Classic movie site with rare images, original ads, and behind-the-scenes photos, with informative and insightful commentary. We like to have fun with movies!
Archive and Links
grbrpix@aol.com
Search Index Here




Sunday, July 15, 2007







Buzzsaws and Body Snatching In St. Louis --- The Lewton Conclusion


We can sit home with our DVD’s and think we’ve seen The Body Snatcher, but that’s like steak without garnishment compared with what 1945 audiences reveled in. Do note front displays for the St. Louis premiere. RKO merchandising saw a winner early on, their gusto on The Body Snatcher's behalf surpassing effort for any others in the series. Trade ads were lavish and plentiful. That Missouri Theatre opening (3600 seats) became the centerpiece of suggested campaigns in the pressbook. Showmen at last had something they could chew on. The name Dr. Neff may not ring bells today, but in his glory years, this was the dean of spook showmen. As if a world premiere of The Body Snatcher were not enough, St. Louis also got Neff’s live act to serve as vanguard for a new movement toward audience participation screamers, a format where he was unsurpassed. Bill Neff began doing teenage magic acts with Indiana hometown pal James Stewart. Their lives took divergent paths, though crowds might have said in the late forties that Bill achieved at least as much glory in his field as did Jim at thesping. Neff carried sets worthy of DeMille. Nobody came away from his shows with less than exultant praise. Bela Lugosi sought Neff for a stage partner when the vampire king took his show on the road in 1947. Those sad stories we've heard of Bela sharing degradation with guys in tattered gorilla skins didn't apply here. Neff’s act went beyond mere stage illusion. He dragged girl plants out of the crowd and buzz-sawed off their heads. Bloodthirsty teens blew a gasket when the Neff crew came to town. Getting all this plus The Body Snatcher first-run was nirvana in any fan’s language. I checked St. Louis archives for press accorded the World Premiere. Guess they were more sanguine about such things then, for Dr. Neff and The Body Snatcher received but one multi-column display ad on February 14, 1945, plus holdover into a second week. Unlike the Memphis premiere of Brides Of Dracula, there were no post-opening reports from the front. Ah, the stuff they took for granted then …

























There were complications. Manager Harry Crawford had a warrant served on him for disturbing the peace. Seems his ideas for a set piece to adorn the top of the Missouri’s marquee unsettled nearby tenants and otherwise sedate passerbys. Why should a mechanical dog howling at one-second intervals annoy anyone? asked Harry. Gendarmes advised him to tell it to the judge. A fifteen-foot square lobby display (shown here) featured a motorized Karloff figure dragging a female corpse out of its tomb, while a "hundred-year-old hearse" carried dummy cadavers thither and yon with the assist of what was described as two decrepit horses. As The Body Snatcher opened on February 14, valentines were dispatched about town, showing Boris strangling Bela with the caption, Please Give Me A Piece Of Your Heart. RKO’s New York office supervised the campaign. There were horrors staged live that Lewton’s denuded by the Code feature couldn’t begin to duplicate. Kids doubtlessly got more genuine scares out of Neff’s pageant and accompanying front displays than The Body Snatcher would deliver, yet here at last was a solid hit that demonstrated what Val Lewton could do when he turned his hand toward baser shocks. Its success would enable others with a morbid line of goods to sell. Peter Lorre enhanced Body Snatcher presentations (as advertised on a carriage back here) with a ghoulish monologue he had commissioned to show off vocal talent plied in Hollywood thrillers over the last decade. The Man With A Head Of Glass was recited by the actor in hushed auditoriums, followed by bursts of applause and demands for repeated curtain calls. Lorre had initiated the routine in August, 1944, and continued with it on and off for several years thereafter. His would have been an ideal stage warmer for a horror film. The Body Snatcher’s negative was on the high-end at $221,000, but domestic rentals rang up a satisfying $317,000, with foreign money the best ever for this series --- $230,000. Profits amounted to $118,000, the most since I Walked With A Zombie. Were it not for a higher cost, The Body Snatcher would have been the most lucrative of all Lewtons. As it is, the film stands as the biggest single grosser of the nine.






























You’d have thought Universal producer Jack Gross would ride herd over Val Lewton once he assumed supervisory duties at RKO, but the man behind Universal’s recent monster sequels seems to have pretty much left VL alone. Gross is credited as Executive Producer on Isle Of The Dead. Lewton portrayed him as another of those studio troglodytes with his cigar in one hand and a racing form in the other. Evidence of the last three in the Lewton series belie such an image. They are, in fact, among the artiest of the nine. Isle Of The Dead took its inspiration from a painting (of the same name) by one Arnold Bocklin, who set his gothic scene to canvas five different times. Boris Karloff assumed patron of the arts duty for a field trip to New York’s Metropolitan Museum, where he was photographed standing alongside one of them. It pleased and flattered Karloff to keep company like this. He was a cultivated man and appreciated that quality in others. Whatever misgivings Lewton had about using this actor dissolved once they met. The producer frequently called upon memories of creepy art he’d been exposed to as a child (that generation’s equivalent of our monster magazines, perhaps?) and Isle Of The Dead would emerge as much a tribute to things that went bump in Lewton’s boyhood nights. Karloff was the first real star to do a Lewton movie. You could wish he’d been in more than just three, but did RKO really pay him a mere $600 per week as I’ve read? There was a serious delay when BK fell out due to back problems. A spinal operation laid him up for months; time enough for the project to lose momentum and Lewton’s interest to wane. A complete mess, he now called it. Slow perhaps, but wasn’t that the case with most Lewton merchandise? Amazing how all nine have their adherents. I’ve read passionate arguments crediting each as best in the series. Life was simpler when they were new. Showmen thought Isle Of The Dead dragged at first, but relished patron screams when a woman gets buried alive in the second half. Even that may not have been enough to offset continuing inertia at ticket windows, as Isle Of The Dead was way down from stellar numbers recorded by The Body Snatcher. A $246,000 negative cost was the highest yet for a Lewton horror, and way more than they were spending for other "B" pictures. Domestic rentals amounted to $266,000, with foreign $117,000. RKO’s profit was the lowest so far --- $13,000. These were slim pickings during a year when expectations ran high, as one couldn’t help making money off movies in 1945. Was the public tiring of horror films, or just Lewton’s horror films?












































































Bedlam was first to actually go into the hole. It mattered no longer that his was an eccentric approach to the genre. Pictures like these could not sustain. Recent Universal monster rallies invited ridicule. Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein would answer that call, but not for another two years. In the meantime, there was She-Wolf Of London and The Spider Woman Strikes Back to confirm how tired horror films had gotten. Was Universal surrendering the field to rivals? If so, RKO wasn’t taking the bait. Kids wanted screen shows gruesome as Dr. Neff with his tossed heads. They instead got extravagant promises and timid fulfillment of same, but that was the PCA applying brakes, not producers. Lewton had no end to censor problems with The Body Snatcher. Indeed, his career might have better flourished had he come along in the sixties. The Innocents from 1961 plays like one of his, and certainly The Haunting (directed by Robert Wise) was nothing if not a homage to Lewton’s technique. Film noir reflected a new toughness in crime thrillers. Horror films could do with a bit less reading between the lines as well. It would seem to me that audiences were ready for Hammer Films ten years before Hammer Films were ready for them. Had these two gotten together sooner, we might well have had a post-war horror boom. Bedlam, like other late-in-the-day chillers, was a tough sell. Neither fish nor fowl was this. A problem picture
about lunatic asylums sounds fine when Olivia DeHavilland is your inmate, but Boris Karloff presiding could mean only one thing, and therein lay the disconnect. The star didn’t help when he insisted that Bedlam wasn’t a horror film at all. A historical picture, said Karloff. Negative cost reflected steady rises in expense these shows generated. Modern writers claim Lewton had a budget of $350,000 plus extended pre-production time, but RKO ledgers indicate $264,000, a more likely figure. Domestic ($257,000) and foreign ($98,000) rentals were sufficiently eroded as to result in $40,000 lost on Bedlam. It’s no disgrace to any filmmaker when his series winnows out. The fact Lewton managed nine horror features, and nine of such extraordinary quality, within confines of a formula-driven system like RKO’s, is some kind of miracle. His standards remained high, even if the boxoffice didn’t. No one else in Hollywood was making chillers so stimulating as Lewton’s. You can pick at any and find minor fault, but who even bothers over most of the stuff Universal was doing after 1942 (Captive Wild Woman, anyone?). Looking at this series during the last several weeks made me realize once again what a unique talent his was.









































































Lewton might have taken solace over evergreen status these films achieved were it not for his 1951 death. RKO kept the series in circulation for as long as that company remained afloat. Even after closure, Lewton horrors made theatrical rounds via independent franchisees renting them into the mid-sixties. Cat People had a 1952 reissue that scored domestic rentals of $125,000 and resulting profits of $65,000. Most of the others were back as units in double-feature packages. Isle Of The Dead returned with Mighty Joe Young. I Walked With A Zombie supported King Kong in 1956. The only two not reissued were The Ghost Ship and Bedlam. Fifties circulation of Lewton features meant safety prints in 35mm. If you grew up then, chances are you saw some of them theatrically. Television lumped the series into enormous packages of RKO features. Stations purchasing smaller groups might get two or three Lewtons, but seldom all, unless they sprung for C&C’s bulging library of 741 titles. It was May 1963 before stations could unspool all the Lewtons from a syndicated group made up entirely of horror and sci-fi. United Artists’ package of 58 features combined genre offerings from backlogs controlled by UA at the time, thus we had Warner’s Doctor X, Beast With Five Fingers, and The Walking Dead, UA’s own Beast Of Hollow Mountain, Hound Of The Baskervilles (from
Hammer), along with the Lewtons and other RKO favorites (King Kong, The Thing). This was next best to having Screen Gem’s Shock and Son Of Shock groups. Non-theatrical rental went through Films, Inc. Their daily rates reflected critical hierarchy within the series. The rental company’s lavish 1971 Rediscovering The American Cinema catalogue devoted a page (shown here) to the Lewtons (note their promise to add The Ghost Ship among future listings). Worth noting is the fact that Bedlam, The Seventh Victim, and The Leopard Man were available at lower rates than the rest. Could these, then, have been regarded weakest by opinion makers of the day? A check of the Films Inc. second edition (1977) of Rediscovering The American Cinema does include The Ghost Ship, which makes me wonder if it was indeed made available then. Did anyone out there actually rent this title in 16mm?

4 Comments:

Blogger Kevin K. said...

If anyone lives in or near New York, they can visit the Museum of Television & Radio to see Lorre's "Man with the Head of Glass" routine on an episode of "Texaco Star Theatre." Creepy stuff.

11:26 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thanks, East Side, for giving me yet another reason to visit the Museum of Television & Radio if I ever make it back to New York.

And thank you, John, for a splendid three-parter. You sent me back to my Lewton collection for another appreciative look, and even though I still don't get it about The Seventh Victim, even that had its moments; Lewton really was a unique talent.

And by the way, my uncle took me to see King Kong on that 1956 reissue. Looking back, I don't know if I'm sorry or glad that I Walked with a Zombie wasn't on the bill with it at the Stamm Theatre in Antioch, CA. I was only 8, and I'm not sure I could have handled it.

2:25 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Thanks much for the Lewton series. I saw 'Bedlam' long before I ever knew who Lewton was and it remains one of my very favorite films. I suppose it was hard to market at the time but it's surprising to me that it actually lost money, and that the others also didn't do so well overall. The WW2 period may just have been a difficult time to sell horror with all the real terror going on in the world.

8:27 PM  
Blogger Joe Gillis said...

It's worth pointing out that neither ISLE OF THE DEAD nor BEDLAM were given a first-run release in the UK, which severely impacted the foreign box-office takings. ISLE wasn't released and the UK until ten years later (probably because of issues with the BBFC in the 40s, though the documents have since been lost), and BEDLAM was definitely banned outright by the BBFC, as documents in the BFI special collection demonstrate.

11:11 AM  

Post a Comment

<< Home

grbrpix@aol.com
  • December 2005
  • January 2006
  • February 2006
  • March 2006
  • April 2006
  • May 2006
  • June 2006
  • July 2006
  • August 2006
  • September 2006
  • October 2006
  • November 2006
  • December 2006
  • January 2007
  • February 2007
  • March 2007
  • April 2007
  • May 2007
  • June 2007
  • July 2007
  • August 2007
  • September 2007
  • October 2007
  • November 2007
  • December 2007
  • January 2008
  • February 2008
  • March 2008
  • April 2008
  • May 2008
  • June 2008
  • July 2008
  • August 2008
  • September 2008
  • October 2008
  • November 2008
  • December 2008
  • January 2009
  • February 2009
  • March 2009
  • April 2009
  • May 2009
  • June 2009
  • July 2009
  • August 2009
  • September 2009
  • October 2009
  • November 2009
  • December 2009
  • January 2010
  • February 2010
  • March 2010
  • April 2010
  • May 2010
  • June 2010
  • July 2010
  • August 2010
  • September 2010
  • October 2010
  • November 2010
  • December 2010
  • January 2011
  • February 2011
  • March 2011
  • April 2011
  • May 2011
  • June 2011
  • July 2011
  • August 2011
  • September 2011
  • October 2011
  • November 2011
  • December 2011
  • January 2012
  • February 2012
  • March 2012
  • April 2012
  • May 2012
  • June 2012
  • July 2012
  • August 2012
  • September 2012
  • October 2012
  • November 2012
  • December 2012
  • January 2013
  • February 2013
  • March 2013
  • April 2013
  • May 2013
  • June 2013
  • July 2013
  • August 2013
  • September 2013
  • October 2013
  • November 2013
  • December 2013
  • January 2014
  • February 2014
  • March 2014
  • April 2014
  • May 2014
  • June 2014
  • July 2014
  • August 2014
  • September 2014
  • October 2014
  • November 2014
  • December 2014
  • January 2015
  • February 2015
  • March 2015
  • April 2015
  • May 2015
  • June 2015
  • July 2015
  • August 2015
  • September 2015
  • October 2015
  • November 2015
  • December 2015
  • January 2016
  • February 2016
  • March 2016
  • April 2016
  • May 2016
  • June 2016
  • July 2016
  • August 2016
  • September 2016
  • October 2016
  • November 2016
  • December 2016
  • January 2017
  • February 2017
  • March 2017
  • April 2017
  • May 2017
  • June 2017
  • July 2017
  • August 2017
  • September 2017
  • October 2017
  • November 2017
  • December 2017
  • January 2018
  • February 2018
  • March 2018
  • April 2018
  • May 2018
  • June 2018
  • July 2018
  • August 2018
  • September 2018
  • October 2018
  • November 2018
  • December 2018
  • January 2019
  • February 2019
  • March 2019
  • April 2019
  • May 2019
  • June 2019
  • July 2019
  • August 2019
  • September 2019
  • October 2019
  • November 2019
  • December 2019
  • January 2020
  • February 2020
  • March 2020
  • April 2020
  • May 2020
  • June 2020
  • July 2020
  • August 2020
  • September 2020
  • October 2020
  • November 2020
  • December 2020
  • January 2021
  • February 2021
  • March 2021
  • April 2021
  • May 2021
  • June 2021
  • July 2021
  • August 2021
  • September 2021
  • October 2021
  • November 2021
  • December 2021
  • January 2022
  • February 2022
  • March 2022
  • April 2022
  • May 2022
  • June 2022
  • July 2022
  • August 2022
  • September 2022
  • October 2022
  • November 2022
  • December 2022
  • January 2023
  • February 2023
  • March 2023
  • April 2023
  • May 2023
  • June 2023
  • July 2023
  • August 2023
  • September 2023
  • October 2023
  • November 2023
  • December 2023
  • January 2024
  • February 2024
  • March 2024