fate takes an option: the mixed legacy of the Val Lewton horror unit at RKO

The history of motion pictures is littered with tales of might-have-beens, false starts, and missed opportunities, all chronicled in sources as diverse as scholarly biographies to lurid scandal magazines. They tell of lives, today largely forgotten, of the once promising and can’t-miss future stars (writers and directors, too) that … weren’t.

Especially compelling, and not so frequently examined, are the stories associated with a trend, genre or studio. An obvious example is the genre (or was it a style?) today we dub film noir, and the seemingly malevolent hold it had on the actors who portrayed the desperate characters in its cinematic universe. Indeed, their private lives were often more noir than the (anti)-heroes and -heroines they impersonated onscreen. To wit: in one of the more infelicitous timings in American cultural history, the noir era counted among its ranks not only actors but many directors and screenwriters with leftist political sympathies. Thus their fate: the persecution by the infamous House Un-American Activities Committee and -like groups, one of the results being the blacklisting of not a few unfortunate souls. It's probably the most conspicuous example of the curse of noir and its extension to real life drama [1].

But we’d like to focus on another, less well-known, group of ill-fated individuals, with their own attendant maledictions. They were associated with the production unit at RKO Pictures specializing in horror films in the 1940s heralded by maverick producer Val Lewton. The nine films Lewton oversaw from 1942 to 1946 created and perfected the sub-genre of supernatural noir. Conveyed through an aesthetic language similar to that of film noir, these hymns to the night shared with noir a fatalistic, no-exit pessimism and dark world view, though of a different kind [2].

Usually seeking material gain, the edgy characters in noir employed methods both legal and otherwise to achieve their aims, and were often menaced, or manipulated, by powerful, mysterious forces. Sometimes the forces were not so mysterious, but nonetheless eminently threatening – state officialdom, criminal elements, hostile foreign powers, duplicitous femmes fatales. The protagonists in the Lewton films had their own issues, but they stemmed from within, to be precise from the subterranean realms of the human psyche, the result being an existential searching for something they, and often the audience, couldn’t quite get hold of [3]. Theirs was a quest for meaning and direction in a world that seemed devoid of meaning, and moreover arbitrary and chaotic in its dispensation of fate.

The characters in the Lewton films often confronted their issues by way of supernatural or other-worldly manifestations: a sexually repressed woman metamorphoses into a vicious panther; a lonely child summons an angel from the beyond; a doomed heroine seeks redemption by joining a devil cult; an adulteress becomes one of the walking dead; a no-nonsense general succumbs to ancient superstitions and eventual madness.

In any event, and getting back to the notion of a Lewton curse, it’s only fair to list some exceptions, as any number of major and minor creative types associated with Val Lewton went on to successful, lengthy careers: directors Robert Wise, Mark Robson and Jacques Tourneur; composer Roy Webb; wardrobe designer Renié; cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca; art director Albert D'Agostino; and actors Boris Karloff, Kim Hunter, Anna Lee, Kent Smith and Henry Daniell. Moreover, not all the aborted careers were involuntary. Some were very much by choice, a prime example being Jane Randolph, so effective in Cat People and its quasi-sequel Curse of the Cat People. One of her best roles during this time was in the noir classic T-Men (1947), in which she was cast against type as a ruthless high level apparatchik in a counterfeiting scheme. The following year her career came to an inglorious end with her appearance in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, whereupon she left films, married a rich guy and lived out her life in Europe, mostly Spain, amid much material comfort.

But among the less fortunate there’s quite a litany of unfulfilled promises, one-hit wonders, and should-have-beens. Of course the elephant in the living room is Val Lewton himself. So creative during his peak years at RKO (and before), upon his departure in 1947 he oversaw nothing of lasting value. Times, and tastes, were changing, and the new productions he supervised were critical and commercial failures. As a result of a weak heart and years of overwork, Lewton finally succumbed to heart failure in 1951 at forty-six years of age. In many ways Lewton’s was a tantalizingly brief and unfinished career, and we can only wonder what he might have accomplished had he lived longer, another twenty years, even ten years. Perhaps the old magic would have returned, perhaps not, but we’ll never know.

There was also the eccentric screenwriter DeWitt Bodeen, whose career likewise peaked in the 1940s. He wrote the insightful scripts – arguably the best of all the Lewton films – for Cat People and The Seventh Victim, the latter co-written with Charles O’Neal [4]. But he did little of consequence after 1950, confining himself mostly to work in television and film criticism. He left Hollywood disillusioned and died in obscurity in 1988 at the age of 79.

Bodeen's co-author on Victim, Charles O'Neal, lived a long life (he passed in 1996 at the age of 92), but his career as a screenwriter is spotty. He had a string of mostly B films in the Forties but his career stalled around 1950, after which he worked only sporadically, contributing mostly scripts for television.

Another writer casualty, this one a victim of the aforementioned anti-communist witch hunts of the late Forties and early Fifties, was screenwriter and Lewton stalwart Ardel Wray, who helmed the scripts for I Walked with a Zombie (co-written with Curt Siodmak), Leopard Man and Isle of the Dead. Her refusal to name names in 1948 effectively ended her tenure at Paramount, the studio where she was working at the time, and furthermore resulted in her blacklisting by the entire industry. Her career as a Hollywood screenwriter now over, she subsequently confined her work to various and odd jobs: script reader, story analyst, movie serializations, and especially script writing for television programs in the 1960s.

They walked with Val lewton

But as for actors and actresses, a good place to start is Simone Simon, who had a fairly substantial career in her native France before coming to Hollywood in the late 1930s. She became a genuine star after Cat People in 1942, and she appeared in the sequel Curse of the Cat People two years later. But then her career went southward. She returned to France in the late Forties and her roles were spotty. Her best film during this time was La Ronde, after which she appeared in fewer films. She more or less left the movies altogether in 1956, although she did appear in one final film, The Woman in Blue, in 1973. Hers was a sketchy career, and her star burned bright only intermittently.

Cat People’s other cat woman was portrayed by Lewton favorite Elizabeth Russell (she appeared in five of his films, always in cameos or supporting roles). Her post-Lewton career gradually faded and by 1960 she had left the movies altogether. With the renewed appreciation of the Lewton oeuvre in the 1980s and 1990s she became a kind of cult figure, but her glory days in the movies, focused as they were in the 1940s, were limited at best. Mary Halsey, who played the pert blonde desk attendant at Alice's hotel in Cat People, frequently appeared (mostly uncredited) in B movies in the Forties, but her career was to be short lived: her last film was in 1945. She passed in 1989 at the age of seventy-five.

The other actor from Cat People that deserves a mention is Tom Conway, who also appeared in two other Lewton films, I Walked with a Zombie and The Seventh Victim. Born in St. Petersburg, Russia, Conway was the older brother of George Sanders and has been variously described as the nice George Sanders and, less generously, the B movie George Sanders. Perpetually on the fringe of stardom, Conway was under contract to RKO and enjoyed a mildly successful run in the Forties, especially for his appearing in ten Falcon mysteries. But in the Fifties his career slowed and substantial roles came few and far between. By the Sixties he was reduced to cameos and the occasional television appearance. His last credited role was on a Perry Mason episode in 1964, in which he essentially plays himself: a washed up theatrical actor given a raw deal by the industry, reduced to touring with a Shakespearean troupe who perform readings. Conway died at the age of sixty-two, destitute and severely alcoholic, in Culver City, California, in 1967.

I Walked with a Zombie, the film that followed Cat People and considered by some to be Lewton’s masterpiece, nonetheless had its share of casualties. Zombie’s leading lady was Frances Dee, and it’s certainly the performance she’s remembered for, but by this time her star was dimming. The rest of her career is obscure, if recalled at all. But in some respects she escaped the curse, living out a long, and by all accounts very prosperous life (she passed in 2004 at age 94).

Tom Conway was Dee’s leading man in Zombie, but the titular character was played by Christine Gordon, whose (uncredited) credits include only five other films, all dating from the mid 1940s. But at least she has a modest place in cinema immortality as the catatonic Jessica who, appropriately enough perhaps, suffers a tragic fate in the film. An even smaller, if pivotal, role in Zombie is taken by the Panama born dancer Jieno Moxzer, who plays the voodoo priest. Moxzer’s only other film credit is Cabin in the Sky.

Zombie also featured Sir Lancelot, a singer/actor who more or less cornered the market on the calypso singer cameo in the 1940s. He appeared in a string of films in the Forties, including appearances in three Lewton films. Lancelot had a long career as a singer, performing into his sixties, but by the late 1940s his career in film was essentially over. He died in 2001 at the age of 98.

The next film, The Leopard Man, had at least four actresses whose careers were touched by the Lewton shroud. Three of them played the victims in Leopard Man and their acting tenures likewise  came to unfortunate or equivocal ends [5]. Incidentally, of the three Hispanic victims, two were played by Caucasian actresses, a fairly common practice in them days of casting ethnic roles with Anglo performers. In any case Leopard Man also included in its cast Isabel Jewell, who improbably takes the role of a card reading fortuneteller. Jewell also appeared in Seventh Victim, where she had a more substantial part and accordingly made an even stronger impression, but by this time her once promising career was decidedly on a downhill slide [6]. Leopard Man also featured the fetching Ariel Heath in an all too brief appearance as the cigarette girl at the club. IMDB lists fourteen films to her credit, mostly in uncredited roles. Her last film was in 1945, and she died in 1973 at age fifty-one.

The fourth Lewton film, The Seventh Victim, is probably the darkest of the entire canon, and also where we find two of the most tragic true-life cases. Jean Brooks’s saga has uncanny parallels to the doomed heroine she portrayed so effectively in Victim. She appeared as a supporting player in B pictures in the late 30s and early 40s. RKO picked her up in 1942, and she starred in six Falcon pictures with Tom Conway in addition to appearing in three Lewton films. She showed great promise with her easy confidence and screen charisma. But her personal life was another matter: she struggled with alcoholism, and there were incidents of public drunkenness and disheveled appearance. In 1946 RKO dropped her from their roster. Her last movie was the 1948 World War II exploitation film Women in the Night. For a time she worked in dinner theater but by the 1950s had disappeared from public life altogether. She eventually moved to San Francisco, where she worked in the classified department at the Examiner newspaper. Jean Brooks died of complications from alcoholism and malnutrition on Nov 25, 1963, at Kaiser Hospital in Richmond, California, at the age of forty-seven, largely forgotten. Hers was a sad case of a potential star that might have been.

A truly tragic story is that of Erford Gage, who in Victim took the role of the Lewtonesque poet Jason Hoag. Gage’s wafty intensity brought a genuine pathos to the character and provided a tantalizing hint of what he might have become as an actor. Very sadly, it was not to be. He died in combat in World War II in Manila, the Philippines, on March 17, 1945.

Victim also boasted quite a collection of colorful secondary characters and bit parts. Several of them are associated with the devil worship cult, which meets at the apartment of one Mrs. Cortez (Evelyn Brent), who has a fondness for wearing flamboyant satin outfits. Brent curiously gets a high billing in the credits despite hers being a relatively marginal character. In any case she was quite the star in the Twenties but by this time had slipped to B movies. Seventh Victim was one of her last films.

Another career that ended in the Forties was that of Ben Bard, who plays the elegantly sinister Mr. Brun in Victim. His solid if unspectacular career included a nice run of Lewton films with appearances in Leopard Man, The Ghost Ship, and Youth Runs Wild, in addition to Victim. But in 1946 he left movies altogether to concentrate on managing acting schools. Eve March, who takes the role of Miss Gilchrist in Victim, kept busy as a supporting player in the Forties but her career sputtered in the Fifties. Her last film was an uncredited part in 1958 in The Last Hurrah. She died in Hollywood in 1974 at the age of sixty-three.

The fifth Lewton film, The Ghost Ship, is the transitional work that heralds the shift away from mood and atmosphere to story and character. And character indeed comes to the fore in the person of the totalitarian-minded Captain Stone, portrayed with edgy menace by once major star Richard Dix. But Dix’s salad days were two decades prior and by this time his career was in decline. In the Forties he appeared in B movie programmers, most notably six of the Whistler mysteries in which he played unhinged types not that dissimilar to Capt. Stone. After years of struggling with alcoholism, he retired from films in 1947 and died of a heart attack in 1949 at the age of 56.

Rising star Russell Wade was Dix’s costar in Ghost Ship, taking the role of Capt. Stone’s reluctant protégé, Third Officer Merriam. Wade also appeared in Body Snatcher and (uncredited) Leopard Man. He was in over 60 movies in the Forties but retired from films in 1948 for a career in business and real estate in the Palm Springs area. He died in 2006 at the age of 89.

Ghost Ship also boasted Skelton Knaggs, whose craggy looks and eccentric disposition seemed to predestine him to an untimely demise, which did happen, both onscreen (in Isle of the Dead) as well as off. Knaggs also appeared in one other Lewton film, Bedlam. Born in Yorkshire, England, he came to the U. S. in 1939 and by the early Forties had established himself as a reliable performer who specialized in offbeat character roles. His career slowed in the 1950s and his last film was in 1955, the year of his death from cirrhosis of the liver at the age of 43.

1945’s Isle of the Dead, the first of three films to showcase Boris Karloff, also featured in a prominent role the ingénue Ellen Drew, who always seemed one step away from the stardom that ultimately eluded her. She does well in Isle of the Dead but is probably best remembered as a brutal gangster’s wife in the noir programmer Johnny O’Clock. By 1950 her career in film was essentially over, after which she confined her work to television. Her last appearance on the small screen was a Perry Mason episode in 1960. Isle also included the distinguished stage actress Katherine Emery, who had a modest run of film appearances in the 1940s in which she essayed mostly character roles. Her film career ended abruptly in 1953 with the 3-D cult classic The Maze.  

Also released in 1945 was The Body Snatcher. The fetching Rita Corday took the sympathetic role of Mrs. March. Corday had a good run in the 1940s, mostly in B pictures, but her career petered out in the Fifties and her last film was in 1954. She died in 1992 at the age of age 72. Body Snatcher also featured Donna Lee in the small but pivotal role of the street singer. IMDB lists five credits for her. Her last film was in 1946 in a small role in Bedlam.

The valedictory Bedlam had at least one performance worthy of a mention in present traversal. That’s the one given by Joan Newton. Even by Lewtonian standards she had a very brief career, appearing in only two movies: Riverboat Rhythm and Bedlam, the latter in the minor but crucial role as Dorothea the Dove. She passed away in 2012 at the age of 91.

Isle of broken dreams

It’s risky, and counterintuitive, even counterproductive, to generalize in such matters, but a pattern does  emerge. Most of the individuals discussed above reached their peak in the 1940s, especially, and sometimes exclusively, in the Lewton films. For some, the career arc was already on a downward slope. In any event, most did little of substance after 1950, usually with a gradual diminishing of output, both in quality and quantity. Several struggled with alcoholism, and most died in obscurity and/or near-poverty.

Indeed, was there a kind of curse, a shroud of doom that wrapped itself around the lives of many of the actors who appeared in the Val Lewton films of the early and mid-Forties? It’s tempting to see a connection. But perhaps we have it wrong. What if the reverse is true? Could it be that the kind of films Val Lewton produced attracted a certain personality type, especially so in the case of the supporting performers and bit players. Quirky, erratic, self-destructive, unable or unwilling to conform to the Hollywood standards of career molding and good behavior, these actors brought their own imperfections to the overall alchemy of films like Seventh Victim and Isle of the Dead, to cite two of the darkest exemplars in the Lewton canon. And these individuals carried their own burdens with them, quite independent of their brief association with Val Lewton [7].

Truth be told, there are several possible explanations for the Lewton actors’ memorable contributions to the films, and, more to the point, their eventual fates [8]. Some are offered above and some are not, and overall patterns and trends are debatable at best. Simply put, it wasn’t just fatalistic pessimism, a sorcerer’s spell, or the callousness of a depraved, indifferent industry, though some of these might have played a part. More practical issues – financial exigencies, career change, lack of ambition, bad timing, inept management, and any number of other factors, singly or in combination – no doubt figured into the mix. It could all come down to a bizarre witch's brew of contradictory motivations and circumstances, both internal and external. Either way it’s difficult, indeed well nigh impossible, to arrive at definitive conclusions, especially so given the tenuous and conflicting evidence.

Still, it’s a peculiar and tempting conceit: an individual artiste becomes involved, even enmeshed in, an aestheticized, artificial world of darkness – exotic, dangerous, seductive – yet upon departure, the melancholy and mystery linger on, sometimes for years, even decades. The scenario is certainly consistent with the message of these nine little pictures, these nocturnes for the dead: dark, mystical forces reach out, and with a shadowy, inexorable malevolence, perpetuate the nightmare expressed so eloquently in the movies themselves, and their bleak existential universe somehow bleeds over into the private worlds of at least some of those connected with the production unit that created the Val Lewton films.

    [1] The curse of noir didn’t confine itself to anti-communist witch hunts and show trials. Though never officially investigated, many individuals known for their work in noir had real lives with an undercurrent of scandal, unfulfilled promise or untimely death. Tom Neal, Cleo Moore, Jean Hagen, Lynn Baggett, Peggy Castle, Albert Dekker, Gloria Grahame, Laird Cregar, Zachary Scott, Barbara Payton, Steve Cochran, Veronica Lake, Linda Darnell, Lizabeth Scott, Susan Shaw, Gail Russell, Barbara Nichols, Jean Gillie, Rita Johnson and Helen Walker are only some of the more prominent examples. For more on noir and the Blacklist see: Noirlisted: Film Noir and the Hollywood Blacklist.
   [2] By way of amplification, we may cite Wells, who, writing in the context of science fiction and horror, explains that the former is concerned primarily with the external, the macrocosmic, and horror is more directed at the internal, or microcosmic: “science fiction is potentially utopian [although often critically grounded] … the horror genre is almost entirely dystopic, and often nihilistic in outlook.” Paul Wells, The Horror Genre: From Beelzebub to Blair Witch, London: Wallflower, 2000, pp. 7-8.
     Applied in our context, the characters in film noir proper are driven by external things like status, social hierarchies, police excess, and the corruption of capitalism, whereas Lewton’s protagonists are more concerned with inner fears, phobias and existential worries. To be sure, noir certainly concerns itself with the inner worlds as well, and conversely there are elements of social and political criticism in the Lewton films, albeit more as background (see: Martha P. Nochimson, “Val Lewton at RKO: The Social Dimensions of Horror,” Cineaste Fall 2006, pp. 9-17; Cameron Moneo, The Horror of ‘This Pretty World’: Progressive Pessimism in Val Lewton’s Films and Novels, Thesis [M.A.], York University, Toronto, 2009).
     By the way, we refer to the Lewtonian subgenre as supernatural noir, but it might just as well be called, more accurately perhaps, 'horror noir,' or 'psychological horror,' since at most only three of the films deal with overt supernatural elements.
    [3] Boardwell explains that “characters of the classical narrative have clear-cut traits and objectives, while characters of the art cinema lack defined desires and goals.” Such a lack of a center of gravity gives them the freedom to “...express and explain their psychological states.” Ergo we never discover who they really are. [David Bordwell, “Art Cinema,” The European Cinema Reader, Routledge, 2002, p. 96]. This existential searching further underscores the Lewton films’ flavor of the highbrow and arty while paradoxically retaining their appeal as popular entertainment.
    [4] Bodeen also contributed the script to Cat People’s unofficial sequel, Curse of the Cat People.
    [5] The actresses who played Teresa Delgado, Consuelo Contreras and Clo-Clo/Gabriela were, respectively, Margaret Landry, Tula Parma (Tuulikki Paananen), and Margo. Landry was American, Parma Finnish and Margo Mexican. Landry appeared in a few films in the 1940s, in mostly uncredited roles. Her last picture was in 1945. Tula Parma moved to the U.S. from her native Finland in 1940. Her career in film is sketchy. Leopard Man is listed as her only American film. From 1968 to 1973 she appeared in a few episodes of the television series Hawaii Five-O. Margo had a more substantial career than either Parma or Landry, and her Mexican bonafides were impeccable: born in Mexico City in 1917, she came to the U. S. in the early Thirties and was cast in a few films, most famously Lost Horizon. But by the early Forties and Leopard Man her career was in decline. Blacklisted in the 1950s for her activist views, film roles were scarce. She did manage to appear in one prestige production, Viva Zapata (1952). Her last film was Diary of Mad Housewife (1970).
    [6] Isabel’s later years were not always happy. In 1959, she was arrested in Las Vegas for passing bad checks. The bad check was for 37 dollars to be paid to a cab driver. Isabel was again arrested in Los Angeles in 1961 for drunk driving. She was sentenced to five days in jail and she was put on probation as a driver. Isabel Jewell died in Los Angeles, California on April 5, 1972, aged 64. Sources differ on the cause of her death. Some versions say it was suicide by taking an overdose of barbiturates, others claim she died of natural causes due to her lifelong struggle with diabetes.
    [7] Of course it’s not just actors who figure into the mix, but all the creative individuals associated with the Lewton films from 1942 to 1946 – writers, directors, cinematographers, wardrobe designers, editors, set decorators – all of whom brought their own individual, often unconventional, visions to the final product that was the nine unique films that make up the oeuvre.
    [8] Lacking anything in the way of statistical or scientific support, nonetheless I’ll posit an idea, though it tends to undercut my thesis presented above: anecdotal evidence does suggest that a goodly amount of performers from Golden Age Hollywood (Lewton veterans and otherwise), especially those in the lower tiers, ended up living out their sunset years in obscurity, poverty, or in any case greatly reduced circumstances. Indeed, it would seem very few enjoyed a later life of Norma Desmond-like opulence, and many were bitter about the time they spent working in the motion picture industry. In any case their eventual fates were attributable to non-supernatural, eminently human factors.
    In this context it’s interesting to theorize what sort of results we would get if we investigated other studios of the era, especially the small ones. Would there be similarly sad, equivocal, stories? Is the Lewton phenomenon of ill-fated lives and unfulfilled promise inevitable in the entertainment business? In particular one might wonder what kind of results an analysis of that most prominent of Golden Age studios specializing in horror films, Universal, would reveal. Might the darkness of its product be mirrored in careers and lives of its employees, both in front of and behind the camera? Fascinating stuff, and perhaps grist for an enterprising PhD student. Indeed a casual perusal suggests the principle may apply to television as well. As a case in point we may note the original Perry Mason series of the late 50s and early 60s, in which it seems an inordinate amount of guest performers had shortened careers.