Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows (DVD)

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It isn't often that Warner Bros. make one of their film documentaries available separately from a box set, but in the case of "Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows," they made an exception. They probably made a good exception, too, as the documentary is fascinating from beginning to end. Its only problem: It's not long enough.

Technically, the title of this release is "Martin Scorsese Presents: Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows" because Scorsese co-produced and narrates it. Doesn't hurt to have his name above the title, either, if you're going to attract the public's eye.

There are some paradoxes about the release, though. (1) If you're already a Val Lewton fan, you probably already know most of the information the documentary contains. (2) If you've never heard of Val Lewton, you probably aren't going to care. And (3) Val Lewton is famous for a limited number of films that he made during a limited number of years. That he should get his own documentary for so relatively small a body of works is curious but deserved.

OK, so, first, who is this guy? And, second, is the documentary about him any good?

Val Lewton (1904-1951) was a writer, then a right-hand man to producer David O. Selznik, then a full-time producer himself in the 1940s. He was born a Russian Jew in Yalta, and his mother came to America in 1909 with her two children. By his early adulthood, Lewton had become thoroughly Americanized and developed an interest in movies.

After learning the trade under Selznik, in 1942 he came to RKO. By that time, the studio had lost money on two big, prestige films, "Citizen Kane" and "The Magnificent Ambersons." They wanted no more such highbrow films and hired Lewton to head up a newly created low-budget horror unit. RKO's new, unofficial motto was "Showmanship in place of genius," a slap at Orson Welles. They assigned Lewton the job of making horror films that would compete with Universal's monster movies but at a third the cost. Lewton delivered.

From 1942 to 1946, the War years, Lewton produced some of the finest horror movies in Hollywood history, quiet horror movies that were more psychological studies than fright fests. The irony is that in essence RKO got a new Orson Welles in Lewton, who supervised everything that went into his pictures from the choice of director to the lighting to the final script approval but on a tighter budget and using almost purely horror motifs. Lewton even rewrote the screenplays the studio handed him.

Consider some of the titles for which we best remember Lewton: "Cat People" (1942), "I Walked With a Zombie" (1943), "The Leopard Man" (1943), "The Seventh Victim" (1943), "The Ghost Ship" (1944), "The Curse of the Cat People" (1944), "Isle of the Dead" (1945), "The Body Snatcher" (1945), "Bedlam" (1946). In Lewton's day, his movies brought RKO back to life, and today they are all of them minor classics. After "Bedlam," however, the vogue for horror was coming to an end, and Lewton was never as successful doing straight dramatic or comedy films. At the age of forty-six he died prematurely of a bad heart.

Lewton produced movies that Scorsese tells us "moved and spoke in a different way." His movies "satisfied the demand for horror, but they delivered much more." His movies were shocking, to be sure, but they were also strange, poetic, and evocative, where "nothing that happens is expected."

"Horror," the documentary informs us, "is what causes physical revulsion; terror is what causes fear." So, if anything, Lewton's films are terror films. The mood of his stories was reflective and melancholy, the main characters mostly tormented and just as often women.

Writer and director Kent Jones helmed the documentary, which premiered at several film festivals in 2007 and on the Turner Classic Movie channel in 2008. He crams an awful lot of facts, data, opinion, and analysis into its seventy-seven minutes (the keep case erroneously lists it at eighty-seven minutes), and that may be its only shortcoming--it's too brief. Beyond copious film excerpts, Jones provides interviews with and comments from people like producer/director Roger Corman, reigning king of the low-budget film; Val E. Lewton, the subject's son; director Kiyoshi Kurosawa, no relation to Akira Kurosawa but a fine director in his own right; Jacques Tourneur, Robert Wise, and Val Lewton himself in archive footage; and actor Elias Koteas reading the voice of Lewton.