The Seventh Victim (1943)

The Seventh Victim, released in 1943, was the fourth of the eleven movies (nine of them horror movies) made by producer Val Lewton at RKO in the 40s. It was Mark Robson’s directorial debut.

Lewton’s first RKO film was Cat People which was a huge hit. In commercial terms the series started to falter slightly after that. Lewton’s idea of taking a totally fresh and original, and subtle, approach to the horror genre was an artistic triumph but audiences were increasingly unimpressed.

The nine Lewton horror films gradually established major cult followings and are now immensely admired by cinephiles but it is worth bearing in mind that only Cat People and The Body Snatcher achieved massive commercial success at the time.

The Seventh Victim bombed at the box office. It’s easy to see why. It sounds like it’s going to be a murder mystery but it isn’t. It’s also not a conventional horror movie. It’s not a conventional anything. No matter how good such films are they’re difficult to promote and are likely to provoke audience resistance. These are the sorts of movies destined one day to become cult movies.

The Seventh Victim begins with what does seem like a straightforward mystery. Schoolgirl Mary Gibson (Kim Hunter) is told that the school has been unable to her sister Jacqueline. Jacqueline is her only living relative and pays her tuition fees. Mary decides to head for New York to find her.

She is befriended by lawyer Gregory Ward (Hugh Beaumont) who claims to be in love with  Jacqueline and to be equally anxious to find her. Ward seems like a very nice man.

Mary is also offered help by a down-at-hell private eye, Irving August (Lou Lubin). He is scruffy and seedy and looks very disreputable but he also sounds very confident and Mary probably figures all private detectives look like bums.

Mary meets several other men who have played some part in Jacqueline’s life. There’s failed poet Jason Hoag (Erford Gage) and psychiatrist Doctor Louis Judd. Since Judd is played by Tom Conway he could turn out to be a sinister figure but in a Lewton film it’s foolish to jump to conclusions.

Mary also discovers the room that Jacqueline rents but keeps permanently locked. The contents of the room provide the first unsettling moment in the movie and it’s very unsettling indeed, for Mary and for the viewer.

Gradually it emerges that Jacqueline had belonged to a group of Satanists known as the Palladists. It seems that Jacqueline is trying to break off her contact with this group.

The movie was criticised at the time for being incoherent. The fact that several scenes were apparently cut (including a longer ending) may have contributed to this but I suspect the cuts were deliberate. Those cut scenes were unnecessary and would have slowed the movie down. The Lewton movies had to come in with running times around 70 minutes. That was non-negotiable. And that was a good thing. They couldn’t afford to have an ounce of fat on them, and they don’t.

The ending as it stands works extraordinarily well and I think the movie is meant to remain enigmatic. In particular I think that Jacqueline is meant to remain something of a mystery. What led her to the Palladists?

It’s definitely not a plot-driven movie. Mood is everything here. None of the characters take any actions that really achieve anything. The attempts by Mary and her friends to rescue Jacqueline are confused and ineffectual.

This is a very morbid film. Most of the characters are either failures or disappointed by life or drifting through life in a mood of quiet despair. This incredible bleakness almost certainly contributed to the movie’s commercial failure just as it has contributed to its later cult status. Nobody made movies like in the 40s, but Val Lewton did.

What’s really fascinating is that these devil-worshippers are themselves so ineffectual. They are effete self-indulgent would-be intellectuals playing at wickedness. They would head for the fainting couches if they ever encountered true evil. Their devil-worshipping game of make-believe staves off the boredom and despair for a while. They think it gives their lives meaning but it doesn’t.

Forget the silly stuff about homoerotic subtexts that some reviewers try to read into this film. I don’t buy it because it would be out of place. This is a movie that has other fish to fry. This is a movie about people who are emotionally, spiritually and intellectually neutered. They’re empty vessels.

Mark Robson had edited the first three movies in the series for director Jacques Tourneur (whom he admired greatly) and Robson learnt his lessons well. He does an excellent job. And the cinematography is once more done by the great Nicholas Musuraca.

The Seventh Victim is awash with film noir nihilism. It’s tough viewing but it’s very highly recommended.

Curse of the Cat People (1944)

The Curse of the Cat People, released in 1944, was the sixth of the horror films produced by Val Lewton for RKO. 

This was Robert Wise’s first movie as director. 

As with Cat People DeWitt Bodeen got the writing credit but in fact the script was co-written by Bodeen and Lewton.

RKO gave Lewton enormous creative freedom except for one thing - they got to assign the titles to the movies before the scripts had even been begun. Oddly enough this worked quite well - being given a title and then having to build a movie around it was a challenge to which Lewton was more than equal. 

But in this particular case Lewton really was dismayed. He did not want to make any sequels. He solved this problem very adroitly. The Curse of the Cat People is an object lesson in how to make a sequel without actually quite making a sequel. They are two separate but linked movies.

While it’s not quite a sequel The Curse of the Cat People does reveal major spoilers for Cat People. You absolutely must see Cat People first. And the nature of the story means that it is impossible to discuss The Curse of the Cat People without revealing huge spoilers for Cat People. So from this point on this review will contain very big spoilers for Cat People.

The time element is a slight problem. Oliver Reed (Kent Smith) and Alice Moore (Jane Randolph) are now married and they have a six-year-old daughter, Amy (Ann Carter). This means that at least seven years must have elapsed since the events of the first movie.

Oliver has never fully recovered from the death of Irena. He deals with it by convincing himself that Irena simply had strange fantasies but Cat People is unequivocally and unambiguously a supernatural horror story. There is no doubt that the supernatural was involved.

Amy is a sweet kid but inclined to live in a dream world. She is solitary rather than lonely. The other children avoid her but this possibly bothers her father even more than it bothers her.

An eccentric old lady gives Amy a ring. It’s a wishing ring. The one thing Amy wishes for is a friend. The old lady has a daughter but refuses to admit it. She insists that her daughter died years earlier and that this woman is an imposter.

Oliver has an odd obsession that Amy is going to take after Irena. Which is of course impossible. She’s Alice’s child, not Irena’s. Although Oliver stubbornly refuses to admit that anything supernatural happened in the past involving Irena he does seem to fear that Irena might somehow be able to exert an influence on Amy. It’s a kind of irrational superstitious fear.

Oliver is not only worried about Amy’s tendency to live in a dream world. It frightens and angers him.

And Amy’s dream world takes a sudden turn when she finds the friend she so desperately wants. The lady is Irena, or Irena’s ghost.

There are many who insist that nothing at all supernatural happens in this movie. It can certainly be interpreted that way. Whether having viewed the movie you believe that Irena’s ghost is real or not is up to you.

With Nic Musuraca once again doing the cinematography this is a visually gorgeous movie with a very slight fairy tale flavour.

Lewton may not have liked the title but it did allow Simone Simon to be cast. After the huge success of Cat People Simone Simon was definitely regarded as bankable and she was the movie’s main selling point, getting top billing and being prominently featured on the poster. To be honest this is such a low-key movie that the title and the presence of Simone Simon were desperately needed to give it any chance at all of commercial success.

Ann Carter pretty much has to carry the whole movie and her superb performance is its biggest strength. Jane Randolph is dull. Kent Smith is dull as well and in this movie Oliver is a very unpleasant unsympathetic character.

Incidentally once the film was completed Lewton decided he was dissatisfied with the ending and ordered reshoots with a slightly different ending.

This is not even remotely a horror movie. It’s almost a fairy tale movie. It’s the story of an unhappy little girl and it was very autobiographical. There are bits of Lewton in Amy and in Oliver and other characters are based partially on people from Lewton’s past. It’s interesting but to me it seems too low-key for its own good and it’s not surprising that it’s commercial performance was disappointing. It’s worth a look as an interesting misfire although I should point out that most people like it a lot more than I did.

Robert Wise did go on to make a genuinely great horror movie, The Haunting (1963).

Isle of the Dead (1945)

Isle of the Dead, released in 1945, was the tenth of the eleven movies made by producer Val Lewton at RKO in the 40s. Yes, there were eleven - there were also two non-horror films.

Lewton started his run at RKO with Cat People which was a smash hit. The subsequent films fared increasingly poorly at the box office. Lewton’s idea had been to take an entirely fresh and original, and subtle, approach to the horror genre. Artistically the idea was a triumph but audiences were not too keen on subtle horror. And while Cat People had received rave reviews critical response to the later Lewton films was decidedly mixed. Critics even more than audiences struggled with the subtlety and psychological complexity of these films.

The nine Lewton horror films gradually built huge cult followings and they’re now worshipped by cinephiles but it is important to bear in mind that only Cat People and The Body Snatcher (the most conventional of the lot) achieved massive success at the time.

RKO had started to become just a little disillusioned. They wanted proper gothic horror settings, not contemporary settings, and they tried to force Lewton into more conventional channels by imposing Boris Karloff on him as the star for the final three films.

Isle of the Dead was a bit of a cheat on Lewton’s part. It does have a period setting but instead of central Europe in the nineteenth century it’s set on an island in the Aegean in 1912, during the First Balkan War. And instead of playing a monster Karloff plays a Greek general. There are supernatural monsters in the movie, or at least the idea of supernatural monsters plays an important role in the plot, but the supernatural definitely does not figure in the movie in the conventional way for which RKO was hoping.

An American war correspondent, Oliver Davis (Marc Cramer), has attached himself the the army of General Nikolas Pherides (Boris Karloff) which has just won a major victory against the Ottoman forces. There is just one tiny fly in the ointment - there have been a couple of cases of septicaemic plague in other Greek army units.

The inspiration for this movie was Arnold Böcklin’s famous painting of the same name. Or rather paintings - the Swiss Symbolist artist produced half a dozen versions between 1880 and 1901.

In the movie the General and Davis visit a tiny nearby island (which looks like the paintings) which is uninhabited and used as a cemetery. They intend to lay a wreath on the grave of the General’s wife. 

The island is represented by a matte painting and it’s a fine example of how effective that technique can be. When we reach the island we can’t help wondering if we’re leaving behind the world of science and reason and entering a world of nightmare.

They are in for a surprise. The island is well and truly inhabited. A Swiss archaeologist, Aubrecht (Jason Robards Sr) lives there with his housekeeper, an old peasant woman named Kyra (Helene Thimig). They have a whole tribe of house guests. There’s British diplomat St. Aubyn (Alan Napier), his wife Mary (Katherine Emery), their sweet but timid servant girl Thea (Ellen Drew) and there’s a Cockney tinware salesman named Robbins.

Davis and the General spend the night on the island. In the morning Robbins is dead, and all the symptoms point to septicaemic plague. 

The General, quite correctly, declares that the island is now under quarantine. Now all they can do is wait for the wind to change. The plague is spread by insects. When the sirocco starts to blow the hot winds will destroy the insects’ eggs and the plague will be over. There is no way of knowing when the sirocco will arrive. If it doesn’t arrive in time they are all doomed. There is no cure for the plague.

And to add to their troubles old Kyra is convinced that the evil has been brought upon them by a vorvolaka (an undead creature similar in some ways to both a ghoul and a vampire). She believes that Thea is the vorvolaka.

So until the movie is well advanced the horror comes from the fear of the plague and from Kyra’s superstitious beliefs. The General is of peasant stock and was raised in an atmosphere of superstition. When he reached the age of manhood he abandoned such beliefs and become a modern man, a man who believed in science and progress. But can we ever entirely forget the superstitious fears of childhood?

Early on we learn something that foreshadows the real horror content which hits us in the final third of the picture, and what a gut-punch it is when it arrives. I can’t think of anything from this era that can match it, apart from The Seventh Victim which just happens to be a Val Lewton picture directed by Mark Robson.

And in Isle of the Dead Mark Robson doesn’t put a foot wrong. Cinematographer Jack MacKenzie  shows us that he knows a thing or two about using light and shadow.

All the cast members are solid but it’s Karloff who has the really meaty role. The General is a good man, but a hard man. He has a stern sense of duty, but also a stern sense of justice. We may find it hard to warm to him but Karloff makes sure we respect him and are fascinated by him.

Isle of the Dead has subtlety and an atmosphere of dread and it has some real chills. Very highly recommended. 

The Body Snatcher (1945)

The Body Snatcher was one of the later RKO horror B-films produced by Val Lewton and was a major commercial success for the studio. It was shot in 1944 and released in 1945. It was the first of the three Lewton films to star Boris Karloff (actually Isle of the Dead should have been the first but production was temporarily halted and it was completed after The Body Snatcher).

It was based on Robert Louis Stevenson’s story of the same name which was based in turn on the infamous West Port Murders (for which Burke and Hare were believed responsible).

The story takes place in Edinburgh in 1831. Dr MacFarlane (Henry Daniell) is not only a very prominent doctor but also a renowned teacher at Edinburgh’s famous medical school. Like his predecessor Dr Knox (who was involved in the Burke and Hare case) Dr MacFarlane has one major problem - the immense difficulty of obtaining a sufficient supply of cadavers for his students. His main source of supply is a cabman named Gray (Boris Karloff). Gray has a knack for supplying bodies when needed. The bodies in fact are obtained from grave-robbing.

In the West Port Murders case it was alleged that Burke and Hare not only robbed graves but also hastened the deaths of the unfortunates who provided the cadavers. We have our suspicions right from the start that Gray may well be doing the same thing. Dr MacFarlane certainly has very strong suspicions but he dare not voice them. For one thing he himself could well be implicated in any investigation. Secondly, he wants those cadavers for his students. And finally, it is clear that Gray has some sort of hold over him.

MacFarlane’s new assistant, Donald Fettes (Russell Wade), wants to give up studying medicine entirely when he discovers Gray’s activities. He is persuaded not to do so by MacFarlane. MacFarlane argues that the benefits for society (more and better trained doctors) outweighs the evils of grave-robbing and possible murder. To what extent both MacFarlane and Fettes have really convinced themselves of this we are not really sure but the internal moral dilemmas faced by both men provide much of the movie’s impetus.

There’s a sub-plot involving a little girl who needs an operation in order to be able to walk again, and Dr MacFarlane is the only man capable of performing it. This sub-plot could have been merely an excuse to indulge in some cheap sentimentality but it’s used quite cleverly in order to give us a much greater insight into Dr MacFarlane’s very troubled mind.

Lewton was more interested in movies that explored interesting psychological states rather than just horror pictures as such. The basis of his success at RKO was his ability to produce movies that combined both psychology and horror. In The Body Snatcher the real core of the story is the complex and unhealthy relationship between Dr MacFarlane and Gray and the resulting psychological power struggles between the two men.

Like all the Lewton RKO productions this movie is more character than plot-driven. This means that the actors are required to do some real acting. That proves to be no problem. Karloff was delighted with his role, realising instantly that it was going to give him the opportunity to really show his acting chops. He delivers a superb performance. For Henry Daniell it also offered one of his best roles and he made the most of it. 

Karloff and Daniell dominate the movie entirely. Russell Wade is more than adequate but inevitably he is hopelessly overshadowed. Bela Lugosi is relegated to a minor role which he carries off reasonably well (this was to be the last film in which Karloff and Lugosi appeared together).

For this film it was going to be necessary to evoke the feel of early 19th century Edinburgh.  Medieval Paris might not sound like an ideal match but Lewton realised that standing sets built for The Hunchback of Notre Dame would in fact be quite suitable for this purpose.

The original script for The Body Snatcher was written by Philip MacDonald but it was Lewton himself who was responsible for the final shooting script (although as always he used a pseudonym for his writing credit).

Lewton was one of that small handful of producers who not only wanted to make a genuine creative contribution to their movies but also had the talent actually to do so. Perhaps even more importantly he seemed to have the ability to do this without treading on the toes of either his directors or his writers. One of the most effective scenes in the picture, in which a young street singer is seen walking away from the camera down a street leading into a kind of tunnel, was (according to Robert Wise) one of Lewton’s ideas.

Lewton had given Robert Wise his first opportunity as a director when he assigned him to complete The Curse of The Cat People. The Body Snatcher was his third film for Lewton. On the whole Wise does a fine job. He lacks the true visual genius of a Jacques Tourneur but The Body Snatcher is still an impressive-looking film.

The DVD supposedly includes an audio commentary track by director Robert Wise. What it actually is is a lengthy interview with Wise, but it’s still quite interesting even if he doesn’t have a huge amount to say specifically about The Body Snatcher. 

The transfer featured on the DVD is superb.

The Body Snatcher is not quite in the top rank of the Lewton horror films but it’s a good movie nonetheless, offering the usual Lewton blend of intelligent thoughtful horror (particularly impressive in this case with subject material that would tempt most film-makers to take a much more sensationalistic and exploitative approach). Highly recommended.

The Ghost Ship (1943)

The Ghost Ship, directed by Mark Robson in 1943, is considered to be one of the lesser pictures produced by Val Lewton at RKO in the mid-1940s. It’s certainly not in the same class as Cat People or The Seventh Victim but very few movies are. It’s still an interesting little movie.  

The story concerns a young man, Tom Merriam, on his first posting at sea as third officer of a freighter called the Altair. The captain seems to want to take Merriam under his wing, but Merriam soon notices some rather worrying things about his captain. Like the captain’s obsession with authority. He talks about it constantly. Much of what he says on the subject, and on command and responsibility, is more or less true. It’s just that he seems to take it a little too far. A captain must appear to his crew to be infallible but when he starts to believe that he really is infallible, that even an unreasonable order becomes reasonable because as captain he has the right to give such an order, the situation can become dangerous.

Things start to go wrong on this voyage right from the start. A member of the crew dies soon after the ship leaves port. There is a potentially disastrous incident involving a cargo hook, an incident that casts doubt on the captain’s judgment.

There are obvious parallels to The Caine Mutiny. Both films deal with a junior officer who begins to suspect that the captain of the ship is dangerously incompetent. In both cases the captain’s behaviour is ambiguous - there are incidents that could be interpreted as errors of judgment but could just as easily be ascribed to chance or misfortune. Once a subordinate begins to suspect a superior of incompetence there is the danger that he will misinterpret the superior’s actions.

Of course there are differences. In The Ghost Ship the captain really does turn out to be dangerous - incompetent perhaps, but mad certainly.

There are further incidents as the voyage progresses and these incidents could be ascribed not merely to incompetence but possibly even malice. 

Tom Merriam persuades himself that he must do something about the situation but his difficulty is that he has no real evidence - certainly nothing that would be likely to convince a court of enquiry. 

Richard Dix as the captain gives us a fine portrait of a lonely, insecure, fearful personality clinging to his rigid notions of authority because those notions are all he has. The major weakness of the movie is Russell Wade as Merriam – he’s too bland and too earnest.

The film’s biggest weakness is the stilted dialogue that Donald Henderson Clarke’s screenplay offers the actors, and the problem is compounded by the fact that none of the actors can be said to have the acting chops to overcome the weakness of the script. 

The story itself is a good one - it just needed someone to do a bit more work on the dialogue.

Like most of the Lewton pictures this is a psychological study rather than a monster movie – a psychological study not just of an authoritarian personality, but of the way other people allow such personalities to exercise their despotic powers. It’s a story of paranoia made more intriguing by the fact that there’s paranoia on the part of both the hero and his adversary.

The story could perhaps be interpreted as a commentary on the nature of totalitarianism - and a captain’s power over his crew is as absolute as that of a  totalitarian political leader. The theme of unwillingness to confront authority and unwillingness to defy the pressure to conform is however more of a universal theme of individualism versus the herd instinct.

The ending is just a little rushed, but the movie includes some wonderful scenes – the scene with the swinging hook, and the one with the anchor chain, are highly original, visually arresting and very scary. Since it’s done once again by Nick Musuraca (who was director of photography on several of the most notable Val Lewton pictures) it is hardly necessary to add that the cinematography is superb and that it has a definite film noir atmosphere. The feel of the movie in fact combines film noir and gothic imagery.

The Warner Home Video DVD release (which pairs The Ghost Ship with The Leopard Man on a single disc) offers a very satisfactory transfer.

This might not be in the top rank of Lewton’s RKO productions  but Lewton’s lesser films are still better than most people’s best films. The Ghost Ship is a moody low-key psychological suspense thriller with just a hint of horror. It’s an interesting enough story and the exceptionally original visual imagery are sufficient to make it as must-see. Highly recommended.

The Seventh Victim (1943)

Most of Val Lewton’s 1940s RKO horror movies have at least some affinity to film noir, and this is seen at its most striking and most dramatic in The Seventh Victim.

Released in 1943 and directed by Mark Robson, The Seventh Victim is of course also a very fine horror film, and it’s one of the subtlest horror films ever made.

The deal Lewton had with RKO is that the studio would give him a title and he would then have to construct a movie around it. It sounds crazy but it worked and it gave Lewton the almost complete artistic freedom that he craved - all the studio demanded was that the resulting movie should be scary, it should be made within a very limited budget and it should use their title. It was an arrangement that suited Lewton perfectly.

Mary Gibson (Kim Hunter in her film debut) is a schoolgirl who learns that her sister Jacqueline is missing. She sets off for New York to find her. She eventually discovers that Jacqueline has become involved with devil-worshippers. She meets the men in Jacqueline’s life, an odd assortment including a failed poet and a cynical psychiatrist. Jacqueline is obviously running from something but it takes Mary quite a while to learn what it is. In fact, as the quotation from Donne that open the movie makes clear, Jacqueline is both running from and running towards death.

What follows is structurally a detective story with first Mary and then the poet Jason acting as amateur detectives, but the movie’s dark themes are enough to qualify it as a horror film. They’re also enough to qualify it as true film noir.

DeWitt Bodeen had been responsible for the screenplay for Cat People was was given the job of writing the initial treatment for The Seventh Victim. Lewton wasn’t satisfied with it and assigned Charles O’Neal to do a complete re-write. Bodeen and O’Neal then collaborated on the script with Lewton, as always, doing the final re-write. Lewton had asked Bodeen to attend a meeting of a society of devil-worshippers, which he did. The writer was struck by the ordinariness and the futility of these New York Satanists, qualities which characterised the Satanists in the movie. The movie can be seen  as being as much as anything an attack on the evil of nihilism, nihilism being the quality that makes people vulnerable to cults such as the movie’s devil-worshippers.

Lewton added numerous literary allusions to the screenplay and these allusions, rather than seeming pompous, add considerably to the movie’s essential fatalism.

The screenplay has obvious film noir elements with Jacqueline being the basically good person whose flaws lead her down into darkness, these flaws being her boredom, her obsession with death and her nihilism. The stylistic approach strongly reinforces the film noir feel.

Jean Brooks as Jacqueline looks like a cross between a film noir femme fatale and a proto-goth. She looks in fact like the kind of girl who’d join a Satanist cult for the thrill of it. The characters all have more depth and complexity than is usual in B-pictures and Tom Conway as psychiatrist Dr Louis Judd and Erford Gage as Jason succeed in capturing the essential ambiguity of their characters. All the characters are torn between light and darkness, between good and evil, between life and death, and all must make a final choice.

Mark Robson had edited Lewton’s first three horror pictures, directed by Jacques Tourneur, and when RKO assigned Tourneur to other projects Lewton promoted Robson to director. Lewton was very pleased with the results, and rightly so. Robson had a tremendous admiration for Lewton and knew exactly what Lewton wanted.

Few cinematographers have ever exceeded Nicholas Musuraca’s brilliance in capturing the soul and spirit of film noir and he’s at his best in this film. There’s nothing flashy about his photography but the atmosphere of doom, of evil and of inevitable catastrophe is palpable right from the start.

The subway scene with the corpse of Mr August is one of the great visual set-pieces that distinguished all of Lewton’s RKO films. The earlier scene in which August is killed is yet another and it’s a superb exercise in suspense and atmosphere. The opening scene in the office of the headmistress at Mary’s school is impressive for the amount of trouble taken for what is really a fairly minor scene. Lewton insisted on getting the details right, this being one of the qualities that makes his RKO movies so much more than mere B-movies. Even more impressive is the starkness and bleakness in the early scene in which Mary enters Jacqueline’s room to find that it contains nothing but a chair positioned beneath a noose. There’s also an ominous scene with Mary in the shower being warned off by Mrs Redi, with the shadowy figure of Mrs Redi seen through the shower curtain.

This is one of the darkest Hollywood movies of the 40s. Superficially it paints an extraordinarily bleak picture of life, so bleak that death seems welcome. It’s worth pointing out though that the characters do have a choice. In some cases the choices they have made may seem to make death the only attractive option left to them, but they didn’t have to make those choices. This is something that Dr Louis Judd points out to the Satanists, that they have chosen darkness and death but they could have chosen life. Whether Dr Judd himself has made the wrong choices is open to debate. The fact that the characters have a choice means that the movie is not simply an exercise in adolescent self-pity and gloom. Life may be bleak but nihilism makes it a good deal bleaker.

The Region 1 DVD includes a number of extras including a commentary track, and it boasts a very fine transfer.

The Seventh Victim is one of the greatest of Hollywood horror films and it is also a fascinating exercise in film noir. It’s a complex movie that becomes more fascinating with each viewing. Very highly recommended.

Youth Runs Wild (1944)

Youth Runs Wild was a 1944 product of Val Lewton’s legendary B-movie unit at RKO, but if you’re expecting it to be like his horror movies you’re going to be disappointed.

When we think of juvenile delinquent movies we naturally think of the 1950s, but in fact they were being made as early as the 1930s, Dorothy Davenport’s 1934 The Road To Ruin being an outstanding early example. The Road To Ruin was an exploitation movie, made outside the studio system and not subject to the Production Code, and it was therefore able to be fairly racy with drugs, booze and even nudity being featured. Youth Runs Wild on the other hand was a product of the studio system, and it’s very much blander.

Frankie Hauser (Glen Vernon) is 15 years old. He lives with his parents and his older sister Mary, whose husband Danny has gone off to war. Frankie is in love with the girl next door, Sarah. She’s an older woman, being 16 years old. The Hausers are an ordinary decent family.

Frankie had never been any problem to his parents, not until recently. Now he’s been playing truant from school. Both Mary and his parents are inclined to suspect that Sarah has been a bad influence on him, and this suspicion grows much stronger when Frankie finds himself hauled before a Juvenile Court. Frankie is now forbidden to see Sarah. Danny, now returned to the US after being wounded, is assigned parole of Frankie and his two youthful partners in crime.

Sarah has her own problems. Her parents are only interested in partying and as far as they’re concerned she’s just in the way.

Both Frankie and Sarah have been seeing quite a lot of Larry Duncan (Lawrence Tierney) and his girlfriend Toddy (Bonita Granville). Larry always seem to have lots of money, and this makes Frankie feel very inadequate. Frankie’s problem is that he is still just a kid, and he’s in too much of a hurry to grow up. Watching people like his brother-in-law Danny go off to war makes him feel even more of a kid. With the US war effort in full swing Frankie feels he is missing out, that kids only a few years older than him are in uniform and getting the respect that goes along with that.

The movie limps along to a painfully predictable ending, with an even more painful epilogue of government propaganda about the ways juvenile delinquency is being solved. The movie mostly takes the line that everything is the parents’ fault, although rather disturbingly it seems to imply that the government can and will fix everything.

The problem with this movie is that Hollywood had not yet invented the teenager, producers were not yet aiming movies specifically at the teen market, and teen subcultures   had not yet been recognised. As a result the movie lacks the focus on the clothes, the style, the music of teenagers that 50s juvenile delinquent movies have. It comes across as a movie aimed at the parents, intended as a stern warning of the dangers of neglecting their kids. Socially conscious movies with a message are almost always cringe-inducing and this particular movie is a prime example of that tendency. The screenplay is unbelievably clumsy and heavy-handed.

Mark Robson directed a couple of notable pictures for Lewton in the 40s, but this movie lacks the style of the Lewton horror films. The B-movie budget is painfully apparent and the story does not offer the opportunities for hiding the modest budget by the use of low-key lighting. The result is a movie that looks as dull as the story it is telling.

The acting is uniformly unimpressive, but given the blandness of the script, the terrible dialogue the actors had to work with and the heavy-handed message incorporated into virtually every scene, you really have to feel sorry for the cast. There really wasn’t much they could do. Even Lawrence Tierney seems unusually dull - Larry is just not a bad enough villain to give Tierney anything to sink his teeth into.

Youth Runs Wild remains no more than a curiosity in Val Lewton’s filmography. It lacks the camp value that makes 1950s juvenile delinquent movies so much fun and it’s painfully earnest. It’s a movie that wants to be an exploitation movie but everybody involved in making it was much too timid to go that route. It’s interesting to see a 1944 movie grappling with a phenomenon that was only just starting to attract attention, and also grappling with the stresses that the war imposed on people on the home front, but sitting through this movie is quite a chore, even with a running time of just 67 minutes. If nothing else, it proves that even Val Lewton could make a bad movie.