Cats, a Cammell, and some really big bunnies

Warner Home Video has announced an eclectic lineup of titles coming out on DVD this Halloween:

“To direct a picture, a man needs humility. Do you have humility, Mr. Shields?” That was the thinly veiled von Stroheim/von Sternberg character, Von Ellstein (Ivan Triesault), to arrogant movie producer Jonathan Shields (Kirk Douglas) in Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful (1952). If we forgive Ellstein’s ascot and riding boots, his point about humility is well taken. What doesn’t register right away is the fact that Shields isn’t as cold and ruthless as his fair-weather friends and associates would have us believe. There’s a dose of humble pie when he’s making a low budget horror movie, realizing that the cat-man costume from the wardrobe department is ridiculous, and that people could be more frightened by shadows in the dark.
    In these scenes, Shields’s character was partially based on the producer Val Lewton (1904-1951) who had a brief but influential career in the 1940’s. Working at RKO, he tapped into the psychological power of shadows, camouflaging threadbare horror productions by making viewers focus on things that weren’t visible to the naked eye. A number of proficient directors worked for him—Mark Robson, Jacques Tourneur, Robert Wise, Compton Bennett, Norman Taurog, Hugo Fregonese—but Lewton is a test case for the producer as auteur.
    Warners is releasing nine of his best known horror films for the first time in a DVD boxed set. For those who are unfamiliar with the work, don’t let the titles fool you: Cat People (1942), I Walked With a Zombie, The Leopard Man, Ghost Ship, The Seventh Victim (all 1943, his banner year), Curse of the Cat People (1944), The Body Snatcher, Isle of the Dead (both 1945), and Bedlam (1946). Some of them star Boris Karloff, but the rest rely on the spontaneity of their solid ‘b’ casts, generally forgotten actors such as Frances Dee, Tom Conway, Simone Simon and Kent Smith. While all the films are worth checking out, I’ve a special fondness for The Seventh Victim, in which Satanists lurk in the alleys of a backlot Greenwich Village.

While making Demon Seed (1977), director Donald Cammell supposedly quipped to a reporter on the set about his star, Julie Christie: “The film may be shit, but I think her work in it is extraordinary.” A funny, erudite British artist who fell into the trap of Hollywood, Cammell hired himself out for this bizarre exercise in sexual degradation. Prompted by the demand for science fiction late in the decade, MGM wanted a picture about Julie being raped and made pregnant by a computer who has Robert Vaughn’s voice. Cammell was right: it’s shit…but it’s really good shit!

Before he made Night of the Lepus (1972), William Claxton directed a lot of television; after Night of the Lepus, a theatrical release, William Claxton directed a lot more television. Well, work is work. To be perfectly honest, I never knew what a ‘lepus’ was until a couple of years ago—a word stored for years, waiting for the proper moment of revelation. It’s Latin for hare. Rabbit. Bunny. And the book the film was based on—if you can believe that this film was based on a book—was The Year of the Angry Rabbit by Russell Braddon. I’ve never read it, so I can’t rightly say how faithful Claxton’s adaptation is. And it’s been about thirty years since I’ve seen the movie, so I’m not sure how it holds up. The stars are Stuart Whitman, Janet Leigh, Rory Calhoun, DeForest Kelley, and an ever-growing population of giant rabbits. If the memory’s correct, they used real rabbits hopping around miniature sets.