Film Reviews by Steve

When RKO asked Val Lewton to take charge of their new B horror unit they expected monster movies similar to those made at Universal but on a lower budget. They got a new kind of film, psychological horror, set in realistic, modern city locations. Its fears were drawn from the darkness and superstition and the unknown. Secret personal fears.

RKO gave Lewton the title: Cat People. Simone Simon is Irena Dubrovna, a commercial artist in Manhattan, who believes she has inherited a Serbian curse. If she is sexually aroused she will turn into a predator. Desire will make her bestial. Her rejected husband, Oliver (Kent Smith), encourages his wife to try psychoanalysis, but rationality proves inadequate.

This is horror noir. It was shot and lit by RKO's great noir photographer Nicholas Musuraca. DeWitt Bodeen's script is extremely imaginative and invents a rich folklore for Irena's psycho-sexual anxiety to inhabit. Irena lives in a place of darkness and foreboding. Simon is really quite moving as an outsider, tortured by her need for love but fearful of its consequences

Cat People is one of the best and most influential horror films ever made. It was a revolution, a Freudian allegory full of symbolism. This is among director Jacques Tourneur's greatest noirs. It was a huge hit and allowed Val Lewton to make another eight excellent horror films for RKO.

With Cat People not yet released, producer Val Lewton was given another lurid title by the bosses at RKO and told to make a horror based on a magazine article about voodoo. But Lewton took as his premise the idea of making 'Jane Eyre in the Tropics'.  

Frances Dee plays a nurse who leaves the snows of Canada to work in San Sebastian in the Caribbean.  She cares for Jessica, the insentient wife of a sugar plantation owner (Tom Conway). The doctor says Jessica suffered a disease like meningitis. Her maid says she was made into a zombie by a voodoo ceremony. On this island, science and the occult have become entwined.

 I Walked With a Zombie is a work of unusual imagination. The dramas in the family before the nurse arrives are not revealed through exposition, but in a calypso.  There are so many eerie, unforgettable images; like the night walk through the plantation with the vision of the gaunt zombie-guardian of the cross-path. The script is poetically sensitive to human suffering. The film is as mournful as a spiritual hymn.

What is most unusual and profound about I Walked With A Zombie is the depiction of the local people, the heirs of the shame and despair of slavery. There was nothing equivalent to this in 1940s Hollywood. The film is relentlessly sorrowful; a sad/beautiful vision of characters who always feel like they are about to be swallowed up in the shadows. 

Charming screwball fantasy about a Puritan in Salem in the 1600s who condemns a young woman to burn for witchcraft; she curses his descendants to suffer from miserable marriages for evermore... In 1942, the spirit of the witch (Veronica Lake as Jennifer) is loosed to spread havoc with the latest heir of her spell, Jonathan Wooley (Fredric March) who is about to marry a spectacularly ill tempered harridan played brilliantly by Susan Hayward.

Of course, Jennifer and Jonathan fall in love and marry. Wooley has his eyes on the Governorship of the state and his new wife will use all of her craft to help him.

Some of the pleasure to be had from this film may depend on a tolerance of Veronica Lake, and I have little. And neither had Fredric March... But there is much else to enjoy. March and Hayward are marvellous and the support is well cast. The script is very witty and genuinely funny. The many effects are well done.  

René Clair's touch is light and enchanting, like a Parisian Ernst Lubitsch. He draws a sweet performance out of dramatic actor March and confects a most delightful comedy. Clair was born to make ornamental frou-frou like this

Kenton mainly worked on Universal monster sequels, but he has his name on one masterpiece. Edward Parker (Richard Arlen) is a two fisted American man of action, shipwrecked on the remote jungle island of the sinister Dr. Moreau, whose ambition is to evolve animals into humans through genetic experimentation and vivisection. Maybe Parker could be persuaded to mate with his panther-woman (Kathleen Burke)?

This version of HG Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau was photographed by Karl Struss, and its world of shadows and fog gives the film such an expressive look. The white tropical suits of the cast contrast attractively with the deep pools of darkness. It creates an imaginative portrait of the south seas, full of loners in transit, drunk sea captains, discredited medics, way off the map of normal human behaviour.

At the centre of the film is Charles Laughton's superb portrayal of the mad scientist, his untethered and megalomaniacal moral sickness, of course, hidden behind a cherubic mask of utter reasonableness. He wears the goatee of evil with distinction and cracks his whip with conviction.

The half-human beasts are artistically brought to life by makeup and costuming. It would be great to see more of them. But we do get to witness their famous ceremony of laws imposed by Moreau: 'Are we not men?'. We see the mutations and failed experiments either exhibited or doing the backbreaking tasks. Naturally, it was banned around the world for decades. This is a transgressive, febrile classic of early cinema whose interesting themes never impede the fabulous spectacle.

This lavish adaptation of Victor Hugo's historical melodrama was Universal studio's most lucrative hit of the 1920s. It is set in 1482 and focuses on the romance of a gypsy, Esmerelda, with a nobleman in a socially polarised Paris; of the arrogant, brutal aristocracy and the persecuted poor.

Patsy Ruth Miller is histrionic and lacks appeal as the untamed dancing girl. What everyone remembers the film for is the grotesquery of Lon Chaney's portrayal of the title character, Quasimodo, the ringer of the bells. It's Chaney who makes this a horror film at all, not just for his legendary make-up effects, the deformity and gymnastics, but for the strange, primal enigma of his character.

Worsley's film is pretty early cinema and it doesn't have the visual expressionism of some of the later silent horrors, but what it does abundantly present is spectacle with the magnificent sets, particularly of the medieval cathedral, with its huge cast of extras in period costume.

This is the film where the great Lon Chaney became a big a star around the world and his Quasimodo remains definitive. The spectacle of the film, whether Chaney's demonic aura or the convincing recreation of fifteenth century Paris makes the first Hunchback of Notre-Dame the earliest Hollywood horror classic.

This is an occult face-off in rural Austro-Hungary between an architect/satanist (Boris Karloff), and a vengeful psychiatrist (Bela Lugosi) who has just been released from 15 years in a Siberian prison after being betrayed by Karloff in WWI, who then married his wife and later his daughter... It is the first pairing of the two great horror stars of the thirties.

The Black Cat is a startlingly deviant film. As well as the then novel theme of satanism, there is an unmissable suggestion of necrophilia. Karloff, inhabits a modernist mansion built on the site of the castle in which he oversaw genocide in the war. He has designed it in an ultra-modern style, most unusual for thirties horror, but in the cellars of the old castle he keeps the bodies of women he has loved, preserved in their youth, including Lugosi's former wife.

The look is striking, both impressionistic, and spacious and modern. The main weakness is the film's funereal pace and the vacuous American honeymooning couple (David Manners and Jacqueline Wells) who happen upon this house of insanity. Wells reminds the two rivals of the woman who married them both, and they play chess for her. Karloff intends to sacrifice his prize in a black mass and add her to his gallery of beautiful corpses.

So who wins the battle of the stars? Both overact splendidly.  Lugosi is a very limited actor but there is a wonderful moment when he delivers some lengthy dialogue in his own language and he suddenly sounds natural. But Karloff with his lisp and his deco-effect makeup is more memorable and a less restricted performer. 

A loose remake of the German silent horror classic The Hands of Orlac (1924) directed by the star photographer of German expressionism, Karl Freund. So it is a visually artistic film. Cinematographer Gregg Toland paints with light most eloquently and there are evocative sets of the back alleys of the Parisian Grand Guignol. 

The plot is one of the most brilliantly lurid in all horror. A concert pianist (Colin Clive as Orlac) is badly injured in a train crash and his hands crushed. His beautiful wife, Yvonne, (Frances Drake), goes to a celebrated surgeon, the sinister Dr. Gogol (Peter Lorre) who has been stalking her, and begs him to save her husband's precious hands. Gogol transplants the hands of a recently guillotined, knife-throwing murderer, Rollo! Orlac finds he can no longer play the piano but can't stop chucking blades...

Gogol is sent (more) insane by Yvonne's continued rejection of him so he frames the distraught pianist for murder. Posing as Rollo, in a head brace, with metal gauntlets he claims that when Gogol removed his hands he stitched back his head! This vision of the bald, baby faced, big eyed Lorre in his fetishistic leather neck support and robot hands is one of the great grotesque horror images. 

Mad Love is an excellent mad doctor film and an early example of the dark hospital theme, which finds within its gleaming white sterility, suffering, transgressive behaviour and unbridled egotism. Lorre is memorably repellant. Horror was about to go into remission for a few years under the influence of the the Hays Office. Many films were shelved for decades. Mad Love is the last classic of Hollywood horror's early thirties golden age.

Screwball fantasy about a boxer Joe Pendleton (Robert Montgomery) who crashes his small aircraft and is assumed dead by an inexperienced clerk (Edward Everett Horton) in a bureaucratic heaven. Big mistake. Joe has to be found a new body by pearly gates head of department, Mr Jordan (Claude Rains) as his own was cremated.  First he is billeted in the fresh corpse of a murdered banker.

Pendleton is an honest Joe, an everyman who just wants the world to be a fairer place, but who discovers everything is corrupt, whether the stock market or the fight game. His consolation is Evelyn Keyes, the woman he runs into no matter who he is. It was meant to be.

 Robert Montgomery is a little too much of a dumb klutz. Everything has to be explained to him three times in case someone in the audience isn't paying attention. And Claude Rains definitely twinkles far too unctuously. But this is a pretty funny story with a fertile premise that would be remade many times, and Keyes brings plenty of Hollywood glamour.

The film tells us that what happens is meant to be, and we would understand this if we saw the whole picture. Hardly the most progressive of philosophies. But it's easy to see that the film is intended to be gentle solace to those suffering loss. It was released with the world at war, and America's entry was confirmed a few months later after Pearl Harbour. Before the end of the year Montgomery would be in the US navy.

This is cinematographer Karl Freund's debut as director. He shot Metropolis (1927) and (Dracula, 1931), but The Mummy isn't as visually striking. There is no expressionism. As a spectacle it gains most of its impact from the exotic set decorations; the parchments and symbols which embellish the mystery of a terrible curse unleashed after the opening of an Egyptian burial chamber.  

Boris Karloff is Imhotep, who in ancient times was bound in cloth and buried alive. Exhumed thousand of years later, the living mummy goes off in search of the reincarnation of his eternal love, played by the mysterious, Zita Johann. Who must have the biggest eyes in horror, as well as a precode dress designer.

The Mummy is slow, but as this film creates its unease through arcane curses and hypnotic trances, this lethargy adds to the atmosphere. Of course, this is another defining role for Karloff, transformed by Universal's great effects artist Jack Pierce, both into the mummy, and its wizened alter-ego, Ardeth Bay (anagram of Death by Ra!).

I think the Mummy improves on the Universal hits of 1931, Dracula and Frankenstein, though like those films it suffers a little from its supporting cast of rather effete and theatrical English expats. But Karloff is great and Johann is enigmatically sexy. The occult is challenged by academic rationality, but in Universal horror, superstition is always authentic and the scientific voice of reason is wasting his breath, and about to die inexplicably anyway.

This lurid, fairly explicit precode version of Richard Connell's story was shot on the sets of King Kong (1933) by the same crew. An all American big game hunter Bob Rainsford (a slim Joel McCrea) is lured onto the rocks of a remote jungle island by crazy Russian aristocrat Count Zaroff (Leslie Banks in his screen debut). The hunter becomes the game.

Banks wears the devilish goatee that in early horror indicates true evil, with the traditional past head injury. Rainsford proves a wily quarry, experienced as he is with bloodsports. He is accompanied by the Queen of Scream, Fay Wray. As they make their way though the rugged terrain pursued by Zaroff and his hunting dogs, their clothes become shredded in a way that would lead to extensive cuts by the Hays Office on its re-release.

This is a tremendously exciting film, full of action with a great atmosphere as the fog falls on the island at twilight. There are evocative sets and locations. We get a brilliant display of theatrical overacting by Leslie Banks, which really works. A touch of philosophy in the script adds context, without undermining the horror.

The film's most grisly moment is when Zaroff shows Bob around the human remains mounted in his trophy room. Apparently there was a lot more of this but audiences complained it was too upsetting so RKO cut 20m. It has been remade many times, but even in its self-censored form it is the touch of the macabre, the feeling of transgression that other versions have never captured so well.

James Whale (Frankenstein, 1931), returned to Universal for this first sound version of HG Wells' sci-fi classic. Claude Rains makes his starring debut as Jack Griffin, a scientist who invents a formula for invisibility before he discovers the antidote. Big mistake. Unfortunately, an ingredient in the elixir, monocane, turns Dr. Griffin insane as he attempts to use his breakthrough to gain power and wealth.

This doesn't have the same visual panache as Whale's other films for Universal, I guess because of the already complicated processes for designing the effects. A major weakness is the amount of knockabout comedy, which the director apparently loved. This hasn't aged that well, and actually diminishes the sense of threat and suspense.

The great triumph of the film is the astonishing in camera effects. Not only of Claude Rains removing his bandages to reveal... nothing, but at the climax when a dissolve finally exposes the face of the actor for the first time a few seconds before the credits roll. We might not see Rains, but his rich, distinctive voice gives the invisible man a valuable presence..

The film is the first Hollywood production that feels more like science fiction than a horror film with some sci-fi jargon attached. It looks at the duality of science for good and bad. It's just a bit of a shame Whale was so seduced by the comic potential of Wells' premise above any of its more serious consequences.

Most Hollywood horror films of the early silents were melodramas which included some element of the physically or mentally grotesque. Lon Chaney's Phantom of the Opera was foremost a horror film. It has the look of horror, with expressionist shadows and outré props and sets. And it retains the typical body-horror theme of the twenties, perhaps the definitive example, with the grinning death's head of Chaney's monster.

 Erik the Phantom is a multifaceted symbol. He is the satanic Svengali with whom an operatic ingénue makes a Faustian pact. He is also the distressing victim of nature, condemned to be persecuted by the normal world. He is the hideous true face behind the mask, that we all hide. The Phantom really is a hard act to pull off, but Chaney does it incredibly well. We forget all about the actor under the spell of his creation.

 Mary Philbin is attractive and sympathetic in a difficult role as the young singer. But Chaney is the star. He is mainly supported by the astonishing sets and costumes, and that startling technicolor scene of the masked ball. The recreation of the Paris Opera House is sensational. The impressionistic cellars and the underground river are immensely haunting.

 This original version of Gaston Leroux's classic novel (the author actually worked on the film) has a perverse authenticity that no remake has, partly through its antiquity which gives the film a psychedelic logic where we can accept these sort of events might happen. But it triumphs because of Chaney's exceptional gift for character and effects. He creates one of the enduring images of terror.

This is the wildest, craziest film ever made. It is set in Madrid and claims to be a true story told by circus people! Alonzo (Lon Chaney) is a killer who is known to the police only by the strange double thumbs on his left hand. So he straps his arms behind his back and joins a travelling circus as a knife act, throwing daggers at Nanon (a very young Joan Crawford) with his feet.

Because of previous abuse, Nanon can't stand to be touched and so is neurotically repulsed by the attentions of circus strong man Malabar (Norman Kerry). As the police close in on Alonzo, to hide his incriminating thumbs and to indulge Nanon's fetishistic attraction to him, Chaney has both his arms removed by a surgeon he is blackmailing! 

Unfortunately, when Alonzo returns to the circus, Nanon has got over her fear of Malabar and married him. The now insanely jealous knife thrower devises a hideous revenge! This is pretty uninhibited stuff. The story was created by Tod Browning who left home as a child to join a circus. Chaney's upbringing was equally unconventional.    

Many silent horrors have the illusory mania of a febrile dream. And that is the great attraction of The Unknown. And it's a lot of fun watching Chaney acting (brilliantly) with his feet. Browning and Chaney did astonishing work, but there was an alchemy when they worked together. It feels like anything is possible.

After Paul Leni arrived at Universal studios, the expressionist style of German horror began to be the standard in Hollywood too. The star of Leni's visually stunning German horror, Waxworks (1924)  was cast as his hero in The Man Who Laughs. Conrad Veidt is Gwynplaine, who was disfigured as a boy by the King. He must grow up with a hideous grin which masks his ceaseless misery.

Veidt  is heartbreaking as the suffering grotesque who joins the circus. The power of the  film, is the pathos of a man so mutilated he can never show how he really feels. The clown. Mary Philbin supports as a blind woman, fated never to see her own beauty. And because she can touch the lips of Gwynplaine, she is fooled that he's always happy.

Leni is brilliant at the visuals, but less gifted at narrative and while it looks like art, the film is slow. The expressionist sets of 17th century England are excellent. There isn't the social critique of Victor Hugo's novel, but it does expose the brutal oppression of the poor by the aristocracy, enabled by the King. Leni portrays the aristocrats as being as physically hideous as the members of the freak show the young outcast is exploited by.

There is something primal about the monstrous characters we encounter in silent horrors. They ask ask us to relive one of the terrible fears of childhood, that we ourselves are uniquely unlovable, and the love we need to survive cannot be returned. These roles are eternal, universal nightmares.

This 1931 version of the RL Stevenson classic is definitive for three main reasons; the amazing, innovative initial transformation of Jekyll into Hyde; its fabulously salacious pre-code content; and for Mamoulian's astonishing camera movement and point-of-view tracking shots. That the director managed to get such fluidity in the era of camera booths is a miracle.

A lot of the credit for the above should go to the brilliant cinematographer Karl Struss. He and the Mamoulian create incredible close ups and impressionistic images that mirror the hero's duality. They design a wonderfully atmospheric pictorial of Victorian London, all candle and lamplight shadows and cobbled streets in the rain.

Fredric March deservedly won an Oscar for his split performance, but Miriam Hopkins steals the film as the Cockney prostitute living in absolute terror of Hyde's brutality. Stevenson wrote a story about the ego versus the id, but it was Paramount that added the naked sexual motifs that still feel transgressive. It is a fetishistic film. The Hays office cut a lot of this for its reissue.

The story presents a paradox: that Victorian sexual prohibition drove men to the services of prostitutes; but without these restrictions, man's animalistic nature is capable of terrible depravity. Eventually we see Jekyll as Hyde's mask, sanctimoniously obscuring his real nature and using it to mediate with a hypocritical society. This is a proto-mad scientist film. It is one of the most brilliant of Hollywood's early sound films