films, page 12 of 31

It’s pointless to compare Ralph Bakshi’s 1978 animated film of The Lord of the Rings with Peter Jackson’s trilogy. They’re two completely different things. Jackson’s live-action film makes every effort to bring out the human drama of Tolkien’s story while presenting an exquisitely-crafted, seamlessly “real” version of Tolkien’s world. Bakshi’s, on the other hand, is a far pacier telling of the first half of the trilogy, and in style is more an illustrated thing, story-bookish and textured like a hand-made artefact — expressive and Romantic rather than dramatic and realistic. Jackson’s is convincing in every detail, but Bakshi’s works through the charm of its style.

Three rings for the Elven Kings…

Or perhaps I’m just saying this because Bakshi’s was the first version of The Lord of the Rings I was exposed to. I’d made attempts at reading LOTR before (the school library had a fat one-volume paperback of it, with a Pauline Baynes cover), but I always got stuck in the Shire. When I finally did get past that point and really enjoyed the books (those Barrow Wights!), I did so mostly with Bakshi’s version of the characters in mind — Aragorn had John Hurt’s voice (and, as in Bakshi’s movie, genuinely “looks foul and feels fair”, as compared to Viggo Mortensen’s much un-fouler look), while Gandalf, lean, aquiline, and hobbling around with his staff, was a far more authoritative and scary wizard than Ian McKellen’s (to my taste) rather too fond-and-friendly version. (I didn’t know it at the time, but there’s also Anthony Daniels, aka C3P0, as the voice of Legolas, and Mrs Victor Meldrew, Annette Crosbie, as Galadriel.)

Galadriel

Aragorn

Some people criticise the film for its uneven use of rotoscoping (where live footage is traced over by animators), but to me it’s just one of the many textures the film uses, and to great effect. Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings seems so wonderfully, hubristically 1970s, mixing animation styles like a prog-rock concept album mixes musical genres. (Apparently, he at one point wanted to use Led Zeppelin for the soundtrack.) For me, though, the rotoscoping adds a gritty, grainy quality to the action and battle sequences, recalling World War newsreel footage; and where it’s used to show the Nine Riders in their true form, in a sort of ivory-tinted black-and-white, it creates a genuinely creepy, otherworldly feel that to me is far more effective than the strangely windswept look Jackson used for the Ringwraiths’ true form in The Fellowship of the Ring.

The film does have its oddities. Saruman is sometimes referred to as Aruman — in one scene, he’s referred to by both names. In another scene, we see Merry and Pippin being carried along by a group of orcs after the pair have escaped into Fangorn Forest. But the greatest oddity, of course, is the fact that it ends halfway. There was going to be a sequel, but Bakshi found the process had taken more out of him than he’d expected. (In the end, there was a 1980 animation of The Return of the King by a different company. I saw it once, on US TV. The only thing I remember is my shock at finding it was a musical, with one song being called “Where There’s A Whip There’s A Way”.)

I still watch Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings occasionally. It has certainly not been out-dated by Jackson’s version (which I also like, but which had to first win out against my pro-Bakshi prejudice). The two are perfectly able to co-exist, being so different as they are.

After Cat People, producer Val Lewton and director Jacques Tourneur worked together again on I Walked with a Zombie (1943). Despite its even more lurid title, Zombie is less of a horror film than Cat People, though it occupies a very similar territory of dark psychology and the supernatural.

The film starts with young Betsy Connell being taken on as a nurse to Mrs Jessica Holland on the island of St Sebastian in the Caribbean. Apart from bouts of sleepwalking, Jessica is almost catatonic, and it’s later revealed that her illness began just as she was about to run away from the island with her lover, her husband’s half-brother, Wesley Rand. Having fallen for Mrs Holland’s strong, silent type of a husband, nurse Betsy tries everything she can to cure Jessica, and when the latest medical methods fail, takes her ghostly charge to the local voodoo cult, who of course recognise her as one of their own. As someone says of her: “She makes a very beautiful zombie.”

Where Cat People’s Irena was a foreigner bringing her wild, foreign darkness to the shores of civilised modern America, I Walked with a Zombie’s Betsy is a Canadian, who journeys into the wild, foreign darkness of St Sebastian’s highly-charged atmosphere of repression, betrayal, jealousy, bitterness, resentment, beauty and death, love and mental illness, and willingly becomes caught in its emotional tangles: while Paul Holland, “strong, silent and very sad”, whose first words are to inform Betsy that the supposedly beautiful phosphorescent lights in the sea are caused by things dying (“There’s no beauty here, only death and decay. Everything good dies here, even the stars.”) — and the fact that he chooses to hang a copy of Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead in his sick wife’s bedroom probably says a lot about his state of mind — bears the burden of his wife’s malady like a family curse, his half-brother Wesley teeters on the verge of alcoholism, and his otherwise level-headed mother keeps the extent of her dabblings in the local voodoo cult secret. In both films, troubled souls are failed by the latest advances in Western medicine (psychiatry in Cat People, insulin shock therapy in Zombie), but only because the cause of the malady is supernatural: Irena really does turn into a panther, Jessica really is a zombie.

But the main difference, what makes Cat People a tragedy and this a Gothic romance (as Kim Newman and Stephen Jones point out in the DVD commentary, it’s basically Jane Eyre with voodoo) is perhaps its attitude to the supernatural. Here, far from the civilised streets of Cat People’s New York, the lines between what should be believed and what shouldn’t are blurred, and it is the practical-minded Betsy’s willingness to take a walk into the twilight realm of the voodoo “home fort” (a nightmare journey fraught with spookiness, and the film’s high point) that separates her from the ultimately censorious and condescending attitudes of Cat People’s Alice, Ollie and Dr Judd.

I Walked with a Zombie is not so much a horror film as one dripping with a very shadowy Gothic. And it takes a surprisingly un-sensationalist approach to voodoo, neither presenting it as an excuse to wallow in lurid shock imagery, nor as a Hollywood cliché of “native superstitions”. A good, ghostly-tinged film, then, probably better in terms of characterisation and drama than Cat People, though I have to say I still prefer Cat People for being so intense, weird, dark and tragic.

If you come to Curse of the Cat People (1944) expecting a sequel to Cat People in the usual sense of a horror sequel, you’ll be disappointed (as I was, the first time I saw it). Usually, in a horror sequel, the monster from the first film returns to wreak havoc on a new set of victims; here, the victims from the first film return to wreak havoc on a new monster — only, in this case, the “monster” isn’t a troubled young woman, but an over-imaginative young girl.

In Curse of the Cat People, all-American lukewarms Alice and Ollie (the couple from Cat People) are now married and have a daughter. Amy is an imaginative child, shunned by other children because she’s apt to forget the game they’re playing and wander off in her own little world. Her father Ollie is worried. His experience with Irena in Cat People has led to him being mistrustful of everything that smacks of his former wife’s mental problems. He thinks there’s “something moody, something sickly” about young Amy’s tendency to go “moping and dreaming” on her own. “She could almost be Irena’s child,” he muses to this wife, who gently reminds him that she’s the one to know this can’t be the case. But when, having been shown a photograph of Irena, Amy identifies this dead woman as her new playmate, Ollie first tries to get her to admit she’s lying, then gives Amy her first smacking. He tells Amy’s teacher that his first wife “told lies to herself and believed them”, and that she then went mad, killed a man, then killed herself. (And so he seems to have forgotten his own last words at the end of the previous film: “She never lied to us.”)

What makes it worse is that Amy’s imaginative friend, played by Simone Simon of the first film, is entirely benevolent. The “curse” of the sequel’s title isn’t the fact that Amy is haunted by her father’s first wife, but that Amy’s father is haunted by a fear of people who show any signs of being different. And although his new-found distrust of imagination does, finally, add a new dimension to his character, at two dimensions he’s still far short of the norm, and really not the best person to be deciding how to bring up a sensitive, imaginative child.

There are none of the shocks or spookiness of the first film, apart from a few moodily-lit Gothic moments thanks to a subplot involving a senile old actress who insists the woman sharing her house is not her daughter but an impostor. Instead, the film goes for gentle family melodrama and moments of lightly enchanting childhood fantasy. It’s a sequel to Cat People more in the thematic sense, as it deals with how those “normal, happy” people (or one of them at least, as Alice has much less of her husband’s phobia) of the first film can deal so badly with those who are a little bit different from them. Thankfully, this time there’s no lecherous Dr Judd to push things too far. Instead, Ollie gets advice from his daughter’s teacher, who points out that, as he builds ships, he’s not trained to deal with children but she is, and that it’s only natural for a lonely, imaginative child to invent a friend.

I think you have to approach Curse of the Cat People prepared for something very different from what you’d expect of a film billed as a sequel to Cat People. It’s not a horror film, and, more importantly, it has none of the first film’s psychological intensity. Ollie’s very slow — and, at the end, not very convincing — coming to terms with the fact that his daughter isn’t as imaginatively shallow as he is (at the end, he refuses to look at where young Amy tells him Irena is standing, but lies all the same, saying he sees her too) isn’t even a truly satisfying resolution, but, as sequels go, at least the film attempts something interesting.