and around the city. And a spot of wind and rain is not going to spoil the day. I stumbled upon this festival in Regents Park.

Check out just how green London is:
http://www.green-space.org.uk/london/
http://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/Corporation/living_environment/open_spaces/