I'm glad I never got around to picking up the Val Lewton box set until recently as it's now bundled with a bonus disc: THE MAN IN THE SHADOWS to compliment the main set's SHADOWS IN THE DARK documentary. I haven't gotten to either as I am of course delving into the features first.

I revisited CAT PEOPLE and thoroughly enjoyed it. I hadn't seen the trailer before and I was intrigued that the shot of the cat coming down the stairs was more overtly feline than the ambiguous shadow in feature. Also, there was another feline shadow shot in the trailer (from the office scene) that was more clearly defined than in the feature. I spot checked the commentary on the former scene to see if it came up and it was alleged that Tourneur used his fist to create the shadow which makes sense if he's trying to maintain the mystery of the central conceit. If he did'nt have a cat on-set to create the shadow is it possible the two shots were especially created for the trailer? I wonder if the point is addressed in any of the supplements at some point but I'm too intrigued to wait until I've re-watched all the movies.

Victor.

I home-recorded the docu, and I'm a little pissed they didn't wait to release everything together. They very well might have filmed those shots expressly for the trailer. I'm become kind of a trailer junkie, since so many interesting things that don't show up or were never intended to show up in the finished film (that big step into frame Peter Jackson's KONG made in that trailer?) turn up in them.

Nathan Lee highlighted this week's Village Voice film section with this review of the Lewton documentary, connecting it with director Kent Jones' previous critical defense of John Carpenter's films.

Lee's connection between Lewton and Carpenter is tenuous at best:

Strange, I was just thinking the other day about how Escape From New York is soooo Lewtonesque. :P

Also amusing is the reason why Carpenter isn't in the doc:

Yeah, John. Bedlam wouldn't have been such a cheat if they had just shown the monster. <_<

Despite such critical exertions, the box set and the documentary are much recommended by me. Scorsese narrates and Elias Koteas provides the voice of Val Lewton. I think Lewton is about as good as it gets with classic horror. Anyone who loves cinema should give his films a shot.

Some people seem to be under the impression that you have to buy the new Lewton box set to get THE MAN IN THE SHADOWS.

Not so: the documentary is also available separately. Credit to Warners for not double-dipping the fans.

The shadow was crudely animated, in my opinion. It was always nearly invisible in the old C&C TV prints, and I suspect it's more visible in the home video transfers of the last 10 years or so (since the Criterion and Turner laserdiscs) than either Lewton or Tourneur would have wished. One could formerly watch the movie thinking they might have seen some movement in the shadows, but now there is no doubt.

Thanks, Julian. I'll stick with my home-made copy for now. And I'll admit that, as strange and wonderful as the movie is, I want to slap that kid yeling "My friend! My friend!" in THE CURSE OF THE CAT PEOPLE.

Quoting Tim Lucas:

Do you mean the staircase shadow and do you mean it was a bad animation technique (e.g. stop motion) or it was a bad or unsatisfying way of trying to depict something that should be either an erect woman walking down the steps or indeed a prowling cat (as I believe it fails to convince on that level).

In the feature, the shadow could very well be Tourneur's fist as opined in the commentary however my initial concern was that the trailer showed a full-length shot originated by Tourneur and that the shot was inadvertently neutered by frame damage/loss in the feature. If that were the case, it'd be a completely different kettle of fish. Just trimming the trailer shot wouldn't be satisfactory so it was either filmed especially for the trailer or Tourneur shot several versions for coverage. Closer examination suggests the film version is completely different and not just the tail end of this trailer shot (how 'bout them cat allusions?) Of course, I think he was trying to be deliberately vague but the shot fails as I mentioned above but doesn't completely undermine the suspense.

Victor

I may have posted some of these quotes in a Lewton thread in the past, so if this is old news to you, I'm sorry. But when I was researching the 42nd Street theaters a few years ago, I was fascinated by the critical reactions to Lewton's horror films, which all opened in New York at the Rialto Theater on 42nd Street and 7th Avenue, in Times Square.

Here's an excerpt from a section on Lewton's films and the Rialto Theater I wrote as part of a larger manuscript:


Over at RKO Pictures, producer Val Lewton specialized in a series of literate, atmospheric horror films that had a great influence on the film noir style associated with crime dramas later in the 1940s. All ten of these films premiered in New York at the Rialto, beginning with Cat People on December 6, 1942 and ending with Bedlam on April 19, 1946. Don Miller, writing in B Movies (Curtis Books, 1973), offers a vivid recollection of the regular Rialto audience’s reaction in his account of seeing Cat People:

“...it was with a sense of elation that one sat in the back row of the Rialto and watched the sequence of Jane Randolph walking through Central Park at night...something...behind...her...and the concerted scream of the packed house when a bus pulls alongside the girl with a hiss of airbrakes. An optical illusion perhaps, but it seemed that the entire theater audience rose and fell in one rippling wave of fear, startled by Lewton’s use of sudden sound after silence. These were not impressionable patrons either, but hardened horror addicts who were more likely to show scorn and disdain than register any other reaction.”

Reviews in The New York Times of two Lewton films singled out the Rialto. When The Ghost Ship opened on Christmas Day, 1943, Bosley Crowther noted in his New York Times review, “The boys are tough at the Rialto. No wreaths-and-holly Christmas-stuff for them. They believe in celebrating the season in a cold sweat, doused with buckets of blood, and so, cheerlessly, they are offering ‘The Ghost Ship’ as their holiday film--a nice little package of morbidity all wrapped around in gloom.” In Thomas M. Pryor’s review of I Walked with a Zombie (April 22, 1943), he pointed out that the film “opened yesterday to a packed house at the Rialto and, at one point, drew a horrified scream from a woman patron.” In yet another variation of the perennial campaign to blame movies for the problems of youth, Pryor denounced the movie and closed his review by asking, “If the Hays office feels it has a duty to protect the morals of movie-goers by protesting the use of such expressions as ‘hell’ and ‘damn’ in purposeful dramas like ‘In Which We Serve’ and ‘We Are the Marines,’ then how much more important is its duty to safeguard the youth of the land from the sort of stuff and nonsense that their minds will absorb from viewing ‘I Walked With a Zombie’???”

James Agee, writing in The Nation, had a different take and recognized the unique experience of seeing a Lewton movie at the Rialto and, echoing Otis Ferguson, acknowledged the special qualities of the audience in his review of Lewton’s Curse of the Cat People (April 1, 1944):

“The people with whom I saw the film--a regular Times Square horror audience--were sharply on to its faults and virtues....And when the picture ended and it was clear beyond further suspense that anyone who had come to see a picture about curses and were-cats should have stayed away, they clearly did not feel sold-out; for an hour they had been captivated by the poetry and danger of childhood, and they showed it in their thorough applause.
“That is, I grant, a specialized audience, unobstreperous, poor, metropolitan, and deeply experienced. The West Times Square audience is probably, for that matter, the finest movie audience in the country....As long as such an audience exists, no one in Hollywood has a right to use the stupidity of the public for an alibi; and I suspect that a few more films as decent and human as this one would indicate that there is a very large and widely distributed audience indeed for good films.”