7.5 Modified Expressionism: The Influence of Val Lewton
7.5 Modified Expressionism: The Influence of Val Lewton
READ THIS MATERIAL AFTER VIEWING OUT OF THE PAST
Robert Porfirio has suggested that 'RKO developed the quintessential style of the 1940s due to a unique synthesizing of the expressionistic [sic] style of (Orson) Welles and the moody, Gothic atmosphere of Lewton' (in Sliver and Ward, 1980, p. 40). Lewton's . . . influence on RKO's development of film noir in nowhere better demonstrated than in the seminal Out of the Past (UK title: Build My Gallows High, 1947), directed by Jacques Tourneur. Although clearly drawing on the hard-boiled tradition, the film avoids tight plotting of The Maltese Falcon or Murder, My Sweet, in favor of an episodic, novelistic expansiveness as private eye Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum) recounts, in extended flashback, his infatuation with Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer), the girlfriend of gangster Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas), whom he has been hired to bring back.
Nicholas Musuraca's cinematography has great range and subtlety, beginning with sharp evocation of the crisp, wholesome beauty of small-town America, filmed on location in the mountain resort of Bridgeport, California, a pastoral setting of lakes, rushing streams and pine forests. Out of the past is a film of locales, not interiors: a black nightclub in Harlem, Sterling's mansion at Lake Tahoe, downtown San Francisco, a remote cabin in the mountains and Acapulco where the central scenes take place.
The locales are transfused by Jeff's emotional recollections. His memories of Kathie and Acapulco are so ravishing that he is seduced by them again even as he tries to expiate their effects through his 'confession' to his sensible girlfriend Ann (Virginia Huston). Kathie is first glimpsed entering the shabby bar where Jeff has been forlornly waiting. As she comes in from near invisibility on the bright plaza in a pale dress and matching straw hat, she seems to materialize out of the brightness of itself, her silhouette framed in the entranceway before taking her place at a table near Jeff. Kathie thus emerges as if out of a dream and her delicate ethereality makes her seem both innocent and overwhelmingly desirable. She only appears to him at night when she 'walked out of the moonlight smiling,' Jeff recalls fondly as he recounts how they become lovers on the sandy beach with its delicately draped fishing nets, the bay behind picked out in shimmering moonlight by Musuraca's carefully contrastive photography. The suggestive cinematography evokes a trace-like landscape that seems to have no beginning and no end and which Jeff's voice-over reproduces: 'I don't know what we were waiting for - maybe we thought the world would end. Maybe we thought we were in a dream and would wake up with a hang-over in Niagra Falls.' LYNCH
Their affair culminates in the rain-swept lushness of his first visit to her cabin where a solitary lamp, photographed from a low angle, throws up huge shadows behind them, creating an ominous sense of foreboding that the narrator seems blind to, even in recollection. As the lamp blows over, plunging the room into darkness, the rain still raging outside and the wind blowing through the open door, the camera makes a slow, delicate tracking movement out onto the veranda before returning to the room which is now lit by moonlight, implying time has passed during which they have made love. It preserves the romanticism of Jeff's memories and deftly circumvents censorship restrictions.
This subtle suggestiveness is Tourneur's imaginative development of Lewton's legacy. Here, as in Nightfall (1957), Tourneur's priority is to integrate all the scenes into an atmospheric whole. As Naremore argues, Out of the Past significantly modifies an expressionist register, generally avoiding the distorting lenses, odd angles and deep-focus compositions that Place and Peterson argue is essential to the noir style (Naremore, 1998, p. 175). It does this in order to create, through careful tonal shadings of its black and white cinematography, a melancholy romanticism that shifts noir's axis away from the toughness of Powell's Marlowe to the desolate fatalism of Mitchum's Bailey. Mitchum's modulated baritone narration is capable of greater inflection than the dead-pan drawl of Bogart or Powell, and contributes powerfully to the mood of blighted hope in which the only 'solution' seems to be that they die together in a police roadblock that Bailey has engineered. Out of the Past is a masterpiece that many have celebrated because it has the confidence to modulate the noir style so it becomes capable of evoking a genuinely tragic pathos.
- Andrew Spicer, Film Noir pgs. 54-56
VIDEO CLIP OF NIGHTFALL (1957) Clip - "I'm Scared Stiff"
Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur at RKO
YOUTUBE description of "I'm Scared Stiff " clip- Link here.
In this second volume, renowned directors Fritz Lang, Phil Karlson and Irving Lerner are joined by Jacques Tourneur and Richard Quine in proving that lust, adultery, greed and revenge all adds up to cold, calculated murder.
Film Noir Classics II takes you on a dark journey among lowlifes and mobsters, cops and gun molls, and the dimwitted, hapless pawns who forever changed the landscape of cinema, and whose doomed paths are as disturbing today as when they were first committed to film.
"The tougher they are, the more Fun they are, tra la - grabs his gun"
Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur helped significantly shape RKO 'signature style' in films such as Cat People (1942) and I Walked With A Zombie (1943) evidenced in darkly cast shadows shaped with softer, somewhat 'romantic' lighting. Notice there is no distortion with lenses, instead realistic shapes are distorted by darkness. This evokes and transforms the Expressionist influence.
VIDEO CLIP OF STALKED, Cat People (1942)
On YouTube - Link Here
The classic atmospheric horror film about a young newlywed who is stricken by an ancient curse that turns her into a bloodthirsty panther. Starring Simone Simon and Tom Conway. Featuring stellar black and white photography. Produced by Val Lewton. Selected by the prestigious American Film Institute as one of the 400 best American films of all time. Inducted into the Library of Congress National Film Registry.
VIDEO CLIP OF I Walked with a Zombie
On YouTube - Link Here
Val Lewton's I Walked with a Zombie: Betsy takes Jessica to the Hounfour
VIDEO CLIP OF The Leopard Man (1943)
On YouTube - Link Here
The Leopard Man (1943) - Clip: Mamacita Let Me In (HD)
Director: Jacques Tourneur
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