7.6 Module Summary

 7.6 Module Summary

Whit threatens Kathie

RECAP

In this module we considered a penultimate noir, Out of the Past. Complete with a man with no future and a "woman with a past" the film stands as evidence of peak noir as well as RKO signature style developed by Producer Val Lewton, executed by director Jacques Tournier.

There are multiple reasons why Out of the Past  is such an exemplary work, and in part has to do with how faithfully and inventively it adheres to the form, where themes of betrayal, corruption and fatalism are interwoven and entangled together in a perplexing and convoluted plot. 

Unlike most noirs, however, much of the drama is played out not in the typical confined corners of a shadowy city, but in broad daylight and natural settings – in this case, the sundrenched backdrops of Lake Tahoe and Puerto Vallarta. Throughout, cinematographer, Nicholas Musuraca –who also filmed Tourneur’s Cat People  (1942) – utilises stark imagery, contrasting the dark scenes of murder and treachery with stunning compositions of rural, wooded retreats.

Structured as a present-tense narrative with an extended flashback sequence, the film opens with world-weary ex-detective, Jeff Bailey (Robert Mitchum), hiding out in an idyllic small town, where he works at a gas station. His cover is soon blown however, as Joe Stephanos (Paul Valentine), a henchman for ‘big operator’ Whit Sterling (Kirk Douglas), orders Jeff to meet with the gangster. Forced to reveal his checkered past to his wholesome girlfriend Ann (Virginia Huston), Jeff tells her about his connection with Whit. As we soon learn, Jeff has good reason to hide. Whit had asked Jeff to find his runaway mistress, Kathie Moffat (Jane Greer), who shot him and fled to Mexico with $40,000 of his money. However, the bullets failed to kill Whit, and now he wants her back. Not because he wants to kill her, though: “I just want her back,” he tells Bailey. “When you see her, you’ll understand better.” When Jeff eventually tracks down Kathie in Acapulco – before deliberately walking into a trap set for him by one of screen history’s most fatal femmes – it is not long before he is falling for her charms. When she passionately assures him that she never stole the money, he responds with a laconic “baby, I don’t care.” And right then, he does not care – he is in too deep to worry about anything other than being with her. Before long, the erstwhile investigator is betrayed by the duplicitous dame – when, without warning, she flees. All of this takes place in the opening 40 minutes. The rest of the film is set in the present and includes two other storylines which all culminate in a violent finale, where in a series of dizzying double-crosses, Jeff attempts to stay one step ahead of Kathie and Whit, who have now teamed up against him.

-  Amy Simmons, Senses of Cinema (Link does not work)

To demonstrate your learning, you completed the following activities and assessments: 

1.Read  "Trapped by Oneself in Jacques Tournieur's Out of the Past" from
   Robert Pippin's Fatalism in American Film Noir  and all module content

2. Watch Out of the Past and clips

3. Contribute to  Mildred Pierce  Discussion

RESOURCES

"Death Meets Me Fast: Val Lewton's Early Horror Films" Diabolique Magazine (Links to an external site.)
Few film producers are branded with the “auteur” label awarded to some directors, but Val Lewton’s series of horror films for RKO Pictures in the ’40s has certainly granted him that honor. A novelist, screenwriter, and producer who emigrated from Imperialist Russia to New York City as a child, Lewton made some of the finest—and certainly the bleakest—WWII-era American horror films, somber works of subtlety and isolation.

Lewton’s early films like Cat People (1942), I Walked with a Zombie (1943), The Leopard Man (1943), and The Seventh Victim (1943), often had scripts written or influenced by Lewton and concern similar themes: female protagonists tormented and pursued by both psychological and occult forces. Set adrift in a lonely world, these isolated women are not damsels in distress to be rescued by the confident male heroes of earlier (and later) horror films. Lewton’s films are ominous, subtle, and gloomily psychological, with characters in an existential crisis that I can’t help but feel was informed by the horror of war.

Lewton introduced a number of influential techniques with Cat People, including the “Lewton Bus.

Lewton and Tourneur also used shadow and suggestion in this film in lieu of showing the alleged leopard woman. This is supported by some carefully used, symbolic dialogue and knowing set pieces. 

I Walked with a Zombie is not a traditional horror film in the sense that none of the characters are really in any physical danger throughout the course of the film, yet there is a constant sense of dread, unease, and foreboding from the moment Betsy journeys to the island. She is told, “Everything good dies here, even the stars.” 

Lewton’s powerful ability to explore contradictory worlds is at the heart of this film: the irrational and the rational, European Christian beliefs and African voodoo, science and superstition, freedom and bondage. In a continuation of Cat People’s themes, I Walk with a Zombie is ultimately about a man being unable to control his wife’s sexuality; infidelity is explored from a different angle than in Cat People.

Death, as with many of Lewton’s other films, is the great escape, the only device able to liberate characters from the excruciating pain of living. The ambiguous, yet devastating ending culminates in a murder-suicide that leaves the family free of secrets, but permanently unable to resolve their complicated feelings

As with much film noir, all the characters operate within a certain moral gray area.

Where Cat People used its female protagonist to challenge the notion of European expatriates adjusting to life in America, I Walked with a Zombie quite explicitly examines race relations in America and is one of the few horror films to prominently display black actors.

Lewton abandoned the idea of the supernatural all together in his final film with director Tourneur, 1943’s The Leopard Man. Based on noir author Cornell Woolrich’s novel Black Alibi, the film is a disturbing meditation on death and is one of the earliest American films to portray a serial killer (coming the same year as Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt).

One of Lewton and Tourneur’s most difficult and interesting films, this maintains some of the themes of their best work. Sexual repression, the devastating effect of isolation, and, most of all, death, represented in the three episodic killings of local Hispanic women. Unlike later serial killer films (but similar to Hitchcock’s The Lodger), the murders are not about the madness of an individual, they are about the psychosis of an entire community. 

While Cat People began with a couple and I Walk with a Zombie moved to a family unit, The Leopard Man extends outward to a community. Guilt and responsibility do not really lie with the killer, but with everyone. Many of the deaths occur because characters simply made the wrong decisions, decisions lacking in compassion or love: for example, in a chilling early set piece, a mother is responsible for her own daughter’s death when she mocks her fear of the dark and refuses to open the front door.

Unlike the majority of later slasher movies and serial killer films, The Leopard Man focuses on the victims, providing intimate, but brief snapshots of the three women and their lives... but is a unique and interesting examination of small town murder.

Like Lewton’s earlier films, there is a clear focus on foreignness and with independent female characters. Like Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie, this is essentially a film about women trying to find their way in the world, even though it is a place of violence and horror.

Obsessed with loneliness, isolation, alienation, and a longing for death, The Seventh Victim is Lewton’s most inspired and chilling film. Falling somewhere between expressionistic horror and film noir, the dizzying narrative structure includes an array of characters, many vignette-like sequences that seem to stand on their own, and a twisting and turning plot led by an almost dream logic (LYNCH) that prevents a clear narrative with one focused protagonist...this is a horror film with noir stylings, but the horror emerges not from the physical or supernatural threat of death, but from the longing for death and the fear and hatred of life. Jacqueline somberly declares, “I’ve always wanted to die – always.”

Character, as in many of Lewton’s films, is subjective and changeable. Though at first ostensibly the film’s protagonist, Mary pales beside her sister, though her sometimes selfish, almost immoral actions provide a nice twist on the typical “good girl” detective character and romantic interest in many film noir or mystery efforts. As with many of Lewton’s other films, the male characters are weak next to their female counterparts, and often suffer from unrequited love or unsatisfied sexual desire. Seduction, however, is replaced with the longing for death and the most tense relationship is the flirtation, if it could be called that, between Jacqueline and her neighbor. Played by the haunting Elizabeth Russell, who appeared as disturbing side characters in many of Lewton’s films, is terminally ill and on the brink of death

Though there are many excellent horror set pieces throughout The Seventh Victim—including a menacing shower sequence that foreshadows Psycho and a hellish subway ride—the film’s overall sense of dread, despair, and morbidity is visceral, disturbing, and often outright shocking. This is a film that could not have been made in a major studio or enjoyed by a somewhat baffled public without the horrors of WWII as its subtext. Though he would go on to produce other films before dying of heart failure in 1951, mere months before his 47th birthday, there is a strange finality about The Seventh Victim with its preoccupation with suicide that has a power to haunt viewers long after the credits have faded.

Jacques Tourneur page at TCM (Links to an external site.)

Jacques Tourneur on Val Lewton and Cinematic Escapism, Criterion (Links to an external site.)

Jacques Tourneur Interview (Cinefantastique: Summer, 1973) (Links to an external site.)

http://vallewton.org (Link Here) 

"You Must Remember This" Podcast: Val Lewton (Link Here)

LOOKING AHEAD

Now you're ready to move on to Module 8.