The Woman in the Window

Fritz Lang's 1944 noir The Woman in the Window is in many ways a meta-noir that examines the tragic allure that draws so many doomed noir heroes into situations that are bound to end up in murder and worse. The aging professor Richard Wanley (Edward G. Robinson) is a pretty unlikely noir hero, and he seems to know it. He's settled into routine and domesticity, and even when his wife and children go away on vacation, leaving him on his own, he doesn't have anything planned beyond drinking quietly at his club, reading and smoking cigars. Naturally, he's going to be shaken out of this routine in a rather startling way, and in true noir fashion his downfall is practically preordained from the moment he sees a painting of a lovely, elegant woman in a gallery window adjacent to his club. He and his friends cheerfully discuss the woman in the painting, their infatuation with her virtually the only outlet for the sexual feelings of these thoroughly domesticated middle-aged men.

Wanley's conversation with his friends at the beginning of the film lays on the foreshadowing pretty thick, with his friends warning him that they're now too old for adventures, while Wanley insists that he has no interest in anything but going to bed early. He even tempts fate by saying that, should he encounter the beautiful woman from the portrait in the window, he'd walk right by, not even letting her sway him from his quiet, eventless night. It's of course immediately obvious what destiny has in store for Wanley, so it's no surprise when he walks outside, peering at the portrait one last time before he goes home, only to have the woman herself appear, reflected in the window. Lang telegraphs what's going to happen long before it does; even the framing and composition of the shot as Wanley looks in the window seems to be primed for the woman's inevitable appearance. Her face floats in the reflection in the glass, hovering in the blackness right next to her painted doppelganger, two alluring images superimposed. She briefly exists only as this hazy, wavering ghost image, her reality uncertain, before Lang's camera turns, with Wanley's gaze, towards the flesh-and-blood woman.

This woman, Alice Reed (Joan Bennett), leads Wanley, in total innocence, into a shadowy nightmare of murder, suspense and intrigue. The pair spends an innocent, pleasant night together, their flirtations barely edging past politeness — Wanley is married and scrupulous — when suddenly one of Alice's lovers bursts in, immediately flies into a rage, and begins strangling the shocked professor. Of course, it's the other man who ends up dead, and Wanley and Alice must dispose of the body, covering up their crime before morning comes. Lang draws out the process of cleaning up after this accidental murder, not skimping on any details, emphasizing what a difficult, physical, tense procedure it is. Every moment is loaded with the possibility of getting caught: lugging the body, wrapped in a sheet, out to the car in the rain, then driving out to the country to dump the corpse in the woods. The empty, rainy nighttime streets are eerily quiet and empty but seem loaded with danger, like a taxi dropping off a passenger just as Wanley is about to carry the body outside, or all the cops who suddenly pop out of nowhere, threatening to pull the professor over and discover his sinister cargo. One cop actually does pull him over, before Wanley has picked up the body, and sneers suspiciously at the professor's ethnic origins, in a sequence that surely must have resonated with the immigrant Lang: "Wanley, huh, what's that, Polish?" "No," Wanley replies, "it's American."


This attention to detail enhances the film's nightmarish atmosphere. Wanley is a man who's totally unprepared for this kind of intrigue, and Lang rigorously emphasizes each step of the process, as well as calling attention to all the little details of the evidence trail that Wanley leaves behind. After the murder and cover-up, the film becomes an interesting kind of forensic mystery in which the hero is the killer, watching his friend, district attorney Frank Lalor (Raymond Massey), piece together the clues and form a startlingly accurate picture of the crime. Throughout the film, Wanley's conversations with his friends, especially Lalor, keep him updated on the inexorable progress of the police, who uncover more and more evidence, all of which would point directly to Wanley if they ever got on his track. Moreover, these conversations work on a meta level to signal future plot points in an almost playful way: when his doctor prescribes Wanley medicine for nerves but warns him not to take too much, Wanley exclaims, almost excited, "poison!" It's as though he can't wait to see who will inevitably be getting poisoned via this new plot device, and neither can the audience.

This meta playfulness is carried over into the series of ironic twists that constitute the finale, with the last of these twists purportedly forced on Lang by a studio displeased with the director's original tragic ending. The studio-favored ending might seem like a cop-out if it weren't also so consonant with the film's theme of a man chasing his modest fantasies into danger and ruin. The film is a dreamlike journey through the dark side of the American city — in that respect, it would make an ideal double feature with Martin Scorsese's later After Hours — only to pull back at the last moment into safety, security, and a lack of risk. The urban environment and young women like the lovely Alice embody excitement and danger, contrasted against the stability and the safety, but also the boredom, of the nuclear family. At a key moment towards the end of the film, Wanley receives a phone call from Alice about another problem with their plans, and Lang shoots him sitting in an armchair with photos of his wife and two children prominently placed on a table beside him, reminders of everything he stands to lose, but also everything he was running away from into this dark fantasy.

The Woman in the Window is beautifully shot, bathed in shadows, with exceptional performances and witty dialogue. Robinson and Bennett make a great central couple, with Robinson playing a restrained, sophisticated man slowly being overtaken by fear, while Bennett radiates femme fatale glamour. Also notable is Dan Duryea as a sleazy blackmailer who seems to be constantly talking out of the side of his mouth. Lang shoots with precision and formal rigor, his camera constantly tracking either in or out of a scene, as though continually alternating between psychological intimacy and the forensic observation of distance. At one point, he shoots Wanley and Alice walking alongside an iron railing, the metal bars falling across their figures like prison cell doors, a familiar noir visual shorthand for a trap closing in, that's nevertheless effective nearly every time it's used. This is a potent noir that writes the subconscious psychological desires of the protagonist onto the dark, lonely city streets, suggesting that one's fondest fantasies can also be — and often are — traps. The shy, sly smile of a woman in a painting can be an invitation to adventure and romance, but also an invitation to be swallowed whole by the city's deep pools of darkness.

Mademoiselle Fifi

[This is a contribution to the Robert Wise Blogathon being hosted at Octopus Cinema from September 1-7.]

Mademoiselle Fifi is a curious bit of World War II propaganda, made at the tail end of the war and drawing none-too-subtle parallels between the then-current German occupation of France and the 1870 occupation of France during the Franco-Prussian War. It was the first film of director Robert Wise, stepping in to helm the first of producer Val Lewton's non-horror properties. After producing a string of B-movie horror classics during the early 40s, Lewton, always more ambitious and literary than his low-budget films really required, was eager to branch out into a different kind of film. Mademoiselle Fifi thus initiated the general shift away from horror that characterized Lewton's later features, in which the horror elements increasingly became incidental to the stories he was telling. This film was also the beginning of Wise's fruitful collaboration with the producer, which would also yield The Curse of the Cat People and The Body Snatcher. Moreover, this film continued Lewton's collaboration with Simone Simon, who starred in both his Cat People movies.

Mademoiselle Fifi is thus important in relation to the careers of both Lewton and Wise, but it's also interesting in its own right. For one thing, it's an especially naked piece of propaganda — its narrative, adapted from the stories of Guy de Maupassant, is set during the Franco-Prussian War but every line is clearly crafted to refer directly to the situation of the occupation and the Resistance in 1940s France. It's blunt and forceful in delivering its messages, as was increasingly the case with Lewton, who often presented his rhetorical points with hammering zeal. Simon plays Elizabeth, a proud laundress with a patriotic love of her country and a corresponding hatred for the invading Prussians. She is being forced out of a town because she refuses to eat with the soldiers, refuses to do anything for them, because she heckles and throws things at them in the streets. She winds up in a coach full of rich snobs, initially gaining only the trust and companionship of the leftist political activist Cornudet (John Emery). Of course, in the fashion of a true fairy tale (or a moralist fable) it winds up being "the little laundress" who's able to teach the other passengers about dignity and compassion, generously sharing her food with the starving rich folks even after they've openly insulted her.

This kindness is repaid by the other passengers with contempt and betrayal. The carriage is detained along its route by the Prussian officer Von Eyrick (Kurt Kreuger), who the other Prussians have dubbed "Mademoiselle Fifi" because of his fey, bitchy manner. This officer with the feminine nickname is cruel and unyielding, and will not let the carriage pass until the proud Elizabeth has bent to his will by agreeing to have dinner with him. The other passengers, though initially in solidarity, eventually decide that their business interests are more important than this girl's patriotic idealism, and all but force her to give in. The film's preachy sermonizing would be deadening were it not for the performance of Simon at its core. The character of Elizabeth, this good, noble, saintly young girl who's implicitly compared to Joan of Arc in the film's opening minutes, would be insufferable and unbelievable if played by anyone but Simon, who radiates such sweetness and warmth and innocence with every smile. Her gentle demeanor makes her pious patriotism seem genuine rather than smug — and makes her eventual suffering and betrayal all the more heartbreaking.


Though the film is far from nuanced in its political content, it's nevertheless fascinating for the way it examines the shifting double standards and hypocrisies of the bourgeois. The coach's rich passengers snub Elizabeth and make snide remarks at her expense until they discover that she has food, at which point they begin thawing and making expansive remarks about "brotherhood," as though suddenly they are all the same. This camaraderie only lasts, however, until the girl inconveniences them, and then suddenly they are cavalier about her honor. There is a real undercurrent of sexual snobbery in these people, who seem to assume that any girl of a lower class is promiscuous and easy, with no real honor worth preserving. Thus they feel no guilt or shame in essentially offering up their young companion to the Prussian officer when he demands she have dinner with him. While Elizabeth is upstairs with the officer, below they are celebrating, getting drunk on champagne, laughing at what they assume must be going on upstairs, happy that they'll finally be able to move on in the morning.

Wise cuts purposefully between the dinner upstairs and the dinner downstairs, contrasting Elizabeth's quiet suffering with the reactions of the bourgeois revelers below. Von Eyrick forces her to sing at one point, and the diners downstairs take this as an indication of the charming dinner the couple are having. But when Wise cuts upstairs to Elizabeth, she is in tears as she sings, absolutely ashamed of herself, only going through with it because she has been convinced that it's for the greater good. Later on, when the couple upstairs fall silent, the bourgeois downstairs listen intently, looking at each other knowingly, implying that the officer and the girl are having sex now. But in the officer's chambers, Von Eyrick simply humiliates Elizabeth, pulling her close for a kiss and then blowing smoke in her face instead, then forcing her into his lap only to reject her offhand. He wants only to humiliate her. (And, indeed, it's here that his character's feminine nickname takes on an interesting subtext of homosexuality and misogyny.)

In scenes like this, Lewton's hand is apparent: the producer was frequently interested in issues of class and sexuality, in the hypocrisy and moral censoriousness of those who consider themselves superior to others, and especially in the treatment of women. This theme played out as a consideration of the eroticization and fear of the foreigner in Cat People, and here shows itself in the way these elites treat a poor girl who they seem to consider simultaneously naive and debased. The film is also distinctively Lewtonian in its atmosphere, its foggy nighttime streets, lit by gaslight, and its denouement with Elizabeth darting through this shadowy emptiness, hiding and fleeing. The film is marred by its performances, which besides Simon's incandescent innocence and Kreuger's polished Aryan evil, range from utterly forgettable to theatrically overwrought. Even so, despite the overbearing political parallels and a certain period stiffness in the adaptation, Mademoiselle Fifi is an interesting work in the Lewton/Wise oeuvre, a chance to see Lewton's unique sensibility separate from the horror premises with which he usually worked.

Gaslight

George Cukor's Gaslight is a claustrophobic Gothic suspense piece, a haunting psychological thriller about marital control and manipulation. The beautiful young Paula Alquist (Ingrid Bergman) is devastated by the grisly murder of her aunt Alice, a famous opera singer who had raised Paula from birth. Shocked and wounded, Paula leaves behind the London house where she grew up and goes away to study music like her aunt. She soon enough finds happiness in the arms of the charming pianist Gregory Anton (Charles Boyer), and the couple are married and return to the home where Alice was murdered. Paula is convinced that with her new husband she can finally forget the horrors of the past and create a new life there for them. However, once they arrive, Gregory's demeanor changes almost instantly. He begins assuming tighter and tighter control over Paula's life, forbidding her from having any visitors or going out and, through an accumulation of small incidents and details, slowly convinces her that she is going mad.

The film places its audience in a situation analogous to Paula's, trapped and tortured and manipulated by the overbearing Gregory. His vice-like grip on her mind is infuriating, and the film is frustrating to watch — a measure of how effective it is in conveying the cruel manipulations of its villain. Boyer is terrifying and sinister, with his rigid formality occasionally breaking down, revealing flashes of the monster beneath his cultivated façade. He projects quite a lot through the simple narrowing and widening of his heavy-lidded eyes, which slim down into thin slits and then suddenly open into an intense, fiery glare. It's a nasty, finely tuned performance, but it's certainly not much fun to see him reducing the noble, lovely Bergman into a cowering, stammering, confused mess, unsure of her own mind, half-convinced that she's losing her sanity.

Of course, it is never in doubt for the audience what's really going on: Gregory is the one who murdered Alice, and he's now manipulating the dead woman's niece for some obscure purpose of his own. His guilt is all but confirmed by the way he reacts, early on, to the discovery of a letter sent to Alice just two days before her death. It's an obvious cue, and the audience instantly knows what Paula will take the entire movie to discover: this man is a purely evil murderer. As a result, Gaslight is a form of highly refined cinematic torture, watching the disintegration of this lovely woman's mind and all the while knowing exactly what's really happening. The suspense in the film arises not from any mystery about what's going on, but from the simple, stomach-churning tension of the situation, as well as the unspoken questions bubbling just beneath the surface at every moment: when will Paula wake up? When will she realize what's going on? Cukor toys with this release, and there's a great scene where Paula, finally fed up with her husband's iron fist, devises a minor revolt by resolving to go out for a party. Bergman's sly, proud smile at herself in a mirror, dressed in a lavish white gown, is a reward for the audience and herself for enduring this torture.

This victory is short-lived, however, and ultimately the film's most frustrating quality is that it doesn't allow Paula to solve her predicament herself. She remains, throughout almost the whole film, the helpless, weak, easily controlled woman she seems to be right from the start. It takes the deus ex machina intrusion of a knight in shining armor, the Scotland Yard assistant inspector Brian Cameron (Joseph Cotten), to finally shake Paula out of her stupor. Cameron is awkwardly inserted into the plot, simply appearing at intervals spying outside the couple's home, led on only by vague intuition. His role in the film denies the audience the satisfaction of a more feminist resolution: Paula fighting back for herself, redeeming herself. The film subjects Paula to such extremes of suffering at the hands of a man that even the suggestion of a newly blossoming romance between Paula and Cameron at the denouement is somewhat distasteful — no sooner is she free of her murderous, monstrous husband than she seems to be gravitating towards a new coupling to replace her destructive marriage. Cameron's presence in the film succinctly states the limitations of classical Hollywood: even in a film about the horrors of romance, the film can't manage to present a more compelling solution than simply a better romance.


Still, despite Cameron's part in triggering Paula's belated recovery of her identity and strength, the ending does provide a stunning and deeply satisfying showdown between Paula and her tormentor. Before he's hauled off by the police at the end, Gregory is displayed to Paula trussed up and tied to a chair, their positions finally reversed, with Gregory at last helpless before his wife. True to form, he tries to manipulate her into freeing him, but discovers that he has lost his hold on her. In a marvelous scene, Paula taunts and cajoles him, bitterly mocking him, teasing him with the possibility of freedom before turning him over to the police. The film is a barbed satire of society's contempt for women, and particularly the tendency to reject their concerns, to label them mad, to threaten them with the asylum. Paula's final opportunity to turn the tables on her husband is thus especially satisfying in that she's able to turn his words back on him, to take the words that he used to control her and turn them to her own purposes. It's a complex and potent scene, and Bergman's performance, sensitive and multi-layered throughout the film, is here extraordinary, a masterful display of passion and long-delayed rage spilling over.

Cukor lavishes attention on the film's atmosphere and setting, perfectly capturing a vision of period London: flickering gaslight lamps, foggy gray streets with rain-streaked stone walks, velvety shadows draped over every surface. In this respect, Bergman's face is treated as a surface as well, brushed with the warm glow of the lamps, the shadows tracing along the rounded edges of her cheek bones, the light playing within the depths of her wet, expressive eyes. Cukor frequently highlights his main actress in closeups, often lingering on nearly silent shots of her simply looking around. The direction is finely attuned to the nuances of her performance, the movement of her eyes, the way she holds her face, the subtle touches with which she fleshes out her character and makes her suffering palpable. Even when the focus isn't on Bergman, nearly every frame of the film is sumptuous and enveloping, a study in the oppressive, womb-like atmosphere of this dark, shadowy house.

Cukor's attention to detail, coupled with the great performances of the two leads, makes it easier to overlook the film's shortcomings, but it's undeniable that the script is a silly and contrived piece of work. With the exception of the confrontation between Paula and Gregory, the final act dissipates the film's eerie atmosphere into banality, particularly once Gregory's motivations for what he's done become known. On the plus side, the airless claustrophobia of the plot is relieved slightly by the sporadic presence of a trio of fine character actresses in bit parts: the house's near-deaf cook (Barbara Everest), the couple's gossipy, murder mystery-loving neighbor (Dame May Whitty) and the tart, snippy young maid (Angela Lansbury in her first role; though why Gregory would show her the least bit of amorous attention with Ingrid Bergman right upstairs is one of the film's most insoluble mysteries). Gaslight is at times frustrating and doesn't go far enough in exploring its ideas about marriage and gendered power struggles, but it's nevertheless a dark, interesting chamber thriller.

Bluebeard

In Edgar G. Ulmer's Bluebeard, the Poverty Row auteur crafted a strange, eerie piece of extreme low-budget horror, centered around the titular murderer, an artist who strangles his models to death after painting them, throwing their corpses into the Seine River. Gaston Morrell (John Carradine) is both a painter and a puppet artist, a performer who puts on elaborate stagings of the tale of Faust with his puppets. His paintings are more of a sinister and deadly hobby, as well as a source of income — his Mephistophelian business manager (Ludwig Stössel) sells the resulting paintings at a great profit. However, Morrell is moved to give up painting — and thus also his sinister sideline — by the appearance in his life of the lovely Lucille (Jean Parker), a dress designer who agrees to create new costumes for Morrell's puppets.

There is little mystery or true horror in this tale, as Ulmer, in his characteristically blunt way, establishes early on that Morrell is without a doubt the killer. He's shown murdering his assistant, Renee (Sonia Sorel), when the girl begins to wonder what has happened to all the women for whom Morrell would leave her for days or weeks at a time. The film is sexually frank for its time, and it is heavily implied that Morrell has been going to bed with his models in addition to simply painting and killing them. One wonders at times if anyone from the censorship boards ever even watched this film, particularly in the early scene where the police fish a woman's corpse out of the Seine and the wet dress clinging to her body reveals the bare flesh beneath — a haunting scene that confirms the sexual component of Morrell's murders.

Morrell is obsessed with ideas about sexuality, about purity and sin. As he reveals in the film's talky conclusion, his murderous rage was first triggered by a woman who he painted while he was helping her recover from an illness — inspired by the purity and beauty he saw in her eyes, he painted her as a saint with a glowing halo on her head. After her recovery, however, he was horrified to learn that she was a prostitute, a crude and impure woman, nothing like the unblemished portrait he'd made of her. The film makes the dichotomy between the Madonna and the whore central to its theme: Morrell goes mad because he cannot handle having his pristine images soiled by the complexities of reality. Preferring art to life, he loses control of himself and becomes a relentless killer. The film also deals with prostitution and vice in a comedic scene in which a police inspector (Nils Asther) interrogates a woman who had served as an artist's model but had, it seems, lately turned to other work. The script dances cleverly around the subject of that "other" occupation, but it's apparent that the whole conversation between the policeman and the girl is about sex, about prostitution. It's funny principally because the girl herself is unperturbed. She's openly flirtatious and says just what she means; it's the inspector who's uncomfortable with the subject and keeps cutting her short, trying to turn the conversation in another direction. He's a censor, not allowing an open and honest discussion of sexuality to take place, stopping the conversation at the surface level of euphemisms.

Here and elsewhere, the film playfully mocks male insecurities about female sexuality. The women in the film are open and charming and assertive, while the men are ineffectual and timid. When Morrell speaks to Lucille, he tries to maintain a cordial coldness that simply comes off clipped and awkward. He's a vicious murderer, but he's also a fairly sad, overly naïve guy who doesn't know how to talk to girls. At one point, he comes to visit Lucille, who is with her sister Francine (Teala Loring). Francine is getting dressed, shielded behind a thin dressing screen, but she urges Morrell to step inside, not to be shy, despite Lucille's statement that her sister is "not decent." Francine's eyes peek coyly over the top of the screen, the only part of her body visible, and Ulmer playfully highlights the sexual tension of the scene by having her step out from behind the screen just at the moment that she's fastening her shirt closed.


In this way, the film is continually calling attention to sexuality and feminine allure. If it is not a mystery or a horror film, it is in its weird way a kind of creepy love story, the tale of a man who falls in love to such an extent that he is moved to give up his profession for the love of a woman. Carradine's performance is exceptional, capturing the layered qualities of this urbane killer: by turns charming and distant, kindly and terrifying, icily murderous and tortured by his deeds. His role requires him to shift fluidly from outward calm to the pop-eyed stare he focuses on his victims, a crazed expression that Ulmer accentuates with closeups. Equally compelling are Parker and Loring as the sisters who cross paths with Morrell: the bold, independent-minded Lucille as the object of his affection, and Francine in her amorphous role as a police assistant of some kind, helping with the investigation of the Bluebeard killings.

As is typical of Ulmer and his minimalist productions, the plot of Bluebeard is almost indifferently handled, with frequent jarring cuts and a generally brisk pace that hurtles from one incident to the next with little connective tissue. The film very much displays its ragged edges: Ulmer shows only that which is absolutely necessary to either the plot or the atmosphere, omitting everything else with brutal economy. The film lasts just over an hour, and hardly a minute is wasted, though at times Ulmer's tendency towards economy sabotages the dramatic tension of the story. The conclusion, in particular, feels oddly rushed and overly talky, packing dense exposition into a few quick minutes, explaining the killer's origins and motivations before the perfunctory final battle that brings the film full circle: its last shot of the buildings along the Seine mirrors exactly its first shot.

Elsewhere, however, Ulmer's Gothic visual sensibility provides plenty of striking images to distract from the minimal, fractured narrative. The sewers beneath Morrell's house, where he dumps the bodies of his victims, are shadowy and gray, and Ulmer's camera follows black cloaked figures creeping through the darkness on sinister errands. In another scene, Morrell stares at the shadows of his puppets reflected on the wall in front of him, suspended in the air, awaiting his control, looking like a line of tiny hanging victims above his head. The film's plot might be simple, and its aesthetics sometimes crude and rough, but it is at the same time a stylish, intelligent treatment of sexuality and violence.

The Curse of the Cat People

Few film titles could be more misleading than The Curse of the Cat People, a gentle, meditative film about a little girl and her imaginary friend. Conceived as just another low-budget horror film for producer Val Lewton, a sequel to his wildly successful first film, Cat People, Lewton instead created a deeply personal ode to childhood innocence and the confusion and loneliness of children in an adult world they don't understand. Young Amy (Ann Carter) is the daughter of the heroes of Cat People, Oliver and Alice (Kent Smith and Jane Randolph, both reprising their roles from the first film), now happily married following the tragic events of the earlier film. Despite this tangible connection to the past, the tone of this sequel is far removed from the moody, shadowy supernatural horror of Cat People.

Instead, the film is about the inner fantasy world of a lonely young child. Amy is an isolated and distant girl, easily distracted from games with the other children, often content to run off by herself to make friends with a butterfly instead. She has an active imagination and a free spirit, but her increasing encapsulation in her own dream world worries her father Oliver, who has already seen the damage that vivid fantasies can do to one's psyche. In fact, Amy's problems are only compounded by Oliver, who, wounded by his past, resorts to simply berating and punishing his daughter when he judges that her fantasies have gone too far. He all but severs the lines of communication between them, explicitly telling her that he doesn't want to hear anything about her fantasies or about her isolation from the other children at school. He doesn't realize it, but he's cutting her off, preventing her from being able to talk to him, pushing her further away into a dream world where she can find a more loving and accepting friend who doesn't yell at her or judge her.


She soon finds this friend in the form of Irena (Simone Simon), the deadly cat woman from the first film, Oliver's deceased first wife. But even though Simon returns to play this vision of Irena — possibly a ghost or simply a figment of the girl's imagination — she is not at all the feral, intimidating creature who stalked through Cat People. Dressed in beautiful, glamorous gowns, shimmering in the icy winter glow of the family's backyard, Irena looks like a princess from a Disney musical, a young girl's fantasy playmate who appears whenever she calls. With her lilting foreign voice and slightly off-kilter beauty, Simon proves as potent in this film as she was with her more sinister role in its predecessor. She is Amy's sweet, kind friend, a source of comfort when the young girl has to cope with the meanness and fickleness of children at school or the inconsistent messages and haphazard parenting she faces at home. Amy is especially confused to find that her parents' discomfort with her fertile imagination doesn't extend to superstitions like wishing on her birthday candles, which they encourage.

Indeed, Amy finds comfort and support from everywhere but her home, where her well-meaning parents can't seem to figure out whether there's anything wrong with the girl or if she's just an ordinary child. Amy is especially drawn to the kind but eccentric old Mrs. Farren (Julia Dean) who lives in a creepy, decrepit mansion around the corner. This old lady gives the girl a "wishing ring" (the ring that first summons Irena) and tells her ghost stories like the legend of the Headless Horseman. Lewton himself grew up not far from Sleepy Hollow, and the mingled fascination and terror that Amy feels upon hearing this story must have been drawn from Lewton's own childhood. Mrs. Farren is interesting to Amy, but the young girl hardly understands what's going on in the house, with a scowling, bitter woman (the cat-like Elizabeth Russell, channeling Simon's creepiness from Cat People) lurking around in the shadows. She is Mrs. Farren's daughter Barbara, but the addled old lady believes her daughter died as a child, calling Barbara a liar and treating her with undisguised contempt. One of the film's points is that all of this goes over the head of Amy, who doesn't understand the complex and ugly adult emotions bubbling over in this house, which she loves so much for its ornate decorations and the theatrical ghost stories of Mrs. Farren.


Although The Curse of the Cat People is hardly a horror story, the shadowy atmosphere and visual beauty for which Lewton's productions have become known is quite possibly at its peak. The film had two directors, both directing features for the first time: Gunther von Fritsch, who was fired for progressing too slowly, and editor Robert Wise, who stepped in to take his place and complete the picture halfway through. The film is seamless, however, bolstering the impression that it was Lewton, not his directors, who was the driving creative force on the RKO horror films he produced. The visual style is clean and sumptuous, using shadows to carve out areas of light and shade in the family's back yard, where Irena hovers, glowing radiantly, beneath the black and white grids caused by sunlight filtering through the leaves above. There is a subtle eerie aura to the film, a suggestion of something creepy beneath its sunny suburban surface, but the film's only real hint of the supernatural is in the way Irena is able to dim the light in the backyard or put on a show of sparkling crystalline patterns for Amy. It soon becomes apparent that the real danger lies not with a ghostly presence come back to haunt the living, but with the incomprehensible problems and emotions of the adult world, too large and confusing for a young mind to cope with or understand.

This is a lovely, haunting film, as disturbing in its way as any of Lewton's more conventional horror productions. There is no true horror here, only the misunderstandings between generations that might, if unchecked, grow into potentially tragic alienation. The film's horror lies in the fear that one doesn't understand one's own child, or else in the amplified fears of childhood, where the sound of a speeding truck might be transformed into the galloping hooves of the Headless Horseman's mount. In this child's eye world, ghost stories that evoked delight and mystery by day jolt the child awake, sweating and terrified, by night, comforted only by the presence of a sweet, angelic friend, hovering at the foot of the bed and whispering lullabies into the chilled night air.

To Have and Have Not

If Howard Hawks' low-key WWII thriller To Have and Have Not seems a bit too much like Casablanca for comfort, the film goes a long way towards making up for its lack of originality in the accumulation of small details and the fine central performances that Hawks brings to the film. Obviously contrived as an attempt to restage Bogie's iconic turn as Rick, this "sequel" once again sets down Humphrey Bogart in the middle of contested wartime Martinique, this time as the fisherman-for-hire Harry Morgan, doing his best to stay out of the increasing strife between Vichy sympathizers and the "Free French." I'd normally summarize some more of the plot here, but Hawks seems largely unconcerned with it, so I'll just go ahead and admit that so was I. There's something about a rebel (Walter Szurovy) who needs to be ferried into Martinique, and for some reason his on-island allies decide that Morgan is just the man for the job. There's a daring escape from a Gestapo patrol boat, and an inquisitive and leering Gestapo captain (Dan Seymour) who's putting the screws to Morgan to find out what he knows.

With all this at stake, both for Morgan and Martinique as a whole, you'd never know it from the film's meandering, laidback pace — despite the trappings, this isn't really a suspense film, or a spy film, or a wartime thriller. It's a showcase for Bogie, and especially for his sizzling onscreen romance with first-time actress Lauren Bacall, sauntering onto the scene as the young girl on the run from her past and adrift on her own. Bacall is the film's real star, delivering a stunner of a performance that threatens to make even Bogart recede into the woodwork altogether. As soon as she slithers into Bogart's room for the first time, uninvited and interrupting a frantic conversation concerning the Resistance fighters, she takes over the film with her sheer presence. She just wants a light, but she might as well have said, "Hey, forget all that spy stuff, look over here." Even the way she asks Bogie for a match, her mouth twitching suggestively and her hips nestling against his doorframe, telegraphs her raw intensity and sensuality. Her chiseled marble face, already looking wise beyond her years, is a fount of subtle emotion, and she invests her cipher of a character with far more depth and complexity than the writing deserves. Just looking at her, the way she carries herself and the way she speaks and the way her eyes move, is to know something of her story and what she's like. Her sidelong glances, cast back over her shoulder, freighted with hidden meanings, carry a static charge that can't help but energize anybody hit with that blazing stare.

Bacall manages to carry her character, "Slim" (a typical Hawks nickname), through even the script's unusual excess of misogynistic tripe, which seems a bit much even for a Hawks film. It's not enough that the film is populated with one "silly dame," it has to add a second (Dolores Moran as the frail wife of the French Resistance fighter), and has both of them confess to Bogie that they're "making a fool" of themselves in front of him. These women both seem eager to apologize to this man they hardly know, and the film's weaker moments require a real suspension of disbelief to see the rock-hard Bacall making gestures of contrite acquiescence towards her leading man. It's slightly more bearable when it's Moran in this role, playing a one-note weak woman who faints at the slightest provocation despite her initially hard aura. The whole second woman thing is silly to begin with, so much so that even the two leads seem to realize it, and consequently Bogie downplays his reaction to this interloper even as Bacall downplays her jealousy. The result adds some pleasant friction to these scenes, and even comes close to redeeming the contrivance altogether.

Elsewhere, there's the usual undercurrent of Hawksian machismo, a sense that women shouldn't get in the way of men's stuff, and that the men who allow such intrusions are somehow cowardly and weakened by it. The script requires Bogart, who's clearly outmatched by the fiery Bacall, to nevertheless get the best of her, seeing right through her and condescending to her at every turn. Only Bacall's innate toughness allows her character to come through it unscathed, and as a result it's hard to take Bogart's bluster too seriously in relation to her. Instead of two equals sparring, it seems more like Bogart's putting up a masculine front in an attempt to save face. But it's a vain effort, and once he finally gives in to Bacall's charms, the game is lost. After one passionate clench, she tells him to go shave and gives him a playful slap on the cheek, a bit of S&M foreplay that mirrors an earlier scene where the Gestapo slapped around the completely unfazed Bacall as Bogart watched.

The film also offers up one other uncontested pleasure on the acting front, and that's the surprisingly nuanced turn from Walter Brennan as the hopeless old drunk Eddie. Brennan played the grizzled old coot, the comic relief sidekick, in countless movies, practically making a career out of it, but this performance is something of a revelation for anyone tempted to dismiss him as limited in range. Eddie's character is well within Brennan's comfort zone, a washed-up drunk who was, Morgan says, once a great fisherman, but is now just about useless. Brennan infuses this character with a ragged charm, a rambling, discursive wit, and an incredible amount of pathos. He's a man who knows he's used up, who clings to his last loyal friend with a puppy-like dedication and obedience. And yet he's also a soulful, complicated character, displaying flashes of a shrewdness that must be a carryover from his youth, and a sense of humor that's all his own. His frequently repeated joke, "was you ever bit by a dead bee?" coaxes some subtle repartee out of Bacall, who distinguishes herself by playing along with the old man instead of just dismissing him like everyone else does. In the two brief exchanges they have together, which mirror each other towards the start and end of the film, Brennan and Bacall prove why they're the film's true linchpins, as Bogart just stands off to the side and smirks.

Hawks is wise to let these fine actors just do their thing, and he's also wise to keep the focus as far off the plot as possible — the action happens in fits and starts only, with long scenes of moody, atmospheric stasis in between. Especially characteristic of Hawks are the many scenes that take place clustered around the piano in the local hotel. It's here that Bacall delivers a trio of sultry, low-voiced torch numbers, and where the local pianist (Hoagy Carmichael) croons out a handful of smarmy ballads. Hawks loves this kind of scene, with musicians and audience alike gathered around the piano, as many people crammed into the frame as possible, fostering a sense of warmth and camaraderie that is very dear to Hawks' heart. Variations on this scene recur frequently in his films, most notably in Only Angels Have Wings, though none of the scenes here have the poignancy, urgency, or depth that the similar scene possessed in that film, where the gathering at the piano took the metaphorical place of a drunken wake for a dead friend. Here, these scenes are just atmosphere, helping to infuse the film with a distinctively Hawksian character but not adding up to much otherwise. The same can't be said, fortunately, about a similarly crowded scene around the bedside of a man with a gunshot wound as Bogart attempts to remove the bullet. Hawks orchestrates this scene with surgical precision, culminating in a shot where Bacall stands in the foreground, holding a bottle of chloroform and fanning away the fumes, as across the prone body of the patient sits Bogart with scalpel in hand, two assistants holding a lantern and a water basin over his shoulders. This careful clustering also creates that tight, cluttered image that Hawks loves so much, though here the deliberate arrangement of the figures and the tensions that all focus on a single point as small as a bullet, create a scene of lasting power.

Despite its limitations, this is a sharp, smart film from Hawks, one that completely dispenses with its ostensible subject in order to squeeze in as much of the good stuff (Bacall!) as possible. Hawks presumably recognized the film for what it was, a somewhat cynical remake of a film that had, after all, only been out two years earlier with the same actor in the lead. And instead of taking it seriously, he decided to take to the margins and just have fun with it, letting Bacall's saunter and Brennan's wit take over the film. This holds true even down to the final shot, in which the central trio walk off into the foggy night together towards unknown adventures. Bacall executes her exit with as much aplomb as her entrance, slithering offscreen with a playful sway to her hips and a smile on her face, as Brennan agreeably bops his shoulders in sympathy. In keeping with the film's wry spirit, this trio doesn't just walk off into the fog; they dance off.