If you’ve been following my blog for a while, you would have figured out, that I’m a singer/songwriter & recording artist, because I’ve mentioned it, oh about a zillion times…So here I go again taking a song of mine ‘Savage Bliss‘ off my lo-fi neo classical album The Amber Sessionsand mashing it up in the editing bowl with Jean Cocteau’sLa Belle et la Bete (1946) Starring Josette Day and Jean Marais.
I love working with the films that have inspired me, adding my musical voice to the images, not because I flatter myself as a couch surfing filmmaker, rather as a way of expressing my eternal gratitude for the release and fulfillment that film has given me since I was a little monster girl singer/songwriter. So without any further adieu…!
Here’s to the beauty and the beast in all of us… cheers-MonsterGirl
Director Max Ophüls( Letter From An Unknown Woman 1948, The Reckless Moment 1949) offers a gritty and volatile film noir starring James Mason, Barbara Bel Geddes, and the imposing figure of Robert Ryan. With an uncredited assistant directorship by Robert Aldrich. Based on the book Wild Calendar by Libbie Block
Written by Arthur Laurents (The Snake Pit 1948, West Side Story 1961, The Way We Were 1973)
Interesting question: If Howard Hughes gained control of RKO in 1949, was Robert Ryan’s characterization of Smith Ohlrig truly based on Hughs?
A young Howard Hughes…Ryan was perfect for the part of Smith Ohlrig.
Also stars Frank Ferguson (regular on Andy Griffith Show) as Quinada’s partner Dr. Hoffman, Art Smith as Ohlrig’s psychiatrist who knows Ohlrig is a walking powder keg, Natalie Schafer as Dorothy Dale and Curt Bois as Ohlrig’s personal assistant, and like many a good Film Noir delivers, the snarky gay cipher – Franzi Kartos, who’s incessantly calling Leonora DARLING… that if subtitled would read ‘you bourgeois cow…’
One of the staples of the Noir catalog, Caught is a brutish and self-contained story about an egomaniac, hungry for power and consumed by a nasty possessiveness that borders on the psychotic.
Paging Dr. Freud… a classic case of overcompensation and oh yes… this man is a ticking time bomb.
Robert Ryan is chilling as the Neanderthal bigwig worth millions of dollars, with an explosive rage that rests on simmer until something sets him off when it doesn’t go his way. Oh, and Ohlrig also suffers from panic attacks, which he believes is truly a heart condition and not a nervous disorder.
Barbara Bel Geddes is the naive Leonora Eames, who has childlike fancies of marrying a wealthy man and living a life of luxury. Invited to a party on a boat one night, she meets Smith Ohlrig outside on the pier, near his yacht. Although Ohlrig could have any woman he chooses, something about Leonora sparks on him. From the very first encounter, we can see that it’s not a romantic chemistry that stirs Ohlrig, but something more forbidding and sinister.
Once he sets his sights on her, taking her for a ride in his car, he decides there and then, to marry this plain girl, whom he doesn’t love but knows he can possess easily.
Leonora soon realizes that her dream has become a nightmare and that Smith is a menacing character who treats her like part of the furniture and is not quite right in the head.
Ohlrig refuses to give Leonora a divorce, so she decides to leave her opulent home on Long Island and take a job as a receptionist in the city working for a doctor who runs a free clinic in a very poor neighborhood.
Perhaps this is Leonora’s way of cleansing her soul for making the mistake of marrying for money and not for love.
James Mason is Dr. Larry Quinada the absolute antithesis of Smith Ohlrig. He’s genteel and compassionate, and soon the two fall in love, though Leonora is held captive by her dominating husband.
Leonora Eames: Look at me! Look at what you bought!
Complicating matters is the fact that Leonora becomes pregnant by the sadistic Ohlrig who would rather see her a prisoner in the sterile palace that is her home rather than let her go free… Is the threat of financial security and the welfare of their unborn child that which will chain her to him forever…?
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Smith Ohlrig: Is she coming down? Franzi Kartos: [Stands silent, knowing that Leonora is not coming down] Smith Ohlrig: [Getting angrier] Why the devil do you think I sent you up there, you dirty little parasite? Get her down here! Franzi Kartos: [Long pause] I think I prefer to be a headwaiter again, Mr. Ohlrig. Franzi Kartos: [Heads for the door, then stops] You know, you’re a big man, but not big enough to destroy that girl. Goodbye.
Franzi Kartos tinkling the ivories…darling.
There are thousands of fabulous films in my collection just as thrilling, this is one of them! Don’t you get caught-MonsterGirl
Directed by Charles Vidor the man responsible for the eminent noir classic, Gilda 1946 and no relation to the more well know King Vidor. With a screenplay byReginald Denham (The Mad Room 1969 a modern reworking of the same play, Suspense, Kraft Theater and Alfred Hitchock Presents)
The Mad Room 1969 a modern reworking of Denham’s Ladies in Retirement starring Shelley Winters and Stella Stevens.
The film is a suspenseful story with tremors of ethical dilemma, evocative of pity and encompassed by the moor like fog of madness and desperation.
Ida Lupino plays the reticent Ellen Creed, housekeeper to the colorful Leonora Fiske (Isobel Elsom) who has retired from the music hall stage. Ellen is the obsessive guardian of her two loosely screwed sisters Emily and Louisa portrayed deliciously vague sort of loony by Elsa Lanchester (Emily) and Edith Barrett (Louisa).
Ellen manipulates Leonora to allow her quirky siblings to come and visit, well aware that she has no intention of making it a temporary stay. Once Leonora realizes that the two are batty, she demands that they leave forcing Ellen to do the unthinkable, to not only murder her employer, but create a deceptive strategy that will allow the sisters to dwell in sanctuary at the cozy manor house by the moors.
Unfortunately, Ellen not only has the full time job of wrangling her nutty sisters, she becomes the target of her blackmailing nephew Albert Feather, played with a dash of charming malevolence by Louis Hayward. ( And Then There Were None 1945, Ruthless 1958, House By The River, Night Gallery: Certain Shadows on The Wall.)
The film is moody, macabre, theatrical, with a musty air of Gothic as Leonora’s remains lay hidden in the coal bin behind the bricks, near the grand piano where she once boisterously sang Tit -Willow from The Mikado…
The atmosphere stays closed in, as all three sisters flit about exposing their disconnection to reality. Evelyn Keyes is Lucy the house maid who brings a bit of naivete to the atmosphere as she too falls prey to Albert the ‘charming rogue” who gets her to participate unwittingly in his ruthless scheme of blackmail.
A quiet and delicately creepy hybrid of the old dark house sub genre of horror, mixed with suspenseful psychological thriller as it whimsically touches on the subject of mental illness and the darker sides of human nature.
The brooding Lanchester and the chattering, guileless Barrett (I Walked With A Zombie, The Ghost Ship, Jane Eyre all 1943) are wonderful as the one who is intense and a compulsive collector, to the one who is as fay as an aged wood sprite, wide eyed and childlike.
In contrast to the flightiness of her two sisters, the tightly coiled Lupino is beautiful and menacing as she anguishes over the fate of the peculiar pair who act more like undisciplined children, and less the blatant lunatics.
It’s the subtle intrusions of reality that impinge on the character’s terminal state of fantasy,which brings out the self-centered, insulated psyches of the two sisters. This creates the environment of insanity, and while they cause the situation to ignite a criminal conspiracy because of their unchallenged instability they are essentially harmless ultimately exposing Ellen as the most dangerous and cunning in the family.
Albert charms his way into Leonora’s home and heart!
Louisa Creed: I hate the dark. It frightens me. Sister Theresa: It shouldn’t, my dear. Don’t you believe we’re watched over? Louisa Creed: Oh yes. But I’m never quite sure who’s watching us.
Ida Lupino on the set of Ladies in Retirement 1941
There are thousands of films as fabulous as this in my collection, this is just one of them!-MonsterGIrl
You know, men aren’t the only ones that know how to use a syringe…turn some dials, flip some switches, crank the whatsit, and raise up the thingamabob…extend the oscillator and tweak the Mezzershmitzchen levels!
Women play with Ape Men, they build men, they like maggots, make deadly nerve gas and even perform reconstructive surgery on their own faces!
The 49th Parallel (1949) Directed by Michael Powell and starring Leslie Howard and Laurence OlivierLa Belle et la Bête 1946 directed by Jean Cocteau starring Jean Marais and Josette DayBeggars of Life 1928 staring Wallace Beery, Louise Brooks and Richard Arlen. Directed by William WellmanBunny Lake is Missing 1965 Directed by Otto Preminger. Starring Carol Lynley, Laurence Olivier, and Keir DulleaLa Main du Diable or Carnival of Sinners 1943 Directed by Maurice Tourneur and stars Pierre Fresnay, Josseline Gael and Noel RoquevertThe Devil and Daniel Webster 1941 Directed by William Dieterle and stars Walter Houston as Old Scratch, and Edward Arnold, Jane Darwell and Simone Simon.Dracula’s Daughter 1936 directed by Lambert Hillyer and starring Gloria Holden, Otto Kruger and Marguerite ChurchillExperiment in Terror 1962 directed by Blake Edwards and starring Lee Remick, Glenn Ford, Stephanie Powers and a raspy Ross Martin as ‘Red’ LynchFallen Angel 1945 Directed by Otto Preminger and starring Linda Darnell, Dana Andrews and Alice FayeFedra The Devil’s Daughter 1956 Directed by Manuel Mur Oti and stars Emma Penelia, Enrique Diosdado and Vicente ParraJoan Crawford is Possessed 1947 directed by Curtis Bernhardt, also starring Van Heflin and Raymond MasseyDiaboliques 1955 directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot and starring Simone Signoret, Vera Clouzot and Paul MeurisseNever Take Sweets From A Stranger 1960 Directed by Cyril Frankel and stars Gwen Watford, Patrick Allen and Felix AylmerThe Night Holds Terror 1955 Directed by Andrew L. Stone starring Jack Kelly, Hildy Parks, Vince Edwards and John CassavetesRobert Mitchum is Harry Powell, in Night of The Hunter 1955 Directed by Charles Laughton also starring Shelley Winters and Lillian GishPlunder Road 1957 directed by Hubert Cornfield and stars Gene Raymond, Jeanne Cooper, Wayne Morris and Elisha Cook Jr.Seance On a Wet Afternoon 1964 directed by Bryan Forbes and stars Kim Stanley, Richard Attenborough and Margaret LaceyAlfred Hitchcock’s Strangers On a Train 1951 starring Farley Granger, Robert Walker and Ruth RomanGloria Swanson is Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard 1950 Directed by Billy Wilder and starring William Holden and Erich von StroheimVal Lewton’s The Seventh Victim 1943 Directed by Mark Robson and stars Kim Hunter, Tom Conway and Jean BrooksBoris Karloff and Bela Lugosi star in Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Black Cat 1934 inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s story.The Killer Is Loose 1956 Directed by Budd Boetticher and stars Joseph Cotten, Rhonda Fleming and Wendell CoreyThe Ox-Bow Incident 1943 Directed by William Wellman and stars Henry Fonda, Dana Andrews, Mary Beth Hughes and Anthony QuinnThe Prowler 1951 Directed by Joseph Losey and stars Evelyn Keyes and Van HeflinThe Queen of Spades 1949 Directed by Thorold Dickinson and stars Anton Walbrook, Edith Evans and Yvonne MitchellLon Chaney stars in Tod Browning’s The Unknown 1927 also starring Joan Crawford and Norman Kerry.Edward L. Cahn’s 1956 film The WerewolfJean Epstein’s The Fall of the House of Usher 1928 inspired by Edgar Allan Poe and adapted for the screen by Luis BunuelCarl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr (1932) Based on a story by Sheridan Le Fanu. Starring Julian West, Maurice Schutz and Rena Mandel
Aelita:Queen of Mars 1924Aelita:Queen of Mars 1924Daughter of Destiny 1928 Brigitte Helm-AlrauneAnne Francis Forbidden Planet 1956Anne Francis-Forbidden Planet 1956Cat Women of The Moon 1953
Cat Women of the MoonDevil Girl From Mars 1954Devil Girl From Mars 1954Fire Maidens of Outer Space 1956
Fire Maidens of Outer Space 1956Metropolis 1927 dancing Maria Brigitte Helm
MetropolisThe Phantom Planet 1961Plan 9 From Outer Space 1959Queen of Outer Space 1958She 1935She 1935She 1935She 1935She-1935the Mole PeopleThe Mole PeopleThings to Come 1936Things To Come 1936The Astounding She MonsterTerror From the Year 5000Â Planet of Female Invaders -Mexican sci-fi!Santos vs the women martian invasion 1966Cat Women of The Moon
The CassandraMetaphor can have various invocations. Also called a ‘syndrome’, ‘complex’, ‘phenomenon’ ‘dilemma’ or ‘curse.’ This occurs when valid warnings are dismissed or ignored.
Originating from Greek Mythology, Cassandra was the daughter of Priam King of Troy. Apollo became obsessed with her beauty and so gave her the gift of prophecy. But once Cassandra rebuffed Apollo’s sexual advances, he cursed her making it impossible for anyone to believe her warnings. She could never convince anyone of her predictions.
Thus could be the origin of ‘the hysterical woman.’ Women often depicted in films as hysterical, to be dismissed, confined, calmed down, psychiatrically subdued and shut away.
The metaphor has been used in various contexts of psychology, philosophy and cinema.
"I have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really." –Tennessee Williams
Rosemary’s Baby 1968Women’s Prison 1955Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte 1964Airport 1970The Snake Pit 1948A Woman Under the Influence 1974The Haunting 1963The Devils 1971House on Haunted Hill 1959The Birds 1963Strait-Jacket 1964Repulsion 1965Suddenly Last Summer 1959Caged 1950
This post continues from Part 1 at the link above!
And now, Part II
FANTASY as REALITY, REALTY as FANTASY – From page 112, Chapter 7, J.P Telotte Dreams of Darkness
The Curse of the Cat People(1944)
The child per se makes us uneasy, ambivalent ; we are anxious about the human propensities concentrated by the child symbol. It evokes too much of what has been left out or is unknown, becoming easily associated with the primitive, mad and mystical. – James Hillman ” Abandoning the Child” in Loose Ends.
The evil little girl in Master of the Macabre Mario Bava’s Kill Baby Kill (1966).The embodiment of evil in a little blonde girl from Federico Fellini’s segment Toby Dammit of 1968’s Spirits of The Dead.In stark contrast to those two iconic evil imps of horror (above), Amy Reed is not supposed evil incarnate, but she does threaten the equilibrium of the ‘normal’ world her father inhabits.
To continue with this blog post about one of Lewton’s very precious stories, less dark than his others, and dealing with childhood, the fears of and by children.
All of Lewton’s works dealt with subject matters that forced us to push the boundaries of ‘the familiar.’ They challenged us to face a darker, more mysterious reality of the natural world and the incomprehensible landscape of the human psyche.
Curse of the Cat People (1944) acts as a cinematic continuum to Lewton’sCat People 1942, featuring Simone Simononce again as the alluring and sensual Irena Dubrovna Reed, who may or may not have belonged to a race of beings that could shapeshift into the physical form of a large cat or black panther when sexually aroused.
The symbol of Irena synthesized the fear of women’s sexuality, sexual freedom, the women’s body, and often the correlation that is made with women’s emotional existence and madness. What is engendered in Cat People (1942)is far less about a woman who can morph into a predatory feline and more about the collective fear of ‘The Monstrous Feminine.’
Amy lashes out at the little boy who has crushed her beautiful friend, the butterfly. Fear the woman/child.
While Amy is not Irena’s biological daughter, Amy is truly more of a progeny to Irena and the mystique she embodies because they are both alienated figures who are frustrated and misunderstood. Who stand outside the social community which is pumped from the veins of ‘rational’, normative thoughts and behaviors. Amy is the figure of ‘The Fearing Child,’ an innocent who not only has ‘power’ but can wreak havoc in our ‘normal’ world.
Both characters are imaginative and rely on their senses. They are more connected to the natural world, to the darkness, which is associated with feminine energy, and less intellectual, which is considered a masculine marker. They are considered emotional, irrational, and dangerously unpredictable. The character of Oliver Reed is just as frightened and, moreover, threatened by his six-year-old little girl as he was of his beautiful and tragic wife Irena, who was more a victim than ever, the ‘monster’ she was perceived to be.
In Cat People, Curse of the Cat People, I Walked With A Zombie, The Leopard Man, The 7th Victim, and Isle of The Dead, there aren’t concrete Monsters as in Universal films, as in Frankenstein’s creation, Dracula, or The Wolf Man.
Universal’s Bride of Frankenstein 1935 Literal monsters in a corporeal world.
RKO studio heads had a mistrust of Lewton’s creative vision, his unconventional approach to some esoteric subject matter, or volatile subjects such as a woman’s sexual desires. Lewton, rather than using literal lumbering, fanged, or hairy monsters, used the powers of suggestion and shadow to tell the story.
Irena emerged from Lewton’s shadow world in Cat People 1942.Little Amy is lost within the emerging shadows of the old dark house in Lewton’s Curse of The Cat People 1944.Barbara Ferran always placed by a door like a bystander, she is bombarded by Lewton’s shadows.
Lewton disliked mask-like faces that were hardly human, the kinds of images that were expected from the horror genre he was infiltrating. Lewton liked to reveal the monsters that were lurking in the subconscious primitive recesses of our own imaginations. Shadows become the monster in these films, they are the mysterious layer that surfaces in world that only makes sense in the light of day. And Amy draws the shadows to her…
They do not have scary faces, they are quite human and in fact ordinary. He takes the ‘familiar’ and inverts it, subverts it, rattles the soundness of an accepted experience, and turns it into either an illusion, a nightmare, or a fit of paranoia. He taps into our childhood fears and sets those fears on the frightened characters in his shadow plays. Usually, the thing they fear is uprooting their own personal desires and the fear of coming face to face with them.
The tragic and tormented Irena in Cat People 1942.
Oliver couldn’t handle Irena’s sexual desires, nor her desirability; it triggered too much of his own primal urges, and so he demonized her, a fragile girl in a foreign country who believed in folklore from her very ancient set of beliefs handed down for centuries.
Oliver Reed has a fear of foreign Objects!-Cat People 1942.
A story which quite often itself was ambiguous as to whether the threat was real or imagined. RKO wanted to be in competition with Universal, so they added footage of a menacing Panther, which was inserted into several scenes of Cat People.
Val Lewton’s short story ‘The Bagheeta’ appeared in Farnsworth Wright’s July 1930 issue of Weird Tales Magazine. Lewton was dabbling in concepts of terror, before he even got to RKO.
The story takes place in Ukraine (from which MonsterGirl’s people hail!) and is a coming-of-age story about a 16-year-old boy named Kolya who helps his Uncle forge armor. Someone comes into the village with a slaughtered sheep, who claims to have seen a Bagheeta, a monstrous black leopard that can change its form into a beautiful woman. Only one person can kill a Bagheeta, and that is a virgin male, for he needs to be able to resist her seductive powers. If he is seduced, the woman will change back into the black leopard and kill the boy and eat him! Lewton would eventually adapt and produce his story for RKO in the form of Cat People in 1942 starring Simone Simon, the suggested embodiment of a Bagheeta.
The Panther
His vision, from the constantly passing bars, has grown so weary that it cannot hold anything else. It seems to him there are a thousand bars, and behind the bars, no world.
As he paces in cramped circles, over and over, the movement of his powerful, soft strides is like a ritual dance around a center in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.
Only at times the curtain of the pupils lifts, quietly — An image enters in, rushes down through the tensed, arrested muscles, plunges into the heart and is gone.
Curse of the Cat People is filled with poignant original music by Roy Webb and with Cinematography by Nicholas Musuraca (Cat People 1942, The Fallen Sparrow 1943, The 7th Victim 1943, The Spiral Staircase 1945Bedlam 1946 and Out of The Past 1947) It’s no wonder Curse of The Cat Peoplehas many of the elements of a classic film noir piece.
After the tragic death of his wife Irena, played by the beautiful Simone Simon, Oliver Reed, once again played by Kent Smtih, has remarried his co-worker Alice (Jane Randolph). They now have a very serious yet gentle six-year-old girl named Amy (Ann Carter) who is taken to daydreaming and being a loner.
She does not mix in well with the other children at school who do not understand her sensitivity or her private world of fantasy that she has built around her as a survival mechanism.
“My beautiful friend”
Symbolic of Amy’s free spirit, the little boy captures her ‘beautiful friend’ and crushes it. Thinking that this would make her happy, he destroys the very thing that symbolizes her own spirit and her connection to the natural world.Amy is framed here in absolute alienation from the rest of the world.
Amy’s father, Oliver, constantly wields authoritative criticism of his daughter’s daydreaming and wants her to play with the other children and exist in the ‘real’ world. Amy has a birthday party for which she invites the children in her class, but no one shows up that day, and Oliver discovers that she has mailed out the invitations by placing them in the magic wishing tree, which is a hollowed-out knot of the large tree out behind the house.
Waiting for her classmates to share her birthday wishes. But no one ever comes.
Oliver reaches into the wishing-tree and pulls out the birthday invitations.
.
Amy is again admonished for believing that the tree was a real wishing tree. Something he himself had told her not too long ago.
Oliver had told Amy this was a magic spot when she was younger, and she remembers it, understanding it to be true because her father told her it was. She was taught to believe in magic and then, without preparation, was expected to denounce all things wondrous without any serious provocation on her part. She is only six years old, after all.
Saddened by her classmates’ absence at her party, Oliver, Alice, and Edward, the manservant from Jamaica, throw Amy a smaller party instead, complete with a birthday cake decorated with six little candles.
Amy is told to make a wish but not to tell anyone what it is, or it won’t come true. Again, Amy is conflicted by the mixed messages the adults in her life are giving her. She tells her father that wishes don’t come true. Oliver tells her, “Some do.” Her mother, Alice, embellishes by saying that you just can’t say it out loud, or it will nullify the magic wish.
Once again, there is a suspension of disbelief on their terms, disavowing Amy and her ability to develop a clearly defined sense of fantasy and reality. How can she properly order her world?
The children at school are furious with Amy for not inviting them as promised. As they shun her, they lead her to an old, sinister-looking mansion, where someone calls to her from the window. A voice calls out to her to come closer. Amy looks around, and the unseen person throws down a white handkerchief threading a gold ring.
