Bedlam, Val Lewton, and James Bond

I recently picked up a copy of Isle of the Dead on DVD. I’d heard about the film, but had never seen it. It came on a “double bill” DVD with a related film, Bedlam. I’m utterly blown away. Here’s why:
1.) Both films were directed and co-written by Val Lewton (Vladimir Ivanovich Levonton). I’d heard of Lewton before, but the only films of his I’d seen were his Cat People films. I knew he was known as a maker of good but low-budget horror films.

2.) Both films starred Boris Karloff (and each featured Jason Robards, Sr., father of the actor I’m familiar with). Karloff apparently credited Lewton with rescuing him from the cycle of Universal “Frankenstein” films.

3.) Despite the fact that these films were marketed (and are still known as) “Horror” films, they’re not. They’re costume historical dramas with creepy elements. I guess the presence of Karloff helped to “sell” these as horror films, something the posters certainly encouraged (not to mention the very name “Isle of the Dead”)

4.) The writing is surprisingly good – excellent, in fact. I certainly hadn’t expected that.

5.) Both films are based on famous images. “Isle of the Dead” was based on a series of five paintings of that name done at the end of the 19th century by Swiss artist Arnold Böcklin. Apparently these were immensely popular in Europe, so that the title and image (which was used behind the title in the movie) would have been familiar to a lot of people, if not necessarily a lot of Americans.

“Bedlam” was based on a number of paintings and engravings by William Hogarth, which was quite a treat, because I’m a big fan of Hogarth. The most direct inspiration was the painting and engraving from the series The Rake’s Progress showing him in the mental asylum at St. Mary’s of Bethlehem (AKA “Bedlam”), but there are plenty of other allusions in the film.

6.) The thing which really blew me away, though, was an unexpected cultural connection in “Bedlam” Karloff’s character, the asylum keper George Sims (based on the real-life keeper of Bedlam, John Monro) is giving a party, and he has a relatively sedate inmate dressed as the Greek image of Reason. To further the rather bitter joke, Sims has had the inmate memorize and recite a speech, appartently having used more of the stick than the carrot to encoyrage him. Partway through the speech, he collapses.

It’s clear, even in this black-and-white film, that the sparsely dressed inmate is gilded. He skin unnaturally reflects the light. One of the guests comments that he heard that people “breathe through their pores”, and that if you completely coat a person in gilding like this, they get ill, and can die. (The inmate does, indeed, die before they can scour the coating off with burlap and sand and water)

The situation and the wording are so nearly identical to what was said about the gilded woman in the James Bond novel and film Goldfinger that I strongly suspect that this is ultimately where Ian Fleming got the idea., whether he saw the film himself, or was told about it by someone else. (It’s possible that both places got it from some third source, but I suspect not). Where, exactly, Lewton or his co-writers got the idea, I have no idea. It’s certainly not in anything of Hogarth’s.

The image of a gold-plated sexy lady was too irresistible to be ignored. Fleming conjured it up in the mind. Even before they filmed it, the cover of the paperback of Goldfinger carried a golden woman on the cover. When the film came out, the poster featured the woman in gold (and subsequent copies of the book used the poster as its cover). She showed up on the cover of Life magazine and elsewhere. Certainly she was more photogenic than an anemic lunatic in gold.

Of course, as has been stated many times, including by the True Master, you don’t breathe through your pores, and covering yourself in gold makeup won’t kill you. Jamie covered himself in a mixture of metal filings and liquid latex for Mythbusters, and did start to overheat, but that test always struck me as odd – nobody else covered themselves in a mixture of latex and metal filinmgs. It’s pretty clear to me that there was no latex in Goldfinger, or in Bedlam, for that matter. I suspect it was brass filings in a greasepaint base in both cases.

I suspect the “gold” thing adds to the mystiqwue. Nobody ever seems to worry about other scantily-clad people covered ion makeup dying of “skin suffocation”, like the “Statue guy” in The Draughtsman’s Contract.

I’ve got nothing to add, but I want to say that it’s always a pleasure reading your stuff, Cal. I’m sure you’re right about the origins of the gold-painted person meme.

Lewton’s movies are far differeent than what their plot outlines seem. His I Walked with a Zombie, for instance, is actally a version of Jane Eyre. It also is filled with plot surprises, and even uses a classic calypso song as part of it.

Okay, now I’m going to have to track that one down and watch it. Even though I’m not a Bronte fan.

I Walked with a Zombie is one of my all time favorite movies. Val Lewton (who was a producer, not a director) was involved in some of the most stylish B pictures ever made. The two mentioned in the OP were directed by Mark Robson, whose earlier collaborations with Lewton, The Ghost Ship and, especially, The Seventh Victim, are well worth seeking out as well. Lewton, like Roger Corman in the 60s and 70s, had a talent for finding young directorial talent. Robson would go on to direct My Foolish Heart, The Bridges of Toko-Ri, and Von Ryan’s Express. Jaqcues Tourneur, who directed I Walked with a Zombie, The Leopard Man, and Cat People in collaboration with Lewton, would later direct such great films as Stars in My Crown and* Out of the Past*. Robert Wise, who directed Curse of the Cat People and The Body Snatcher for Lewton, would go on to direct West Side Story and The Sound of Music.

All of these old Lewton-produced B movies are worth seeing. I’d paid $90 for a bootleg VHS of I Walked with a Zombie, so when the box set came out a few months later I was a bit miffed. But it’s still one of the real highlights of my collection.

Bedlam? Plugh.

I might even say that I Walked with a Zombie is the best zombie film ever.

Here’s the scene with the song “Shame and Sorrow.” It’s sung by Sir Lancelot, who is something of a legend in calypso music. I can’t find Sir Lancelot’s original version, but here’s the Wailers using the original (and very funny) lyrics.

The Body Snatchers is also a very good movie. Karloff was disappointed he didn’t get an Oscar nomination, and he was right that he deserved one.

Absolutely.

Here’s an idea of the visual mastery that Jacques Tourneur brought to I Walked with a Zombie, a style that elevated it well above the B picture expectations evoked by the titled.

For some reason the Youtube video won’t play for me.

I looked up I Walked with a Zombie, and was interested to see that Lewton himself did not work on the screenplay (although he must certainly have guided it – it has his touches), but that it was written by Ardel Wray (who co-wrote the screenplay for Isle of the Dead) and curt Siodmak.

Siodmak!

This is a guy who was responsible for an awful lot of fantasy tropes that I grew up with. He’s the guy whop rescued the “vampires killed by sunlight” trope from the obscurity it was in for years after Bram Stoker’s widow tried to get all the copies of [io]Nosferatu* burned. He put it in Son of Dracula and House of Frankenstein, and it caught on to become a “standard” piece of vampire lore. He’s one of those who popularized the image of the Brain In The Aquarium in his novel Donovan’s Brain (which got filmed three times).

What’s interesting in this context is that Siodmak wrote the screenplay for The Wolfman (inventing a lot of our “werewolf” tropes in the process), and that his original screenplay left it ambiguious as to whether Larry Talbot really physically changed into a wolf-man, or if it was only psychological (this explains a lot of the dialogue in the film, which seems weird after both you the audience and characters in the film have actually SEEN the transformed Wolfman). His idea was to only show the Wolfman when Talbot, pursued at the end, looks at his reflection in a pond. Is the transformation real? Or only in his mind?

But the powers-that-be at Universal wanted a no-nonsense, really transformed into a man-beast Wolfman, so that’s what they got. It also made the film a lot more popular, I expect.

But Lewton, maybe, saw what Siodmak was doing, and I suspect he hired Siodmak because he liked that sort of ambiguity – it’s never really made clear if there are Cat-Peopl;e in his two Cat People movies, or a real Zombie in I Walked with a Zombie, or a real vampiric creature in Isle of the Dead.

This sort of thing makes for better art, but probably worse box office and TV rentals. I suspect this ambiguity is why I’ve never seen most of the Lewton films. Universal flirted with the same kind of ambiguity (despite what they did to The Wolfman) with The She-Wolf of London (starring a young June Lockhart – Timmy’s Mom! And Dr., Maureen Robinson! – as the titular female Larry Talbot. I don’t recall ever seeing the film until I watched all the films in the Universal Monster Legends DVD set. And I was a fanatical monster-movie watcher as a kid.