Kent Jones – Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows (2007)
Synopsis:
While his name was known to only the more obsessive of film fans during the course of his career, Val Lewton produced a sequence of low-budget genre movies in the 1940’s that had a revolutionary impact.
Working within a special production unit at RKO Pictures, Lewton’s films were mood pieces that created an atmosphere of anxiety rather than aiming for blunt shocks, and used shadowy camerawork and careful pacing to infer more than the audience actually saw. Several of Lewton’s productions became hits, most notably ‘Cat People’, and a number of others (including ‘Isle of the Dead’, ‘I Walked with a Zombie’, ‘Curse of the Cat People’, ‘The Seventh Victim’ and ‘The Body Snatcher’) are cult favorites to this day.
Lewton also discovered a number of directors who would become major players later on, including Robert Wise, Mark Robson and Jacques Tourneur, but Lewton’s efforts to move on tobigger budget projects fared poorly, and poor health claimed his life in 1951, six years after his last picture for RKO.
Film critic and archivist Kent Jones traces the story of Val Lewton’s life and career while paying homage to the films that made his name in the documentary ‘Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows’, which features highlights from Lewton’s best films while sharing the memories of those who knew and worked with him. Originally produced for the Turner Classic Movies cable network, the documentary is narrated by filmmaker and lifelong film fan Martin Scorsese.
Review:
Writer and director Kent Jones helms this compelling documentary that is narrated with great feeling and authority by Martin Scorsese. It plays out as a well-deserved homage to producer Val Lewton. He was known as the man behind the scenes who turned cheapie B-films into works of art; they were highly imaginative, made with integrity and always set an intelligently reflective mood.
Lewton was born in 1904 in Yalta, Russia; his family emigrated to Germany and then to America soon afterwards. His mom Nina left Lewton’s German father in Germany, and when in America raised Val as an Episcopalian. Originally the family was Jewish, but converted to Russian Orthodox for convenience sake while living in a bigoted Russia.
Val graduated from Columbia, wrote several successful pulp novels and through his mom’s connections got a job as a researcher and right-hand man with the demanding film mogul David O’ Selznick, where he learned how to make films. He was then hired by RKO to produce low-budget horror films and in the 1940s with his team of the French director Jacques Tourneau, director Mark Robson, editor and director Robert Wise and writer Dewitt Bodeen he produced some of the greatest horror pics of the 1940s. It started with the Cat People in 1942, which was made for $130,00 but made a profit of over a million dollars. The horror was suggestive, and it told a good story. That was followed in 1943 with the captivating moody film I Walked With A Zombie.
The film traces Lewton’s battles with the studio bosses to make a quality film over a bottom-line film (after RKO came Paramount, MGM and Univeral). Lewton died in 1950 at the age of 46 from a heart attack. Some of the other outstanding horror films he left as his legacy were The Seventh Victim (1943), The Body Snatcher (1945), Isle of the Dead (1945) and Bedlam (1946). If the studio didn’t mess up his film, what you got with a Lewton produced film was an A-film that was made on a B-film budget. He was someone who knew how to use the conventions of the horror film to allow him entrance to the dark side of life. His psychological films blurred reality where things appear real but strange, in a gray zone where dreams and real life come face to face. His name on a film was enough for me to want to see it.
— Dennis Schwartz (Ozus’ World Movie Reviews)
Val.Lewton.The.Man.In.The.Shadows.2007.VOSTFR.DVDRip.x264.AC3-KINeMA.mkv
General
Container: Matroska
Runtime: 1h 16mn
Size: 1.23 GiB
Video
Codec: x264
Resolution: 720x480 ~> 720x540
Aspect ratio: 4:3
Frame rate: 23.976 fps
Bit rate: 2 063 Kbps
BPP: 0.249
Audio
#1: English 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 Kbps (AC3 2.0 @ 192 Kbps)
Language(s):English
Subtitles:English, French (muxed)
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