1942 horror, dir. Jacques Tourneur, Simone Simon, Kent Smith:
IMDb /
allmovie. What does one tell
a husband? One tells him nothing.
I don't know how exotic The Wolf Man's English village was
meant to feel to American audiences, but this sets out explicitly to
being the horror into the familiar environment. (Which is of course
what Dracula had done in 1897, but filmic horror had tended to stick
with the isolated country house or the primitive Eastern European
village: simple studio sets are cheaper than location filming in this
era, and cities need people at least sometimes.)
Val Lewton, producing (and by all accounts being rather more involved
with filming than many producers), had been given a brief by RKO to
make low-budget horror to compete with Universal. He assembled his
crew largely from people he'd worked with before, and this was the
first of several films that the team would put out.
Simone Simon is very definitely the star here. Kent Smith as the
upstanding young man… well, his performance is made entirely of wood,
to the extent that I was reminded of John Payne in 1947's Miracle on
34th Street: the story needs a man, he can't out-act our Star (there
Maureen O'Hara), but surely he could at least try not to be entirely
in her shadow?
But again as in The Wolf Man I don't know whether his Oliver Reed
[coincidentally sic.] is meant to be pressing and insistent beyond
the normal standards of the day, or if nobody in the audience would
have seen anything wrong with what he does here. (Giving a pet as a
present? To someone you've only just met?)
But when Irene is hesitant, fearing that she will lose control of
herself if her feelings are truly engaged, he doesn't care. Given her
level of concern, I can't help feeling that they might test this with
a kiss in a public place, where they could each run away if she did
turn feral. But no, no, it's straight to a remarkably ill-advised
marriage, even though they barely know each other; and then the
initial fascination wears off.
All right, Oliver is pretty clueless. I know, I'll discuss my wife's
psychological problems (that she asked me not to talk about to anyone)
with my best friend at work, who just happens to be an attractive
young lady. How could wifey possibly object to that?
(But by the standards of the day it's fairly daring even to mention
that divorce exists, let alone show us two characters going through
one. So there's that.)
There are some splendid moments, and one of the things I really admire
here is that it's a mystery right to the end whether Irena can
actually transform into a giant predatory cat. No expensive
transformation sequence here, just rely on your actor's body language
and the job's done. One particular sequence, with Best Friend in an
indoor swimming pool while Irena prowls round the edge, is very
effective indeed, though with fractionally better sound technology it
could have been sublime. As it is, this is a lovely film, which leaves
me at least in far more sympathy with Irena than with any of the
supposedly good normal people.
And all of the suffering could have been avoided if Oliver had just
kept to the principle expressed some years ago by a work colleague:
"Don't Put It In the Crazy".
I talk about this film further on
Ribbon of Memes.