Alexander Nemerov,
Icons of Grief: Val Lewton’s Home Front Pictures.
Berkeley: California University Press, 2005.
ISBN: 0-520-24100-2
213pp
US$24.95 (pb)
(Review copy supplied by University of California Press)

Lately there have been a number of publications devoted to cinephilia in its historical and contemporary manifestations. Christian Keathley’s Cinephilia and History (Indiana UP, 2006), in particular, dwells on the blissful detail that cinephiles treasure. Alexander Nemerov’s book derives its inspiration, and its tragic impulse, from such moments in the work of a producer cinephiles have lauded. Nemerov quotes Manny Farber on a filmmaker who did his best work “from the deepest, worst angle…with material that is hopelessly worn out and childish”, looking, as followers of this low budget horror specialist still do, for “the unheralded ripple of physical experience, the tiny morbidly life-worn detail.” (169)

Nemerov’s study of Lewton’s piquant corpus of genre horror movies accommodates the blissful asides of cinephilia within a perceptive account of wartime and postwar iconography. Alongside the flag-waving and stiff upper lips of such films as Star-Spangled Rhythm (USA 1942), Tender Comrade (USA 1943), and Since You Went Away (USA 1944), Lewton’s B-movie output offered singular examinations of loss and longing; in Nemerov’s thesis the melancholy unconscious behind the glad ballyhoo. His title refers to those moments when Lewton’s films stop in rapt contemplation of death and absence, their strange vertical figures concentrating the sorrow overlooked in a jingoistic emotional economy.

Breaking with past Lewton commentaries and true to cinephiliac history, Nemerov puts peripheral images, actors and feelings at the heart of each film. Considering The Curse of the Cat People (USA 1943), he foregrounds that moment when the little girl Amy (Ann Carter) flees Christmas revellers to be with her friend Irena in the snowbound garden. Now dead, Irena (Simone Simon) was Amy’s father’s wife in Lewton’s more renowned Cat People (USA 1942). Like a caped medieval angel in a cemetery, this projection of a child’s imagination becomes a metaphor for feelings too powerful for literal representation during stoic wartime. Significantly, in this study of the forgotten, ignored and passed away, the popular and over-examined Cat People has been elided in favour of obscurities like Lewton’s The Ghost Ship (USA 1943) and Bedlam (USA 1946).

In the chapter on I Walked with a Zombie (USA, 1943), Nemerov evokes another kind of wartime exclusion. Writing of that sublime moment as a sleepwalker and her nurse pick their way towards a voodoo ceremony, Nemerov reads a history of anger and absence rippling away from that long thin naked black man bolt upright and staring blindly ahead in a moonlit sugar cane field. As African-Americans questioned this white war and the politics of emancipation beckoned, a minor actor, Darby Jones, dramatized black American feelings of redundancy. Regaling the reader with a startling reproduction of that shot of the zombie at the sea’s edge, Nemerov compares this forlorn man to the heroic Sidney Carton, that white literary symbol of spiritual transcendence in Selznick’s Dickens adaptation A Tale of Two Cities (USA 1935), an A feature in which Lewton had a hand: “Motionless, he becomes the figurehead Ti Misery breasting the sea. And as a slave, Carre-Four is presented as a sacrifice without transcendence. The heavens become a foam spreading at his feet and the roll of drums ushering Carton into the next world is a roll of surf that explodes as abruptly as the guillotine’s loud sliding drop. Minor figures die without fanfare.” (129)

The chapter on The Ghost Ship (US 1943) entitled “The Power of the Minor Actor”, discusses Skelton Knaggs’ soulful mute sailor, briefly glimpsed before we are ushered away by the plot. There is a, mainly reference, literature on Hollywood’s supporting actors; so seldom are those minor turns made to bear such resonance. In these thick descriptive chapters Nemerov, a Yale History of Art professor, interweaves solidly referenced research into Russian icon painting, sociology, studio politics, the resumes of Central Casting. His account of the Times Square grind houses where Lewton’s B pictures played evokes Siegfried Kracauer’s seminal descriptions of the modern sidewalk.

Nemerov’s chapter on Bedlam (US 1946), set in 18th century London, focuses on Glenn Vernon’s performance as the Gilded Boy, the mental asylum inmate painted in gold for the amusement of high society. As the boy succumbs to asphyxia, the guests are merely amused. Only one is outraged. Amid the hollow cheer of consensus, Anna Lee’s gentle Nell recalls Amy’s earnest belief in The Curse of the Cat People. Appearing immediately after the war, the Gilded Boy evokes for Nemerov the suffocated of Hiroshima, a contemporary event yet to be officially represented. Prior to John Hersey’s journalistic 1946 account of the first A-bomb drop, Bedlam proffers a prescient image of the nuclear age with its push button horror and seeming lack of public conscience. Lewton’s work derives its melancholy at least in part from being caught between the requirements of wartime jollity and the desire to drown bad memories in a welter of postwar largesse. Nemerov writes: “As an ikona steeped in references to Russia and war – to Mitya’s execution, to Irena’s haunted snowbound isolation…Vernon’s character is another of Lewton’s attempts to show a carefree American audience the nature of tragedy, though the film despairs that few will take notice.” (151) (Nemerov is one of a growing band of writers picking up iconic referents in Lewton. British writer Irene Dobson likens Mrs Holland in I walked with a zombie to an icon of the Madonna).

Val Lewton worked in the backwaters, a B craftsman at RKO, Hollywood’s smallest ‘major.’ Amid the bland hubris of new Selznicks, wartime America’s official entertainments, Lewton’s films were a gift to postwar cinephilia, asserting “the value of a minor work of art to say things a major work can never say, to know things a major work can never know.” (6) As United 93 (US 2006) and World Trade Center (US 2006), supposedly crystallize our response to our own catastrophes, Lewton shows how with less bombast than subtlety, less literalness than literacy, less shock, more awe, art can deliver lasting effects, effects perhaps increasingly relevant to our world of sudden death and media commemoration, and which echo the subliminal convulsions of what James Agate described as “that old-fashioned Victorian thing – the soul.” (161)

Richard Armstrong
Cambridge University, UK.

Created on: Thursday, 9 November 2006