Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows

Val Lewton: Man in the Shadows (2008)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Martin Scorsese produced and narrates this documentary that takes a look at the life and career of producer Val Lewton who hated the horror genre but become best known for his horror titles like The Body Snatcher, Bedlam, I Walked with a Zombie and Cat People. I personally find many of Lewton's horror movies overrated but they are popular so I understand the need to do a documentary on them but to do one on Lewton never really made much sense to me. It's even more senseless when you consider that another documentary, Shadows in the Dark was just made in 2005. As with that documentary, there really isn't much to Lewton so we learn very little. He didn't do interviews, didn't have any on camera stuff and in reality there's very little known about him so we don't learn a thing. When they discuss the movies we still don't learn anything outside the fact that Lewton hated horror movies and didn't want to work with Boris Karloff. Since there's nothing to Lewton I just can't justify having two documentaries about him and in the end neither of them do much. Roger Corman, Robert Wise and Japanese director Kiyoski Kurosawa are the only movie people interviewed and both only get a few clips.

VAL LEWTON gave us many wonderful horror films throughout the '40s, but at one time he worked as a reader for David O. Selznick and told the producer his feelings about GONE WITH THE WIND: "This is the biggest piece of rubbish I've ever read. You'll be making the biggest mistake of your career if you decide to make this." (paraphrasing, of course). Well, he may never qualify as an accurate prophet, but he did know how to use subtle horror to make films like THE CAT PEOPLE and I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE.

MARTIN SCORSESE narrates this thoughtful documentary on the producer with many interesting film clips from the low-budget horror films that are now considered film classics of their kind by a man who was "drawn to the darkness of the shadow world." He trusted many of his associates when he began filming the features at RKO with men like Jacques Tourneur, Nicholas Musuraca, DeWitt Bodeen, Roy Webb, and later Mark Robson. His films had an hypnotic effect on audiences, providing subtle horror through the power of suggestion.

In private, he was a sensitive man, never fully satisfied with his work or his assignments, but happily married to a woman who understood him and his needs. He was really not tough enough to be a Hollywood survivor and had a few heart attacks before the major one that killed him at the age of 46.

The documentary tells how he ignited the career of BORIS KARLOFF when Karloff was assigned to films like ISLE OF THE DEAD, THE BODY SNATCHERS and BEDLAM. As the war drew to a close, people began to turn away from horror films and Lewton's career began to decline when the defining films of his earlier career were no longer being made.

His low-budget films really were low-budget: for CAT PEOPLE he was given a budget of $150,000, but the film was a huge hit, made a million at the box-office when only A-budget features made as much and stayed in big city theaters longer than CITIZEN KANE that year!

New Documentary produced and narrated by Martin Scorsese on the life and work on the films of Val Lewton. It premiered tonight on Turner Classic Movies and has occasioned the reissue of the box set of the Lewton RKO horror films on DVD. To be honest I don't think this is really a documentary so much as its film essay on the Lewton produced films and his life. There is no nitty gritty about the making of the films (the fact that one of his films occasioned the last screen teaming of Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi is not mentioned). If one wants details one has to look to the documentary that was originally released with the DVD set, Shadows in the Dark:The Val Lewton Legacy. Here Scorsese talks about the deeper meanings of the films Lewton over saw and how they affected the people who saw them.Its clear that Scorsese is in love with the poetry of the movies, and its nice to have him as a guide into their recesses, indeed watching the film I picked up a good many details that I had never noticed before. It also reveals symbols and character types that reoccur in his movies. Its an examination of how Lewton's melancholy nature produced some very dark and troubling films, films which echo to this day. I liked the film a great deal but I'm not in love with it. While I learned some new things I didn't learn enough (I think the earlier Shadows in the Dark is slightly better, but that may be purely a matter of personal taste).Its very good but there is something that keeps me from saying its great. Is it worth seeing, absolutely, it will reveal many things to you about the films that you probably never noticed. Ultimately it will make you want to see all the films again, which is a pretty good thing if you ask me

Born in Yalta in the early 1900s to Russian parents, film producer Val Lewton was raised in America by his mother and sister, honing a colorful imagination even through his years at military school; he wrote articles and published a few pulpy stories before landing in Hollywood as protégé to David O. Selznick. Selznick turned out to be a helpful boss but was no father-figure, rarely if ever giving Lewton credit for the work he did on pictures such as "Anna Karenina" and "Gone With the Wind". A movie-producing offer eventually came from financially-strapped RKO, who hoped a series of low-budget thrillers would get them back in the black, and Val Lewton was on his way. This documentary on Lewton's career (produced in conjunction with Turner Classic Movies by Martin Scorsese, who also narrates) is nearly bereft of details on Lewton's personal life, mostly due to the fact no documents exist of his recorded voice. Photos and letters written by Lewton help to fill in the gaps, but we never get much sense of the reported turmoils and trouble Lewton went through while working in Hollywood. We also are not privy to much information that went on in the RKO offices with each new Lewton release, only that his films were "successful" up to and including 1946's "Bedlam". If all or most of his films were so popular, what accounted for Lewton's anxieties? He and his wife raised two children--a girl who is unaccounted for here, and a son who has grown up seemingly in the dark regarding his father's business affairs--but what happened to his supporters? Editor Mark Robson and director Robert Wise, themselves protégés of Val Lewton, later found success on their own but failed to extend an olive branch to Lewton once tastes in Hollywood changed. Yet, instead of acknowledging the fact that Lewton was out of step with the times, Robson and Wise are left looking like false friends. The special is clip-heavy, with a finely-tuned parallel atmosphere to compliment the array of sequences, yet it doesn't cut very deep. Still, if the central desire here was to create an interest in Val Lewton's productions for audiences unaware of his languid, elegiac and stylized mood pieces, then "The Man in the Shadows" certainly succeeds. It thoughtfully whets the appetite for an evening's worth of Lewton product, and the artful way in which he was able to combine good and evil with the most subtle of touches.

How well I remember seeing Cat People for the first time. I was almost bowled over by my first sight of poetic horror. It was the 1950's and cheap monsters were all over the drive-ins, fun, but hardly mesmerizing. Then, suddenly, there was Lewton's flick on the late show and I was transfixed by a whole new world of fright movies. The shadowy b&w was riveting, but the shadows of my imagination were beyond even that. As they say- a whole new world had opened up.

Over time, I managed to catch the bulk of Lewton's extraordinary canon, especially The Seventh Victim (1943). That movie's bold ending showed what film censorship typically denied us. I tried to learn more about Lewton, but movie books were almost non-existent at a time when movies were still not considered an art form. To say that Lewton was an obscure moviemaker in a time of Ford, Huston, and De Mille seems almost an understatement. It wasn't until I got a collection of James Agee's magazine reviews that I saw Lewton's brilliance publicly affirmed.

Thanks now to Matin Scorsese, later generations can dive into Lewton's fascinating world in a single sitting. The 75-minutes is replete with clips from his best films, along with commentary from Lewton directors Robert Wise and Jacques Tourneur, and other luminaries. Too bad the illustrious part of his career was so brief, brought down by studio maneuvering. More importantly, Lewton's work shows how unparalled b&w artistry continues even in our era of colorized spectacle. Plus, Lewton uses the spooky not only to open up horror but to lead us into the unique world of a lonely child (Curse of the Cat People, {1944}). Maybe I'm just an old fogey, but I'll bet if you tune in, you'll be as fascinated as I was on that long ago night.