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.