NARRATOR: In 1942, RKO made a change.
WELLES: I wrote the script and directed it.
My name is Orson Welles.
NARRATOR: Its genius, imported from theater and radio, was out.
The studio head who supported him, Jack Schaefer...
... was replaced by the more business-minded Charles Koerner.
The Magnificent Ambersons was taken out of Orson Welles' control...
... and his editor, Robert Wise, with an assistant, Mark Robson...
... was ordered to make drastic cuts.
David O. Selznick urged RKO to strike a print of Welles' cut.
The studio refused.
They had a new motto at RKO:
Showmanship in place of genius.
But in the shift, a space was created for a much quieter kind of genius.
A new, low-budget horror unit was formed.
The first film from the unit, like many that followed...
... was partly shot on the lavish central staircase of the Amberson mansion.
Audiences flocked to these movies, so they gave RKO exactly what they wanted...
... but they were also something new and unexpected:
Movies that moved and spoke in a different way.
[FOOTSTEPS APPROACHING]
You could go and open the door.
[CLOCK TICKING]
NARRATOR: The man who ran the unit...
... had just spent eight years working for Selznick.
He was publicly modest and privately ambitious.
He may have lacked the temperament for the movie business...
... but he had the temperament for movies.
[WATER DRIPPING]
He preferred to stay in the shadows.
He never had any aspirations to direct, but the films he produced belonged to him.
[BRAKES HISSING]
They satisfied the demand for horror, but they delivered much more.
[BRANCHES CRACKING]
O'BRIEN: He realized that he could use that effect of surprise...
...to satisfy the horror audience...
...which wants to have a sudden shock...
...and also create these very strange poetic films...
...where nothing that happens is expected.
Who's there?
GABBARD: The characters don't run away from the darkness, the dread...
...they try to go fully into it, demystify it, understand it.
Horror is what causes physical revulsion. Terror is what causes fear.
If anything, Lewton's films are terror films...
...but there's a sense of some other angle...
...some richer, more subterranean matter...
...that would bubble up and be the real power.
NARRATOR: He was always at war with his bosses...
... and he was never satisfied with his achievements.
There are no recordings of his voice.
There are no home movies.
He had no inkling that he'd be remembered by posterity...
... but posterity knew differently.
FINN: This is another man I can never know, because I cannot talk with him...
...for I am a mute and cannot speak.
I am cut off from other men...
...but in my own silence, I can hear things they cannot hear...
...know things they can never know.
NARRATOR: Val Lewton gave everything he had to making movies...
... and without any self-consciousness or pretense...
... he put a lot of himself into his work and his characters.
It's interesting that many of those characters are women.
REDI: You go back to school.
Young women, receiving quick, brutal educations in the ways of the world.
[DOOR CLOSES]
Lewton grew up around women, powerful women.
His mother, Nina, was one of the first woman story editors in America...
... and her sister, his aunt, Alla...
... was, for a time, one of the greatest stars in American theater and movies.
She studied with Stanislavsky in Moscow...
... and within just a few years of arriving in America...
... she'd become a kind of legend.
"I am a mystery for the Americans," she wrote.
"And that is my biggest advertisement."
Nazimova was an imperious figure.
VAL: My father was raised by his mother and Nazimova.
She had insisted that he go to military school...
...because he was acting up too much and he was a nuisance.
There was some strange interaction going on there.
Nazimova must have been highly influential.
She's this strong woman...
...that appears the strong, young woman and the domineering older woman.
Forever you must ride and ride and ride.
NARRATOR: From a young age, Lewton was also, like many of his characters...
... a dreamer, with a highly active imagination.
Once, he put invitations for his sister's birthday party in the trunk of a tree...
... thinking it was a magic mailbox...
... an episode he later duplicated in one of his best films.
- Not that old tree. - Yes, Dad.
But I told you about that so long ago.
You couldn't have been more than 3 when I told you that tree was a magic mailbox.
AMY: I didn't forget.
But, Amy, that wasn't real, that was just a story.
That tree's no mailbox.
And the mood of his films and his characters...
Reflective, melancholy.
- this was Lewton's mood.
Their torments often reflected his torments.
I have no peace...
...for they are in me.
VAL: He had phobias and fears.
He had a hard time sleeping.
So he could delve into those darker realms.
NARRATOR: His characters go wandering, searching...
... for something mysterious, something elusive...
... something they can never recover...
... which appears to be true of Lewton's life.
He was born in 1904 in Yalta.
Lewton's sister, Lucy, later remembered it as a paradise...
... where the bright sun shines on white palaces, Moorish villas...
... Grecian ruins and Tartar villages.
Tolstoy and Gorky spent their summers there...
... and Chekhov's story, Lady with Lapdog, was set in Yalta.
Leventon, that was the family name.
In the 19th century, they had converted from Judaism...
... to the Russian Orthodox Church in order to further themselves.
As in all the best Russian families...
... the children were sent off to Switzerland for a continental education.
Lewton's mother, Nina...
... was one of the most fashionable, sought-after women in town...
... when she returned to Yalta and met her future husband.
LEWTON: "My poor mother met my father...
...a handsome, dashing, but thoroughly irresponsible young army officer.
She married him and, for a time, they were happy...
...but his great passion was gambling."
NARRATOR: In 1909, like a heroine in a play by Ibsen...
... Nina took her two children and fled...
... first for Berlin and then to America.
Lewton himself never knew his father's correct name...
... which was Hoffschneider.
They never saw each other again.
Leventon was Americanized into Lewton...
... the children were rebaptized as Episcopalians...
... and they were forbidden to speak Russian by their mother.
Anything you want to know about this city, ask me. I know all the unimportant details.
[IRENA LAUGHS]
Like many new Americans, they did a thorough job of erasing their origins...
[SPEAKS IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE]
... the old world eclipsed by the new.
There's always a world beyond, haunting Lewton's characters...
... reminding them of who they are...
... one of the many things that was so distinctive about his pictures...
... and before that, his writing.
Before he ever went into movies...
... Lewton had another career as a writer of newspaper articles...
... publicity, poetry, histories, a radio show and many novels.
His novels of the 1930s, which are wrongly called pulp, trash books...
...actually have a distinct literary quality...
...and, I think, Russian melancholic sense to them.
NARRATOR: One of his best novels, No Bed of Her Own...
... was an uncompromising portrayal of life during the Depression...
... and a racy bestseller.
He often complained about being stuck in pulp forms...
... but on another level, he was comfortable there...
... and it was his ability to work quickly on tight deadlines...
... as well as his abundant knowledge of history...
... that led to his first job in the movies.
It was Nina, then working at MGM...
... who recommended her son for a job with David O. Selznick.
Selznick was Hollywood royalty...
... a dynamo who had become the model of the star producer.
Lewton was a story editor, researcher, script doctor...
... and all-around right-hand man.
This was his apprenticeship...
... the place where he learned to make a movie the Selznick way.
LEWTON: "I had to read nine different translations of Anna Karenina...
...work with Count Tolstoy in getting a literal translation of many doubtful passages...
...assist with technical research...
...and I'm still working on the script, analyzing and suggesting changes."
Don't go away.
It will be all right.
Don't let the nightlight dance. It frightens me.
LEWTON: "The other day...
...disgusted by the lack of warmth in the scenes between Anna and her son...
...Selznick turned that facet of the production over to me.
I doubt I'll get screen credit."
VAL: He was sort of an amateur historian.
The details were important to him.
I think he picked up from Selznick an attempt to make things look authentic...
...to be careful about the research.
NARRATOR: It was on Selznick's 1936 adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities...
... that Lewton first met a young French director named Jacques Tourneur.
They quickly became good friends.
There was never any letup with Selznick...
... who, of course, was famous for his demanding obsessions.
Lewton took calls at all hours of the night from his boss.
He tried to anticipate and satisfy all his needs.
He stood with the stopwatch outside the men's room...
... at a preview of Gone With the Wind...
... to determine exactly where the intermission should fall.
He was also the one who told Selznick not to buy Margaret Mitchell's novel...
... although legend has it that it was Lewton...
... who conceived of the famous boom shot at the depot...
... which he figured would never be filmed because of the expense.
Lewton was secure with Selznick and felt extremely loyal...
... but he was dissatisfied with the work...
... and with himself for not pursuing his own ambitions.
LEWTON: "Instead of taking the gamble of screenwriting...
...I chose to follow another end of the business with less money...
...less satisfaction, and what I thought would be security.
I worked like a dog and saw other people have the fun of making pictures."
NARRATOR: But Lewton had left his mark with Selznick...
... and in 1940, a rival company came calling.
He was nervous about what he was gonna tell his boss...
... but in the end...
... it was actually Selznick who personally negotiated Lewton's contract.
LEWTON: "My task is to initiate a program of horror pictures...
...to be made at the comparatively low cost of $ 125,000 each...
...which should compete successfully with the Universal horror films...
...which cost anywhere from 300,000 to a million.
I feel I can do this easily.
The Universal people spend a lot of money on their horror product...
...but not much on brains or imagination."
NARRATOR: Lewton put together a team of collaborators...
... with whom he would work closely.
Mark Robson, who had assisted Robert Wise on Citizen Kane...
...and The Magnificent Ambersons, was his editor.
DeWitt Bodeen, with whom he had worked at Selznick...
... would write the first screenplay.
His old friend, Jacques Tourneur, was brought on to direct.
And Nicholas Musuraca, the DP, and Roy Webb, the composer...
... were seasoned veterans who had worked on countless RKO films.
The goal, as Lewton said, was to make quality pictures on a low budget.
CORMAN: There are many constraints connected with working on a low budget.
But at the same time, there's certain opportunities.
You can gamble a little bit more, you can experiment.
You have to find a more creative way to solve a problem or to present a concept.
NARRATOR: Lewton took his cue from Selznick...
... and supervised absolutely everything:
Casting, set design, costumes, the direction, the editing...
... and he rewrote every script himself, either without credit or under a pseudonym.
He found his own style of visual storytelling...
... and to a certain extent, you could say that he predirected his pictures on paper.
The unit started with the title suggested by the studio head, Charles Koerner.
It was called, of all things, Cat People.
"If you wanna get out now," Lewton told Bodeen, "I won't hold it against you."
Right from the start, he drove himself hard.
LEWTON: "Jacques and I are trying to perform the miracle:
To get out an A picture in B time.
I don't sleep at night anymore. I just worry."
NEMEROV: The opening of Lewton's first film is a depiction of an artist...
...who thinks her work is no good, who destroys it of her own accord.
The last picture that she discards as no good is left on the ground.
- May I see it? - Oh, no, it's not good.
If I let you see it, you might not want to know any artists ever.
It would have to be pretty bad to do that.
NEMEROV: You can see something of Lewton's purpose...
...to focus on that which is discarded, that which is not good enough...
...because it will yield a story, it has power.
Do you love me, Irena?
Uh-huh.
You know I love you, don't you?
I've never kissed you.
NARRATOR: Lewton and Bodeen created a story about a Serbian woman...
... played by Simone Simon...
... who believes that she suffers from an ancient curse:
That she's transformed into a panther each time she tries to act on a sexual urge.
They stuck to a very important rule:
LEWTON: "I feel every horror story should have a good story to tell...
...even if there were no horror.
We always talked of the scene in two ways:
One way, the horror way...
...and the other way, as if the horror element were out of it.
[PANTHER GROWLS]
Just substitute either insanity or a social disease for Irena's mad beliefs...
...and you'll see that the story still stands up."
[IRENA SINGING]
NARRATOR: Lewton had originally thought of setting the story in Europe...
... but he and Tourneur decided that...
... the audience needed to identify with the characters.
He always insisted that his characters had jobs...
... and that they be seen at work.
The horror elements always mingled with everyday life, ordinary behavior.
GABBARD: There's a kind of gentility in the characters that's deceptive.
The Kent Smith character seems to be a mild-mannered, warm, caring man.
He's unaware of how his aggression is coming out in his interactions.
I think you'd better go home, too, and make it up with Irena.
Alice, you're very swell.
That makes me dangerous. I'm the new type of other woman.
GABBARD: He's the one who triggers the jealousy of his wife.
That's a point that Lewton wants to make: We all are potentially evil, murderous.
Some recognition of the dark forces that move all of us...
...despite our best efforts to banish them.
[GROWLING]
NARRATOR: Lewton's films became known for their creative use of sound...
... and for their set pieces, where much is made from little...
... and where the seen and the unseen converge.
[GROWLING]
TOURNEUR [IN FRENCH]:
[GROWLING]
[LEOPARD ROARS] [ALICE SCREAMS]
Help!
KUROSAWA [IN JAPANESE]:
What is the matter, Alice?
[WHISTLE BLOWS]
KUROSAWA [IN JAPANESE]:
OLIVER: Goodnight, Irena.
[CATS YOWLING IN THE DISTANCE]
[IRENA SOBBING]
O'BRIEN: It totally goes against horror movie logic.
It goes in a very different direction, into her suffering.
These beautiful, luminous patterns and sinuous shadow forms.
It's just intensely pleasurable.
The unsettling scenes are also soothing.
He manages to combine these opposite qualities.
KUROSAWA [IN JAPANESE]:
[PANTHER GROWLING]
NARRATOR: The first reviews of Cat People were dubious, and some were hostile.
The studio was horrified by the film's lack of horror.
But Lewton and his team had the last laugh.
TOURNEUR [IN FRENCH]:
LEWTON: "This sort of makes Hollywood history.
You've no means of judging how much of a furor this poor...
...simple, lucky little film is causing.
It's really made everyone connected with it."
That was a surprise, a pleasant surprise.
But he could always find a dark spot in any light moment.
LEWTON: "With my usual luck, I find myself with a thumping success on my hands...
...and under a long-term contract...
...at what out here is considered almost a picayune salary.
The usual thing is to let the agent go ahead and break the contract.
I can't quite reconcile myself to that.
It's a great problem with me: self-interest against self-respect."
NARRATOR: Cat People did holdover business at the Hawaii Theater in Hollywood...
... and at the Rialto on Times Square...
... which, James Agee claimed, had the finest movie audience in the country.
This was a very different era...
... when the theaters were packed on a regular basis...
... and moviegoing was central to the lives of people all over America.
The picture struck a chord with wartime audiences and with the troops overseas.
The recognized something very special.
They were ready to go deeper.
O'BRIEN: Lewton's artistic ambitions are very directly communicated.
He is trying to make a beautiful film...
...using everything he knows about photography...
...and about music and about writing.
NARRATOR: Lewton's next film had another impossible title.
I Walked with a Zombie, loosely based on Jane Eyre and set in the West Indies...
... is about a pair of brothers, the woman they both love...
... and the nurse who watches over her.
[GASPS]
It's the mood that stays with you.
The sounds, the images.
"The camera eye," wrote the great film critic Manny Farber...
..."is on a curiously delicate wavelength...
... that responds to scenery as quickly as the mind. "
[DRUMS BEATING IN THE DISTANCE]
O'BRIEN: It's scary, but it's also exhilarating.
They're almost like musical numbers.
The whole home-fort scene in I Walked with a Zombie...
...becomes a musical number, in fact.
[DRUMS BEATING] [PEOPLE SINGING IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE]
NARRATOR: Lewton and Tourneur's films sometimes reached an hypnotic level...
... taking us to the edge of another darker reality.
[DRUMS BEATING]
MAN: She doesn't bleed.
The slave ship narrative underlies the whole film...
...and is most unexpected in a Hollywood film made in 1943.
The islands was most old family, miss.
They brought the colored folks to the island.
And the enormous boat brought the long-ago fathers...
...and the long-ago mothers of us all...
...chained to the bottom of the boat.
O'BRIEN: It establishes a mood of despair and tragedy right from the beginning...
...and is connected to the image of Saint Sebastian...
...and all of this is, in a sense...
...irrelevant to the main story, but it's the essence of the story.
[MAN SINGING]
[WOMAN CRYING]
O'BRIEN: I remember that Herzog movie where the whole cast was under hypnosis.
There's something of that quality with Lewton.
The whole movie seems to be under the grip of some kind of trance.
You have this literal sleepwalking...
...people moving in trancelike fashion into some unknown space.
[DRUMS BEATING]
[INAUDIBLE DIALOGUE]
CORMAN: It's hard to say how the concept of the unconscious plays out for the viewer.
I think the filmgoer is probably not aware of exactly what is happening...
...but they're aware of the result.
If you're playing with the filmgoer's unconscious...
...they react to it without really knowing why they are reacting to it.
[MEN SINGING]
NARRATOR: Lewton gave us something quite different...
... from what's now known as "Hollywood craftsmanship."
You could say that he presented us with a parallel world...
... in which everything feels both real and a little unreal.
Familiar, but strange.
The characters and the viewer slip into a mysterious, troubling gray zone...
[TRAIN WHOOSHING]
... where real life and dream life come face to face.
[SNARLS]
And where beauty and destruction merge.
Lewton and Tourneur together really created a new kind of cinematic beauty.
After The Leopard Man, the studio decided to split the team up...
... and double their investment.
Tourneur was promoted to A pictures and Lewton continued to work with B budgets.
Something black.
- Something on its way to you. - Go on.
Let me see it.
Don't look at that.
Let me see it.
O'BRIEN: There's a mutual influence.
It's very hard to say what is Lewton and what is Tourneur.
That sinuous quality, which is really haunting...
...a kind of dance of shadows, movements through mysterious places.
[IN FRENCH]
CLO-CLO: Well, see you tomorrow. - Tomorrow.
NARRATOR: Lewton and Tourneur remained friends...
... and they shared a love of the sea.
This was Lewton's home away from home.
He spent most of his weekends on his yacht, The Nina...
... with a small circle of friends and with his family.
Lewton had married his high school sweetheart, Ruth Knapp.
By Hollywood standards, their family led a relatively quiet, ordinary life.
VAL: My mother and father were in agreement.
She went along with him and she made life comfortable for him.
Most of my memories about my father are great.
But there were those moments when his temper just got the better of him.
And he continually suggested that I would go to military school.
My mother interceded on my behalf, where she wouldn't on my sister Nina's.
He could be so hard on my sister.
LEWTON: "Nina's a problem. She doesn't seem to be a very happy child.
She's a true Lewton in that regard."
VAL: I don't think he was a really happy man.
He had a book of a 101 knots.
He would work late into the night and then he would tie knots.
NARRATOR: At RKO, the pressure never let up for Lewton.
And the pace was inhuman.
There was only a month between the wrap of I Walked with a Zombie...
... and shooting The Leopard Man.
He had to get his next film prepared for the camera only a month after that.
LEWTON: "Hardly a night since Christmas that I got home before midnight.
For the first time in my life, I'm really tired."
VAL: He was always at war with the powers at RKO.
He didn't think much of the material he was given to work with.
So he had to figure out ways to make it look good.
And he put a lot of pressure on himself.
NARRATOR: When the time came to make another picture...
... Lewton decided to keep things in the family...
... and promote Mark Robson, who had become like a son to him, to director.
RKO offered a bigger budget for the new film, but the offer came with a stipulation.
VAL: They weren't gonna let him do it with Mark Robson.
He was gonna have to use a different director.
He decided he would stick with making B movies.
That's a pretty big sacrifice.
[GIRLS CHATTERING]
Maybe he had another reason for sticking with Robson.
CORMAN: As you get into big-budget films...
...you're subject to more studio influence or interference...
...and the film becomes less your own and more a corporate film.
NARRATOR: He knew that the most important thing to preserve...
... was his freedom.
And by this point, Lewton and his team had developed...
... their own individual approach to making movies.
O'BRIEN: He's often filming the journey of a rather naive, inexperienced person...
...into a world full of unexpected dangers and unexpected messages.
MARY: Jacqueline.
O'BRIEN: They emerge into this world.
Everything is a code, everything is being transmitted in cryptic form.
NARRATOR: Each film contained an unusual story element...
... like the Greenwich Village devil worshipers in The Seventh Victim.
In this case, the obligation carried with it the necessity...
...of dying if one betrayed that secret. You understand that, don't you?
Yes. I understand it.
And you also understand that you must die.
No.
- Drink. - No.
O'BRIEN: He's taking for granted a certain intellectual milieu...
...which includes things like an interest in the occult...
...and in unusual religious phenomena.
No, no!
This is a kind of underground cinema...
...a parallel world which is also the world of '40s intellectuals and artists.
The devil worshipers. The lovers of evil.
They're a poor, wretched group of people who have taken the wrong turning.
Wrong?
Who knows what is wrong or right?
If I prefer to believe in satanic majesty and power, who can deny me?
What proof could you bring that good is superior to evil?
[CROWD LAUGHING AND APPLAUDING]
O'BRIEN: Because of the extreme compression of these films...
...many of the most potent moments are extremely brief.
[FOOTSTEPS SQUEAKING]
The afterimage effect is extraordinary.
You see these things really just for a blink and they stay with you forever.
[MAN SINGING "BLOW THE MAN DOWN"]
TOM: For luck. - Thank you, sir.
Being a sailor, you'll need luck.
O'BRIEN: More and more, the tendency is...
...to milk anything that has any potential at all and to stay on it.
On the bridge! The hook!
O'BRIEN: In the Lewton films, it's the opposite.
The most intense moments last a matter of seconds.
[CRASHING]
Put a stopper on that hook, Mr. Merriam.
KUROSAWA [IN JAPANESE]:
Since you have no earthly need of this...
[CHAINS CLANKING]
[SHOUTING INDISTINCTLY]
I think the captain is incompetent.
Louie getting killed in the chain locker, that wasn't an accident.
The captain did it purposely.
I don't know what you're trying to pull, fellow...
...but my advice is pull in your ears...
...before you get yourself into a jam that you don't like.
Now, get away from me. I'm busy.
NARRATOR: The films thrived on a certain quiet simplicity...
... in the dialogue and in the storytelling...
... and in the faces and bodies of minor actors...
... who were often lost in the background of most movies:
Character actors like Ben Bard.
I wouldn't call if coffee.
I don't know what I'd call it, but I wouldn't call it coffee.
Sir Lancelot, who was a well-known Calypso singer from Trinidad.
Is my little miss here?
A little girl with hair the color of yours, ma'am.
Elizabeth Russell, a former fashion model.
- Going on a voyage, my Lord? - A trip to the country, to Brae.
Billy House, who'd been a star on the vaudeville circuit.
To listen to the twitter of the birds.
Or Skelton Knaggs, who'd worked in British theater.
There were former stars whose popularity was on the wane, like Richard Dix.
She's a beautiful ship to command.
Or the lovely Frances Dee.
HOLLAND: It's not beautiful.
They were actors who always seemed to linger on the edge of stardom...
... like Tom Conway, the Russian actor, who spoke like an English gentleman.
Everything seems beautiful because you don't understand.
Or Anna Lee, who was a favorite of John Ford.
How did they know I'm here?
There were bit players who appeared uncredited...
... and who made their living appearing in countless films, like Dewey Robinson.
The captain wants a look at you.
- And Lou Lubin. - Hey, Danny.
O'BRIEN: Many of the lead actors are not particularly expressive.
He saves the expressiveness for bit players...
...who suddenly come into the picture.
Look at that woman. Isn't she something?
NEMEROV: Minor characters did transcend the world of Hollywood generality...
...which could not ever hope to touch ground with lived experience.
NEMEROV: Manny Farber said, "An underground movie...
...is one in which you can feel the careworn detail of life.
The little ripple of physical experience."
These are terms of value for Lewton.
NARRATOR: "I arch my back and purr deep-throated approval...
... of The Curse of the Cat People, " wrote James Agee.
Masquerading as a routine case of grade-B horrors...
... the picture is in fact a brave, sensitive and admirable...
... little psychological melodrama about a lonely 6-year-old girl.
AMY: Irena.
Agee was right.
This time, Lewton really did fool the executives at RKO...
... and he did it in the guise of a sequel to Cat People.
AMY: Irena.
"It has the ability to convey at times...
... the exact quality of certain states of childhood, " wrote Manny Farber.
"It is especially good in getting across the delicacy and warm enchantment...
... surrounding the girl in her daydreaming. "
NEWTON: I remember so distinctly being very impressed...
...that most of it was shot in that backyard...
...which was on a sound stage, made into summer, fall, winter, spring.
They made the snow.
The men would be up on the catwalks, throwing it over.
I did understand her.
I was an only child and grew up around adults...
...maybe in a lot the same way that she did.
MRS. FARREN: - his cold arms around you.
Loud and loud and louder.
[HOOFBEATS]
[AMY SCREAMS]
What is it, Alice?
I thought I heard Amy calling.
I guess not.
AMY: My friend. I'm frightened.
My friend.
NEWTON: I had a friend.
Everyone had to make room for that friend, have a place for that friend to sit.
Simone Simon wore the beautiful, flowing chiffon dress...
...which was very impressive to me, an 8-year-old.
I shall want you for always.
For always, then.
NEWTON: And it had little silver stars, thousands and thousands of these stars...
...and I would follow her around and pick up the stars that fell off.
I thought that was my job.
NARRATOR: What made The Curse of the Cat People so special...
... was that it gave us reality as understood by a child...
... like a potent fairy tale, both magical and disturbing.
GABBARD: The child's task is to realize the mother that loves me...
...is also the mother that punishes me and makes me hate her sometimes.
That task of integrating the bad and the good...
...is often not fully complete until there's a loss...
...and both those elements are brought together.
My friend.
You see this visually near the end of The Curse of the Cat People.
My friend.
GABBARD: That's a theme you see a lot of in Lewton...
...of two women, one bad, one good, not being able to quite put them together.
In that film, he does it masterfully at the end.
AMY: My friend.
NARRATOR: Lewton had originally wanted to call the film Amy and Her Friend...
... but the studio had insisted on The Curse of the Cat People.
They also insisted on promoting it as such.
But audiences understood this picture, maybe Lewton's most autobiographical...
... for what it was.
Lewton had promoted another editor, Robert Wise, to director in mid-shoot...
... when the original director, Gunther von Fritsch, went behind schedule.
When we finished the film, we ran it for child psychologists and teachers.
They said, "It's marvelous, a great study. What's it doing with that awful title?"
And of course, the title's what started it, from the studio's standpoint.
NARRATOR: Maybe there was something else too.
A mysterious aspect of Curse of the Cat People...
... and all of the Lewton pictures...
... that was never discussed, but felt by audiences.
[ALL SINGING "SHEPHERDS! SHAKE OFF YOUR DROWSY SLEEP"]
NEMEROV: There's a Christmas Eve scene. Everything is cheery, brightly lit.
One person in that crowd hears something else...
...and what she hears is another voice singing in counterpoint.
[SINGING IN FRENCH]
NARRATOR: Lewton's films carry a certain sadness...
... the sadness of wartime.
O'BRIEN: Being made in the midst of a catastrophic situation...
...the films do have that strange, hermetic quality.
They actually take you deeper into a sense of underlying disaster...
...but turned into a kind of symbolic poem.
NEMEROV: The war is their inspiring secret.
It is the thing that gives them their sadness.
IRENA: Goodbye.
AMY: Please, don't leave me.
Don't go, please.
Come back, Irena. Irena?
MAN [ON FILM]: My darling, good luck always.
NARRATOR: It was the war that gave Lewton a way out of horror...
... at least for the moment.
He was one of the only filmmakers of the period...
... who looked directly at the sadness of the home front.
- What are you shaving for, Dad? - Going out.
- Mom going with you? - Yup.
- But you said last night. You promised me. - Well, you can go out tomorrow night.
NARRATOR: Youth Runs Wild is an unusual picture for its time.
Simple, spare, a little awkward...
... but committed to a vision of adults and kids...
... leading ordinary lives with ordinary problems.
[BO Y CRYING]
It was no morale booster.
Hey, Frank, hand me that.
What about this kid yapping? I'm afraid somebody will come attend him.
Don't worry about it. Lots of kids like that.
His folks work. They don't have anyplace to leave him.
Lewton's problems started with the State Department and the Censorship Board.
They were afraid the film's clear-eyed depiction of juvenile delinquency...
... would paint too negative a portrait of stateside America.
- Check that guy on the post. - Come on, duck low.
The title was changed twice.
An entire subplot involving a son, played by Dick Moore...
... killing his father, Arthur Shields, was dropped.
Re-shoots were ordered...
... and Lewton tried unsuccessfully to have his name removed from the picture.
But compromised as it is, Youth Runs Wild has an interesting frankness.
Yipe! Mm-mm.
Sarah, why don't you go out? Go somewhere, maybe to the movies, huh?
- May I? - Yes, I'll get the sandwiches.
Oh, Mom, thanks.
My, my, what a bringdown.
You just pick on somebody your size, Bart.
NARRATOR: Lewton was indulged with another non-horror production...
... but at a price.
Mademoiselle Fifi had the dubious distinction...
... of being the least expensive period picture ever made in the United States.
Lewton worked with what he had...
... artfully placed shadows suggesting a greater world...
... beyond what we're actually seeing...
... the standing set from The Hunchback of Notre Dame...
... his own knowledge of another home front...
... the period of the Franco-Prussian War...
... of Daumier's engravings, and the paintings of Delacroix and Lautrec.
LEWTON: "These fellows lived in the days of our story.
Our painting does more than reproduce a street or an inn.
It gives you a feeling about the place."
Mademoiselle Fifi was based on two short stories by Guy de Maupassant.
Good morning.
WOMAN: I understand the lieutenant is going with us.
Simone Simon plays a young laundress...
... with a much stronger spirit of resistance than her wealthier countrymen.
[SINGING IN FRENCH]
Go on, sing.
Go on.
[SINGING IN FRENCH]
MAN: Shh!
Ah, wonderful. To our deliverance.
O'BRIEN: The underlying mood of contempt for these wartime collaborators...
...really comes through very forcefully.
I can't think of many American films from that period that even raise the issue.
Perhaps we can recapture the tone of our last evening together.
NARRATOR: Mademoiselle Fifi is not a story of war...
... but of compromise and courage.
And in a sense, this picture... Small, minor, but beautifully made.
- is a kind of self-portrait of the artist.
I'm not a good French woman or I wouldn't be here.
I'm only the kind of a woman the Prussians would want.
[GRUNTS]
[WOMEN GASPING]
It's not too hard to see Lewton as he must have seen himself...
... behind the story of a woman under attack from all sides...
... by brutes, rogues and scoundrels.
Lewton's excursions away from horror were met with indifference.
The tension kept mounting and the ground was starting to shift beneath his feet.
In 1944, Charles Koerner, Lewton's boss and his champion at the studio...
... became ill with leukemia.
Just like Orson Welles before him...
... Lewton now found himself without a friend at RKO.
For the first time, he had to have his scripts approved.
And then the unthinkable happened.
[WOMAN SCREAMS]
Production executive Jack Gross to Lewton:
" We've just signed Boris Karloff to a two-picture contract.
You're going to use him in your next film. "
Lewton's worst nightmare come true.
But things didn't turn out the way he expected.
For Karloff, Lewton meant salvation.
"He rescued me and restored my soul," said the actor.
Karloff gave Lewton's pictures a gravity they had never had...
... and he brought Lewton's poetic dialogue to life.
When I was a boy, I was taught by the village priest and old women like Kyra.
My belief had many sides, good sides and bad sides.
As a man, I put all that away from me.
I put my faith in what I can feel and see and know about.
NARRATOR: Gross insisted on major alternations...
... in Lewton's original script for Isle of the Dead...
... which took its title from Arnold Böcklin's famous painting.
LEWTON: "It started out as a rather poetic and quite beautiful story...
...of how people, fleeing from the battles of the Greek War of 1912...
...are caught on this island by plague...
...and through their sufferings, come to an acceptance of death...
...Shakespeare's little sleep.
It ended up as a hodgepodge of horror, largely my stupid supervisor's fault."
Wash all you want to. You cannot wash a wave.
There is one among us who brings punishment on us all.
Lewton was wrong about Isle of the Dead.
It's a uniquely haunting picture, a kind of mood piece.
And the mood is quite unusual.
All my life, I've had a dreadful fear of premature burial.
I awaken sometimes screaming with nightmares...
...in which I see myself buried alive...
...waking to find myself entombed, without air.
O'BRIEN: Death is constantly evoked and evoked in a very curious way.
People are always longing for death and expressing a kind of erotic yearning.
DROSSOS: I'll meet my old familiar enemy, death.
I've fought him before. I have won often.
Now he wins. Let him come for me.
NARRATOR: When an exhibitor complained to Lewton...
... that there were too many messages in his pictures, he was irate.
LEWTON: "I'm sorry, Mr. Holt, but we do have a message...
...and our message is that death is good."
GABBARD: Freud's idea of the death instinct...
...was that there was a kind of return to one's origins in dust.
In that sense, there was a kind of completion that was inevitable.
That's part of the reason for this sadness...
...a kind of elegiac tone in much of Lewton's work.
He shared that pessimism.
[WOMAN SCREAMS]
[SCRATCHING SOUNDS]
Kyra?
NARRATOR: Lewton may not have been able to afford special effects...
... but he didn't need them.
He took nothing for granted. Everything counted.
WOMAN: Shut me in the dark.
Shut me in. Close to me.
Shut in.
"I'm thankful that it is my last horror picture, " wrote Lewton to his mother.
"RKO broke their promise."
Gray!
[HORSE NEIGHS]
Lewton was in an odd position.
He had to satisfy the studio, which wanted more horror...
... and the production code, which called for less.
He found a kind of balance with The Body Snatcher.
A fine specimen, isn't he, Toddy MacFarlane?
Come, Toddy, sit down here with me.
- Don't call me that confounded name. - Sit down.
NARRATOR: The film was based on a Robert Louis Stevenson story...
... about the Faustian pact between the dean of a medical school...
... played by the great British character actor, Henry Daniell...
... and a grave robber, played by Karloff.
Of course, I'll do the ordering.
We'll have a bowl of hot punch and a cut from the loin of that young porker.
Don't worry, waiter. I'm with my friend, the great Dr. MacFarlane.
WISE: Boris was very, very anxious to do this particular film...
...because he recognized the quality of the parts...
...and the duel that would take place.
He felt this would be a chance for him to show that he was more than Frankenstein...
...more than the monster man, that he really could hold his own.
I fitted them together... like this.
So that it was right.
Yet she won't walk.
[GLASS BREAKS]
You can't build life the way you put blocks together, Todd.
What the devil are you talking about? I'm an anatomist. I know the body.
You're a fool, Toddy, and no doctor.
It's only the dead ones you know.
I am a doctor. I teach medicine.
You don't know. You'll never know or understand, Todd.
Look. Look at yourself.
Could you be a doctor, a healing man, with the things those eyes have seen?
NARRATOR: The emphasis in Lewton's films was shifting...
... from mood to story and character...
... from the ethereal to the tangible.
But the heart of The Body Snatcher is with the mysterious minor character...
... the blind street singer played by Donna Lee.
[SINGING]
NEMEROV: If you read Robert Louis Stevenson's original story...
...there's not much mention, if at all, of any such blind street singer.
[GIRL SINGING]
NEMEROV: Lewton bestows singular importance on her.
She's one of these beautiful figures of sorrow.
[GIRL SINGING]
NARRATOR: Another innocent.
But this time, she's swallowed up by a dark, cruel world.
[GIRL SINGING]
[GIRL GASPS]
For Bedlam, set in Saint Mary Bethlehem Royal hospital...
... in 18th-century London...
... RKO finally gave Lewton a larger budget and more preparation time.
He created what appears to be another bitter self-portrait...
... another story of a woman...
... this time, trapped inside the walls of an insane asylum.
[MAN GROANS]
Do your chains hurt you?
LEWTON: "We make horror films because we have to make them.
And we make them for little money and fight every minute to make them right."
NARRATOR: "It's not a horror picture," Karloff would insist.
"It's a historical picture."
- Lord Mortimer. BIRD: Lord Mortimer is like a pig.
Brain small, his belly big.
[BOTH LAUGHING]
O'BRIEN: Whereas Selznick takes classic work...
...and gives it the Hollywood treatment...
...Lewton takes a Hollywood concept and gives it a literary treatment.
MORTIMER: To murder him from spite and envy.
Murder?
There was no murder.
Colby was my guest.
He chose to leave by a window before I could open the door for him.
And then that monstrous accident.
NELL: Accident?
Hm. Master Sims is writing a new dictionary.
Are accidents contrived, plotted, executed?
O'BRIEN: He wants a certain flavor to the language...
...and it's very, very important to him.
It's never just background.
NARRATOR: So is Bedlam a horror picture or a historical picture?
Maybe more than any other Lewton film, it's at odds with itself.
Blessing.
Blessing of... Of our age.
Come on, come on, I spent all morning beating it into your head.
You see, my lord, reason is overcome with emotion...
...when it must speak of you.
MORTIMER: Prod him on, Sims.
- Go on. - Lord Mortimer.
SIMS: Duck him in the river.
NARRATOR: All along, Lewton had been trying to accomplish something impossible:
To satisfy the demand for horror and transcend it at the same time.
But the conventions of horror were exactly what allowed him to open a door...
... onto the dark side of existence.
[PATIENTS SCREAMING]
You see things in his films that you don't see in most other films of the year.
Even other horror films.
Human harshness and callousness.
Irrational impulses.
Real fears and disturbances.
His films touched on these elements lightly but clearly...
... and acknowledged them as a part of life.
ALL: Kill him! Kill him! Kill him!
Let me go. There will be no punishment.
- He is sane. The man is sane. - Split him in two.
Plaintiffs, release the prisoner.
Tom.
NARRATOR: Bedlam was Lewton's last completely successful movie.
He moved on to what he thought were bigger and better things.
But was he freeing himself or cutting himself adrift?
The war was over. The vogue for horror was coming to an end.
Lewton started drifting through the Hollywood studio system...
... as it was in the process of collapsing.
He developed a series of projects at RKO.
One after another, they fell through.
He worked on a story with Jean Renoir...
... and if you look at the finished film, The Woman on the Beach...
... you can see the traces of Lewton's involvement.
You can feel his mood.
But he had to leave the production...
... when he suffered his first heart attack at the age of 42.
Once he recovered, Lewton left RKO, now in a state of disarray...
... for Paramount, where the situation was just as bad.
More projects carefully developed, almost made, abandoned.
The one film he was able to make was a drama called My Own True Love.
The production was an unhappy experience...
... and the film is flawed, but it's also affecting.
Good night, Michael. Don't let the postwar get you down, huh?
It's the story of a father and his son...
... a veteran who's lost all connection to his former self.
Well, good night.
I think I'll prowl about a bit.
Good practice, you know.
My Own True Love reconnected Lewton with the war and its sadness.
But the world was drifting away from the war era.
Lewton left Paramount for MGM, the most stable of the studios.
He had to answer to Dori Sheri, who had come from RKO.
More unproduced projects.
LEWTON: "I'm waiting. I've been on payroll 22 weeks.
The whole aspect of such waiting is just too corrosive.
One even begins to doubt one's own abilities...
...and too-evident superiority to those one has to truckle to."
NARRATOR: James Agee made the transition from critic to screenwriter...
... and he had a meeting with Sheri.
" Of course, " Agee mentioned, " you have one of the three greatest moviemakers...
... this country ever produced under contract. "
Sheri had no idea that Agee was referring to Lewton...
... who was working on a comedy called Please Believe Me.
Light comedy was not Lewton's forte.
Don't panic.
- Don't panic. I'll get you out. - Thank you.
LEWTON: "The one bright spot on my professional horizon at the moment...
...is the fact that my two directorial protégés...
...Mark and Bob, have made enormous successes...
...and they want to work with me again.
Now the plan is to see if we can't organize...
...some sort of independent producing unit."
NARRATOR: It was what Lewton had always longed for:
Freedom to work on material of his choosing with his most trusted friends.
VAL: They decided to go ahead with the company without him...
...and had their agent call him...
...and let him know that he was no longer part of their group.
My father was older and maybe they saw a man who was increasingly ill.
Bob Wise apologized, but I don't think he ever forgave Mark.
NARRATOR: It was business as usual for Hollywood...
... but it hit Lewton like a deathblow.
Movies and the movie business, they're two different things.
Lewton landed at Universal in 1949...
... where he worked at a reduced salary and once again with small budgets.
But it was a temporary home.
Apache Drums, directed by Hugo Fregonese, was a first for Lewton.
A Western and it was shot in color.
VAL: He was very interested in working on a horror movie in color...
...using creepy blues and purples.
The Indians in whole body paint...
...are really remarkable examples of use of color for dramatic effect.
He got Santa Monica lifeguards and painted them up to look like Apaches.
[APACHES YELLING] [WOMEN SCREAMING]
Before Apache Drums was released, Lewton drifted again...
... to work on an independent unit with a young producer named Stanley Kramer.
LEWTON: "Although it will be a very difficult assignment...
...with not the money, credit and participation they had originally promised...
...I will be working on wonderful properties with very congenial people.
I hope to be very happy."
NARRATOR: Lewton was preparing two projects for Kramer...
... when he had a more serious heart attack.
VAL: He went to the hospital in an oxygen tent.
You can imagine somebody whose big fear is to be caged...
...to be caged for almost a week before he dies.
NARRATOR: He was 46 years old.
It's tempting to say that the movie business killed Val Lewton...
... that he was no match for its toughness.
But is that the real story?
IRENA: I have no peace. No peace.
His melancholy, his dissatisfaction, the pressure he put on himself...
... they're part of what made his "poor, simple, lucky little films"...
... as he'd call them, so great.
KUROSAWA [IN JAPANESE]:
[DOGS BARKING]
NARRATOR: He was able to speak from a place of darkness during a dark time...
... to give presence to loss and oblivion.
If Val Lewton had been a happier man, a more confident man...
... he probably wouldn't have been so drawn to the darkness...
... the shadow world.
And he wouldn't have wanted to take us with him.
[TRAIN WHISTLE BLOWING IN THE DISTANCE]
[FOOTSTEPS]