The Thinking Man's Exploitation Shockers --- Part One

The frustrated career of Val Lewton was both inspiration and cautionary fable for Hollywood insiders long before horror fans and writers began taking up his cause in the late sixties. No better evidence exists than 1952’s The Bad and The Beautiful, shooting within a year of Lewton’s death and basing its protagonist’s rise specifically, if not accurately, on Cat People lore and a "B" producer scavenging the lot for props to make his films. Industry folk must have talked lots about Lewton and why he rose and fell. There were few better object lessons on the peril of seeking art over commerce, nor a more effective argument favoring team play and sucking up to supervisors when necessary. Val Lewton held on to integrity, but little else. He was a talent to admire, but forget about emulating him if you wanted a future in movies. Sad stories like his were best told in eulogies. Those nine chillers he made for RKO were a first of Hollywood horrors to be critically embraced, but recognition for Lewton came too late to do him any good (early death at forty-six saw to that). His family at least enjoyed bows he didn’t survive to take. My recollection is of Carlos Clarens getting there first, though An Illustrated History Of The Horror Film was merely the initial Lewton celebration of a second wave starting in 1967. Bigger names recognized him earlier, but did James Agee and Manny Farber’s laudatory reviews during the forties benefit Lewton, or help to bring him down at RKO? I think that few people in Hollywood show in their work that they know or care half as much about movies or human beings as he does, said Agee. He and others praised Lewton as the remarkable exception to philistine standards. Former boss David O. Selznick may have done more harm than good when his post-Cat People congratulatory wire crossed RKO chief Charles Koerner’s desk. (It) is in every way a much better picture than ninety percent of the "A" product that I have seen in recent months. Other studios hopefully have extended such opportunities to would-be producers by the score without getting a result such as you have delivered at the outset. We know corporate intrigues and politics proved Lewton’s undoing. Were jealousies inflamed by these and other plaudits? Koerner was a supporter, but lesser RKO brass sniffed "too arty" when Lewton’s name and accomplishments entered commissary chat. The fact he kept to himself and avoided studio camaraderie was no help (Lewton disliked shaking hands). Lesser talent had but to wait for things to go south. In Lewton’s case, they would not wait long.

The golfing party is here for a reason. These are the men who controlled Val Lewton’s fate at RKO. We read about denizens of the front office like Charles Koerner (he having lately expelled Orson Welles) --- that’s him on the right, flanked from the left by N. Peter Rathvon (RKO president), Robert Woolf (New York district manager), and Ned Depinet (RKO Radio Pictures president). Koerner was vice-president in charge of studio production, and on this 1942 occasion they were competing in the studio’s eighth annual golf tournament. Much studio policy was decided on those links. Perhaps decision to give Welles the heave was made around a third green, and by the fourth, an agreement to hire Lewton. Line-producer underlings weren’t invited to such outings. Lewton was assigned to dream up stories for pre-fab titles these men consumer tested at a ceiling price of $150,000 each. Cat People initiated the series of budget horrors. It became what they called in those days a sleeper. Writer DeWitt Bodeen once estimated a four million dollar gross. Modern historians took him up on that tall tale, and further credited the modest show with saving RKO itself --- their biggest hit of that period (no, those would be Once Upon A Honeymoon, Hitler’s Children, and Mr. Lucky). It is tempting to propagate such myth where we admire the man and his films so much. Cat People did earn $360,000 in domestic rentals. $175,000 came back from foreign. There was $183,000 in profit, an excellent return for a "B" (comparable The Falcon In Danger ended $91,000 in the black, while The Saint Meets The Tiger actually lost $25,000). You could only realize so much on pictures that generally played the bottom of tandem bills. Cat People opened on Broadway as a single, though the Rialto Theatre was not otherwise the sort of venue majors sought for prestige bookings. With a modest 600 seats and no balcony, the Rialto prided itself on ballyhoo techniques otherwise abandoned on the Great White Way. Front displays looked like Grand Guignol. Thriller engagements called for outreach to passer-bys willing to enter and be horrified. Owner and operator Arthur Mayer was a well-respected industry veteran whose career dated back to silents. He thrived on lowdown exploitation. Having supervised Paramount’s Panther Woman search a decade before (for Island Of Lost Souls), he knew how to steer intense bally. Mayer balked at the expense of print ads in The New York Times. With my limited budget, I had little money to spend on newspaper advertising, so I was forced to use the theatre front and the lobby for my major shilling. Replacing marble busts and objects of art with gargoyles and displays of torture instruments, Mayer proudly trumpeted the Rialto’s strictly masculine fare policy, reflecting his wish to satisfy the ancient and unquenchable male thirst for mystery, menace and manslaughter. Cat People's entrance shown here was the handiwork of his creative staff.

Critics enjoyed slumming at the Rialto. The theatre became a running joke in their columns. Like a flower of evil, the Rialto Theatre has endeared itself to a little coterie of necrophiles that haunt the area as a perfect rendezvous for Witches’ Sabbath and Walpurgis Eve celebrations. Admissions were the cheapest around for first runs. Cat People played in December of 1942 for a quarter before noon, forty cents to 5:00, and sixty-five cents to closing. Sometimes they didn’t clear the house till four in the morning. You could smoke in either of two side sections in the auditorium. Pretty punk for a Broadway engagement, but RKO could boast of having opened there when selling Cat People to independent exhibitors. Larger audiences for Val Lewton’s understated chiller found it bringing up the rear behind big ticket crowd-pleasers like Springtime In The Rockies, with which Cat People played in multiple New York City theatres starting January 7. 1943. Though Betty Grable’s musical is barely remembered today, this was the kind of show that actually got those four million dollar grosses (in fact, Springtime In The Rockies took $4.4 million in worldwide rentals). Hollywood's host for Cat People was the Hawaii Theatre, whose boxoffice (as shown) was redressed with a sign reading Feed The Kitty Here. The ticket seller sat inside an enormous cat head that covered the window, sliding both ducats and change along a feline "tongue" draping toward the sidewalk. Cat People shared its first LA run with Warner’s The Gorilla Man, as shown in the above snapshot taken in late 1942. Despite critic applause, Val Lewton got little in the way of recognition from bosses at RKO. Koerner tossed a wet blanket when Lewton reminded him of Cat People’s success. The only people who saw that film were negroes and defense workers, he said. All RKO wanted from the horror unit was horror movies, preferably conventional ones. Fortunately for Lewton, I Walked With A Zombie, his second for RKO, maintained Cat People profits and extended his creative autonomy.

In the picture, the nurse walked with a zombie. The patrons walked out of the theatre, and the exhibitor walked around in circles trying to think what to do to make up for the loss. This was O.E. Simon’s trenchant commentary that followed his Menno, South Dakota booking of Val Lewton’s follow-up to Cat People. Was the producer determined to work against horror expectations as his series went on? I Walked With A Zombie and The Leopard Man suggested he was. People said they didn't understand this so-called horror picture (The Leopard Man). Business was light (Dewey, Oklahoma’s Paramount Theatre). Zombie’s negative cost crept $6,000 beyond the $150,000 limit RKO had set, and its worldwide rentals of $496,000 slipped below those of Cat People, though profits of $181,000 insulated Lewton for the present. He was now getting press recognition as a Merchant Of Menace, Sultan Of Shock, whatever lamebrain tag they chose to hang on him. Profilers wondered what made those chillers tick. Lewton dismissed the recipe as pure formula. The last thing this producer needed was a perception he took horror movies seriously. Ingredients required were plenty of "dark patches" and three bumps per show --- easy as plugging in a waffle iron so it would seem, though Lewton's creative team knew well the efforts he had made to distinguish his thrillers from the rest. Always the last RKO employee to head home at night, Lewton took responsibility for every script page going before a camera. As with mentor Selznick, all set-ups bore the Lewton signature. Despite disappointment his films sometimes yield on first viewing, hanged if they don’t mesmerize with second or more visits. The problem in 1943 was showmen expecting horror to be brightly-lit mummies or wolfmen chasing girls up a tree. I Walked With A Zombie,  despite promise of its title, was Jane Eyre set in the tropics. The Leopard Man was no such thing, being devoid of man-into-leopard technics, and in fact, the apparent cat murders were a red herring for human villainy. Lewton kept snatching rugs from under chill fans, and numbers began to reflect their awareness. The Leopard Man cost $155,000. Domestic rentals were $303,000, with foreign $100,000. Final profits of $104,000 represented a steep fall from the first two entries. Lewton were now running even with, if not behind, the Falcon series. A serious, if inevitable, drop-off would begin with The Seventh Victim. Soon it would become a challenge keeping up with Tim Holt.