Over the Edge/An Edge in My Voice Read online

  Had Forbes understood the nature of fear, the nature of terror, he might have been able to save the film. But—and I will expect those of you who have not already seen the picture to see it, rather than accept my theory as some sort of Obiter Dictum—he had not studied his lessons; Lewton’s lessons, mind you; and so all those heavy areas of light and dark were moved around like so much earth and gravel. This was a potentiality for a film of fear, in the same category with Lewton’s subjects, but it was passed over in favor of more dubious “quality” elements. Nowhere in King Rat do we get the feel, the heft, the weight of trepidation, from anyone in the cast. Not even by cinematography or sets or direction is there the suspense of fear, the clutch of abiding terror. We have placidity, we have torpor, we have boredom.

  And that is why King Rat fails.

  Bunny Lake Is Missing, however, deals in fear and suspense and a kind of psychological horror that Lewton would have understood and approved. Yet as baldly as King Rat misses its impact-points for lack of fear, it is a modern classic compared with the stumbling, falling-down silliness and ineptitude of Otto Preminger’s latest carcinoma.

  (Note to my mother, in Miami Beach: Dear Mom, I know I work in the industry, and I know they won’t hire me, but there are times when the sensible writer in me finds himself outshouted by the Ivory Tower writer who deplores bad movies and the men who continue to make them on the strength of reputations ill-deserved. On the other hand, Mom, I’ve always had a tendency to bite the hand that feeds me. Check your own. Much love, Disraeli.)

  Because of the total misapplication of the strictures and freedoms of the implement fear, Bunny Lake becomes an exercise in hoodwinkery. We are led down all the wrong garden paths, without even the justification of a valid denouement.

  Given: a pretty young woman and her pretty young brother, who have recently arrived in England. The young man attends to his journalistic employment, and the young girl (whose husband is confusedly referred to on occasion, but, it is made clear, is no longer on the scene in any way) puts her child Bunny in a day nursery. When she goes to pick her up, the child is missing, and no one remembers seeing her at any time. The police Inspector who handles the case is forced further and further toward the conclusion that the girl is hallucinatory, and the child never existed.

  Given: a mounting strain of hysteria on the part of the girl, who fights to convince the Inspector and the world at large that Bunny does, indeed, exist, and is in terrible danger. The brother continues to drop inadvertent hints that Sis may be around-the-bend, despite his reiteration that Bunny does exist, and he will stand by his sibling come what may.

  Given: a long, drawn-out crawl toward fifteen minutes of madness at the end of which we discover the brother is the whack, and has kidnapped the child himself, to keep his sister beside him, keep her love and attention for himself. A case of arrested adolescence. Or something.

  Taken from a suspense novel by Evelyn Piper (which I must confess I have not read), this would seem to be a fulsome subject for a film of fear. Yet no one I know who saw this picture, myself included of course, felt anything but cheated when it was done. Why? I submit it was in the misunderstanding of the tenets of fear, and what is permissible in directing the logic of an audience in this area. If there was an internal consistency in the novel, it does not show up in the film.

  Rather than merely solidify the points I am about to make by my own instinctive reactions, I approached the cornerstone of the structure of Bunny Lake—the madness of the brother—with an open mind, and consulted several texts on abnormal psychology. Everything I found led me to believe the character had been twisted to serve Mr. Preminger’s ends. Even so, it seemed feasible that in the swampland of the deranged mind such a syndrome might be possible, and so I consulted an expert in the field, Dr. Eugene A. Levitt, Clinical Psychologist of the Peterson-Guedel Family Center, in Beverly Hills. After a lengthy discussion of the motion picture, and the aberration as delineated by Keir Dullea in the part of the brother, Dr. Levitt came to the following conclusions:

  “Given a deviant personality structure as grossly pathological as that of the brother in Bunny Lake, it would seem highly improbable that it would be manifested solely in the area of his feelings about his sister. One would certainly expect to see signs of deviancy in his behavior toward the sister; not just at the dramatic moment when it best suits the purposes of the plot-makers of the film, but consistently, throughout. And possibly more important, because of the clearly psychotic personality with which we are presented at the final stages of the film, indicating an aberrant childhood relationship to his parents, additionally there should—reasonably—be visible symptomatology in his relations with all adults, most particularly with such authority figures as the Inspector, who in this situation most specifically parallels a father-image. The absence of these ‘clues,’ if you will, connotes an intentioned deceit on the part of the story-tellers.”

  Thus, we come to another pillar that must be present in the superstructure of the fear film, lest it fall down about the makers’ ears, as does Bunny Lake. Fear must carry with it, its own internal consistency and logic. It is not merely enough to say The Martian carries off the beautiful girl, kicking and screaming.

  If the Martian’s body chemistry is completely alien to that of an Earthwoman, if he is a methane-breather, with a reproductive cycle closer to that of a chicken than to that of a human, then by all rights he should be raping a Rhode Island Red, not Kim Novak.

  We are more terrified by the plight of Dorian Gray than all the Creatures who ever bubbled up from Black Lagoons, because we see reflected in Gray the terrors to which we are heir. The logic prevails in the one, and flees in the other.

  We are led by the hand, by Mr. Preminger and his group, down a dark hallway toward a Room 101 that promises to hold unspeakable horrors. But when the door is opened, we find someone else’s terror there, and we feel we have been subjected to flummery. Had Preminger wished to make the film honestly, he would have carried the psychotic nature of the brother through the film, but obviously that would not have been dramatic enough, and the shock ending would have been pre-revealed. So Preminger lied to us. He altered the logic, made it inconsistent, and hoped that the pyrotechnics of the denouement would blind us to the cheat.

  He failed, and with the failure comes the inescapable logic that if the film could not be made honestly, it should not have been made at all. We see in the stance of commercialism herewith adopted by Mr. Preminger, a similarity to the posture adopted by those who made King Rat. A neck-craning attitude, much like that of a flamingo, on one foot, precariously arching toward the money. It is an undignified stance.

  Now we seem to be getting somewhere. We have set up a model of successful fear, the oeuvre of Lewton; we have established several seeming truths about fear’s application in the visual medium: it must not bore, it must reflect the personal terrors of the audience, it must contain its own internal logic and consistency, it must employ the imagination and powers of expansion of the audience, and it must view (ideally) through new or original visions.

  We have examined a film that failed in that it did not use fear when it should have. We have examined a film of fear which completely misunderstood and misused the tools of terror it needed to succeed. Now we will go all the way to the far wall and examine a film of humor that somehow strayed into the Country of Cold Chills when it should not have done so; and failed thereby.

  The Loved One, based on a novel of biting satire by Evelyn Waugh. Which I have read. (Two out of three is pretty good.)

  No one who has even scanned Jessica Mitford’s incredible study of the funeral industry, The American Way of Death, can be oblivious to the horrors passim the trade in coffins and coagulants. It would seem impossible to produce a film around Waugh’s shredding dissection of these latter-day ghouls that would not bring forth raves of delight, and kudos for honesty. To even contemplate a motion picture in which the saccharine sanctity of the down-the-hole boys is stripp
ed away (revealing them as used car salesmen in mourning rags), automatically incurs the not-inconsiderable wrath of the Funeral Lobby and its local leech-lines. The question of honesty would seem not even to arise. The question of suicide, perhaps, but not honesty.

  How then, is it possible that Tony Richardson and his high camp followers made such a dishonest film, such a disastrously unsuccessful film, such a depressing and off-the-mark film? A film about as funny as an acrobat in a polio ward? A film about as funny as a turd in a punch bowl?

  The answer, from this corner, lies in the intrusive shadow of fear that Richardson and his cast found themselves unable to dispel. Under a constantly-darkening veil of horror, the bizarre and the ludicrous intermingled with the hilarious and the hideous. In an attempt to make a film of humor about something basically ghastly, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer’s The Loved One wandered slantwise into the Country of Terror and could not find its way out. Trapped on a landscape of gore and grue, dealing with the carrion-flesh of those who live off the dead, Richardson was forced to the outer edge of sanity and visual imagery, in a frenetic attempt to stave off the encroaching phantom of horror that permeated the film.

  He was not able to escape. The picture was forced to adopt advertising that proclaimed, SOMETHING TO OFFEND EVERYONE! and I suppose in Coshocton, Ohio, they will be offended. But we are not dealing with the chauvinism and naïveté of the Bible Belt in these pages. (The presumption that first-level film criticism and fan magazine goshwow need not enter into our considerations may be unwarranted, but if that is what you, gentle reader, are seeking herein, one of us ought to be elsewhere.) The picture is offensive, but not in the way the producers intended.

  As I said earlier, it is offensive because it substitutes cute for cutting, weird for witty, and camp for clever. If MGM wishes to cop-out, it may well save its critical bacon by proclaiming this one of the first of the pop art films. (Though I contend Godard’s Alphaville is the front-runner in that category.) But that fear and terror permeated this film, in a way surely no one could have anticipated, is something Metro cannot deny.

  Snap! We see Bobby Morse and Sir John Gielgud lunching in the studio commissary. Gielgud orders “the breast of Chicken, Lolita” and Morse orders “a Goldwater nut flip.” Funny. Snap! Morse discovers Gielgud’s body hanging grotesquely from the diving board of the weed-infested pool. Not funny. Snap snap!

  The juxtaposition is alarming. We are made to laugh, then to shrink back in horror.

  Snap! Anjanette Comer (surely one of the comeliest creatures God ever set down on this weary cinder to delight our eyes) wrestles about on the lawn with a salivating Morse, hellbent intent on invading her underwear. Amusing. Snap! Anjie Comer jams a pair of tubes of embalming fluid into her veins and dies slowly, slowly, very slowly. OhmiGod, not funny at all. Snap snap!

  We are shown beauty, and it is tainted with madness. The juxtaposition is ghastly in its spectacle, in its roiled commingling of pure and foul.

  The vomity obese mother of Rod Steiger. Steiger’s muscular faggotry. (There is sufficient reason to call it such, despite Steiger’s obvious lust for Miss Comer, because of the almost rampant homosexuality of almost all of the other principals in the cast, in every scene, in every gesture, in all of the private jokes so blatantly put on display for the gay crowd. I’m not knocking it folks, I’m merely saying that it served to deepen the unconscious strains of unrest and nausea for those of us who don’t happen to ride that particular hobby horse.) The Air Force romp with the tarts in the coffin room. The grotesqueries after grotesquerie piled one atop another. The dead dogs in the ice boxes. The very scent and smell of the funeral industry that reaches us through celluloid, through soundtrack, through flickering posturings of the players.

  There is brilliance here, no question about it. But it is the deranged brilliance of a de Sade, the mad joy of an Octave Mirabeau or a Rimbaud. It is thoroughly decadent and debased brilliance. It is the invoking of the demons of fear and insanity, the creation of monster that, like a lynch mob, went berserk and devoured its makers. Consumed by their own creation, Richardson and his company now must exist in the blazing belly of the horror, knowing they somehow inadvertently cast the runes and read from the grimoire of terror, and brought forth they knew not what.

  Here, in The Loved One, we see the incalculable power, the torment for producer and audience alike, the numbing quality of the implement fear. This was a partial awakening of the demon, and it managed in its somnambulistic sleepwalk to destroy a film of some importance. Loose, unfettered, uncontrolled, the fear Richardson came to work with, can be a juggernaut that lays waste the most honestly-intended film.

  But with full knowledge, with the chains of understanding firmly wound in place, fear can be used to woo and capture the elusive mind-balance of an audience. In what particular areas Richardson’s helplessness before the mad face of the God he unleashed can be observed, lies a vivid warning to other film-makers who would toy without understanding with the single most potent implement a film-man can employ. Richardson played with it, tried to tame it with guffaws and outrage, but it destroyed his film.

  In part three of this survey, I will attempt to analyze the struggle of yet another St. George, who may not have slain the Dragon Fear, but certainly dealt it a helluva bruising. And in that direction, I suspect, lies the hope not only of the film of fear, but of the entire motion picture industry.

  Room 101 is just ahead of us. After you.

  3

  Roman Polanski’s Repulsion is the closest thing to a Lewton-oriented film of fear to which we have been treated in recent memory. Many there may be who will cite Psycho and others who will say segments of Charade suit better the appellation. (Most noticeably in the latter, the frightening scene of James Coburn tied to a radiator, his face blue and distorted from suffocation, head gently wrapped in a common plastic clothing sack, of the type we are warned to keep away from children.)

  There is validity in their points, but for overall terror—albeit flawed, as I will delineate further on—the Polanski vision of a beautiful young girl’s progressive psychopathia is monumentally right for our attention here. I cannot quibble with the horror of the shower sequence in Psycho, nor of the final scene in which Tony Perkins talks with the voice of his mother (though I think the subliminal flashing of the death’s head was a bit much), but match these against the subtle horror of Catherine Deneuve’s performance, her sudden start of fear as the walls symbolically rend asunder overhead, the vagrant mad rubbing of the nose as she walks down a street in daylight, the head of the rabbit in her purse, the casual murders, the slatternly deterioration of the lovely girl…all of it, in totality, a numbing portrait of insanity in our times, laid out bare and quivering as the severed arteries of her victims.

  Polanski is a man to watch.

  It is entirely possible we have with us in the person of this young Polish director, another Lewton. From what we have seen of his first two films, it is obvious that Polanski’s interests lie in the area of human motivations and interpersonal relationships. In Knife in the Water Polanski brought tension and originality to the time-worn theme of the eternal triangle. Alone on a small yacht, two men and a woman act out a drama of hate and frustration, of decadent lives and brutality, all on the most subtle of levels, all inextricably involved with the symbolic search of each man for his masculinity. This, told in the framework of a love / sex story as simple as any folk tale. In Repulsion we go very much into the mind of a girl going insane.

  These are the topics Lewton might have explored, had he lived longer. In point of fact, the similarities between The Cat People and Repulsion, each with a heroine living with delusions and murder, are uncanny. It would be interesting to know if Polanski is familiar with Lewton’s work.

  But whether consciously aware or otherwise, what Polanski does in his films, to a marked degree, is what Lewton did. The movement, the easy manipulation of great masses of light and dark, the emphasis on the dark mind of the contemporary man
and woman, the force of study on the terrors that beset us all…these are the trembles and trinkets Lewton found indispensable to the production of small classics of fear.

  Polanski seems unerringly to find the way of most terror, in the same vector of talent that was Lewton’s. But there are differences—both in motivation and technique—between Polanski and Lewton. Differences that occasionally mar and blight what Polanski has brought forth, and against which Polanski hurled his talent, not always successfully.

  Earlier I snapped at Time and Newsweek, and promised I would elaborate on the attack. My reasons are simply considerations of honesty and the inherent values of serious criticism. When I am manic, it is my belief that we need critics: sober and dedicated men and women who will remind us of the heritage of the past in the Arts, who will try to keep our level of attention and achievement at highest tide. (It hardly needs more demonstration than a flicking on of the TV set to prove that if left to its own devices, the taste of the mass—per Sturgeon’s Law—will inevitably sink to the lowest possible common denominator.) Both Time and Newsweek, and the soporific little journals that imitate their approach to reviewing, debase the act of criticism. They become exercises in cleverness; turns of the phrase with tongues in cheeks…admittedly making for garble. They are first to follow the trend of what is “in,” and first to condemn what they do not understand. The shabby need to appear street-smart, cutting edge, in the know, au courant, hip…at all costs; and the spiteful vengefulness when they realize they don’t understand the film, that they are dunce-cap befuddled! They turn their reviews into something like popularity contests, and where the function of constructive criticism is most needed, it is absent in their approach. Both Time and Newsweek praised Repulsion outrageously, without taking the time or indulging the cerebration that would have recognized its flaws, and thus enriched the lessons Polanski might have learned, thus benefitting his methodology in future films. Thus, my fury at the newsmagazines. They chose the way of the cop-out, the line of least resistance, the dazzlement of technique that should not have kept the serious critic from his craft. For Polanski pulled a rabbit out of a hat, and no one so far has bothered to notice that the rabbit was dead.