“Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper” (1943)

[spoilers] This Robert Bloch story, according to editor David G. Hartwell of the Dark Descent anthology, is arguably his best, which is a pretty big statement about someone who was so insanely prolific and also author of the literary property behind Alfred Hitchcock’s movie Psycho. I’m not arguing against it (I still need to read Psycho!), but only, as an ongoing Bloch skeptic (too much hackwork and not enough better than meh, he started early and lived long), raising an eyebrow to hear the argument. In fairness, it might be the best thing I’ve read by him, but “The Hungry House” from The Weird (edited by Ann and Jeff VanderMeer) at least rivals it. Bloch’s primary flaw is a broad vaudevillian tendency to crack glib and jokey, all puns and dad jokes welcome. That’s less of a problem here (though it persists) and my interest in the Jack the Ripper story gets me the rest of the way over the hump. I’m fascinated by the case and up for regular reviews of the details, which takes up a portion of this story. Bloch’s semi-vampiric premise is that Jack the Ripper is immortal, committing blood sacrifice to extend his life. He disappeared as Jack the Ripper, media celebrity, but continued to kill. An investigator, an Englishman, has been on the case for years when he approaches the first-person narrator, a Chicago psychiatrist, to enlist his aid, which involves attending a bizarre trendy bohemian loft type of party along with handfuls of Chicago references. The story’s twist is brazenly gimmicky but Bloch gets away with it somehow and the story is considered by many to be a stone classic. It’s fairly a surprise that the narrator, the Chicago psychiatrist, turns out to be himself Jack the Ripper. But you really can’t think about this too much or it all falls apart. The investigator’s interest in the psychiatrist is never really given. Chicago, not to mention the world, is a big place for such happenstance. And why, as the narrator, is he withholding from the reader who he is, other than for a short story effect? In the end this story doesn’t work so well for me. Bloch is interesting because he straddles two major strains of 20th-century horror, starting out as a teenage disciple of H.P. Lovecraft, and evolving into the straightforward dialogue-driven story with a surprise (and/or ironic) ending so popular at postwar midcentury. He is fully the latter here, by 1943. In many ways the story seems designed merely to spring its gotcha surprise, rather than offer any insight about Jack the Ripper or his legend.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

Meshes of the Afternoon (1943)

USA, 14 minutes

Directors: Maya Deren, Alexander Hammid

Writer: Maya Deren

Photography: Alexander Hammid

Editor: Maya Deren

Cast: Maya Deren, Alexander Hammid

I warmed up for writing about this 14-minute experimental film by looking at the 103-minute 2002 documentary In the Mirror of Maya Deren. I had seen Meshes of the Afternoon previously, via youtube videos of varying quality with and without a soundtrack, and not had much patience for it. I particularly did not like the nun-like figure with a mirror for a face, which reminded me too much of Luis Bunuel and his work, notably Un Chien Andalou, although it is L'Age d'Or where he really starts getting carried away with nuns. And it’s not really exactly a nun here anyway, but never mind. In the Mirror covers all of Deren’s abbreviated career (she died in 1961 at the age of 44) and her six or so movies. Deren was another beneficiary of last year’s Sight & Sound poll, ultimately elevating Meshes of the Afternoon from #277 on the big list at They Shoot Pictures, Don’t They? up to #99, though she does not appear again in the list of 1,000. I suspect other pictures by her may be better, but Meshes also has depths that are remarkable for a little 14-minute cinema play. In fairness, it is merely her very first film whereas especially the footage she shot in Haiti, clips seen in In the Mirror, looks more interesting to me. I thus still had some bias against Meshes of the Afternoon going in again. Then I had a hard time getting comfortable at first with the “intentional silence,” enforced by Deren with intentional markers of sound such as a record-player playing a record. But I came to like it for that, especially when I peeked in on a youtube version with music. Meshes is mostly a dream story, and the dream stories we have at night after all are mostly silent. Meshes is rooted in feminist anxiety, if I’m reading it right, but with its own internal logic as dream narrative more or less, with potent symbols and/or artifacts of the mundane day—the flower, the key, the knife.

It has the inexplicable physical forces and dislocations of dreams too when the dreamer within the dream (Deren) is blown down a staircase, and later when she is edited down and up the same staircase after an unsettling encounter. It is randomly erotic. There is a lot of clarity to how the scenes are staged and shot, and the use of repetition is skillful. Even so, for all the force of Deren’s vision, it often feels much like what it is, some fooling around with a motion-picture camera in the glintingly bright sunshine and etched shadows of California, albeit at the same time admittedly visionary somehow. I found the more I looked at Meshes the better it seemed to get. I have some trouble, I must admit, adjusting to such a purely visual experience as this little 14-minute workout delivers. All of Deren’s films are on youtube, as far as I could see, even a 52-minute 1985 documentary which appears to be the only way to see her Haiti footage. It’s called Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, put together by Cherel and Teiji Ito, finally released eight years later. Teiji Ito was Deren’s second husband, 18 years her junior, married when they were 43 and 25. The youtube video is typically frustrating, with burnt-in Spanish (Portuguese?) subtitles and footage obviously decayed by iterations of duplication. But Deren’s seeming rapport and intimacy with these Haitians gave her amazing access to some remarkable rituals and wonderful, mesmerizing music and dance, which generally come through fine. Voiceovers by John Genke and Joan Pape provide some useful information when they are not sounding like educational films for classrooms. Maya Deren—start with Meshes of the Afternoon, I suppose, fair enough, and then proceed.

“A Thin Gentleman With Gloves” (1943)

Here’s a pretty good story by August Derleth, writing under the name of Simon West in a pretty good anthology he edited, When Evil Wakes. In a way it’s part of an editor’s cheat, because Derleth also includes another story by himself, “The Tsanta in the Parlor” (also pretty good), writing as Stephen Grendon. There’s a third story credited to Derleth with H.P. Lovecraft, “The Shuttered Room,” although word is that Derleth wrote it from sketchy notes by Lovecraft some 20 years or more after Lovecraft’s death. It’s the weakest of his three stories in the anthology. But it’s a good anthology overall, and the other two Derleth efforts under pen names contribute nicely to it. “Thin Gentleman” is fairly obvious, involving a shady lawyer who defrauds his clients to support a gambling problem. In this story he is at work on cheating a woman named in the will of a man who recently died. We come to understand this man is a warlock. Her inheritance was to be 50,000 pounds (a lot of money in 1943) but the shyster boldly whittles it down to 1,000. The “thin gentleman” is basically the warlock’s enforcer. In life his constant companion (just behind and slightly to the side, with bowed head), he shows up on the peripheries anytime the lawyer gets out to the racetrack or is otherwise committing malfeasance. Seeing this mysterious thin gentleman makes the lawyer nervous, something about him seems familiar (no pun intended), but he never figures out what’s going on until too late. We’re way ahead of him. There are some nice notes toward the end, as when the thin man’s face is revealed. The lawyer disappears but eventually his body is found and that’s a nice gruesome grace note too. Take it home, man. Take it all the way home. I’ve read a few stories by the prolific Derleth, who preferred his reputation as the poet laureate of Wisconsin, author of Sac Prairie Saga, a collection of multiple volumes of fiction, historical fiction, poetry, and nonfiction nature writing. But he is also the man who arguably kept the pilot light burning on Lovecraft’s career, establishing Arkham House as a publishing home for the work of Lovecraft and many others. There’s little of the sludgy Lovecraft mythos in this story. It’s efficient, setting up the tension right away with the appalling amorality of the lawyer, and then layering in the witchery, which has much the air of the urbane yet slightly rancid Rosemary’s Baby movie. Civilized horror, suitable for teeming metropolises like Rome, London, and New York, anonymous masses, old brick buildings, and everybody minds their own business. The clues may be all but printed in red capitals in “Thin Gentleman”; the surprises are more in how it’s done. I wish more of these 20th-century writers were public domain so we could get more of them in one place.

When Evil Wakes, ed. August Derleth (out of print)
Story not available online.

“After You, My Dear Alphonse” (1943)

Some interesting points over at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB) about this very short Shirley Jackson story. First, as always, ISFDB's sort of inverted bias makes them quick to declare anything suspiciously realistic as “non-genre.” “Although this story is listed in Ashley & Contento's Supernatural Index, there isn't anything supernatural in it,” they note. And that’s certainly true, at least if you exclude a certain level of future-seeing prescience. It’s a story about racism, and it couldn’t be any more clear, though what’s remarkable may be more the publication date, arguably early in terms of 20th-century integration, even before the U.S. military was formally desegregated in 1948. Mrs. Wilson’s son Johnny has brought home a new friend for lunch. Boyd is “a Negro.” They are about 8 or 9 years old. The moment Mrs. Wilson sees Boyd everything changes. Her bigotry is not based exactly on hatred but more on a mix of uninformed compassion and condescension. She assumes Boyd is poor, has numerous siblings, and doesn’t get enough to eat. She offers to make up a box of blankets and used clothes for his family. She means well, maybe, but she is also overbearing. Boyd very tactfully turns her down, which annoys her. You get the feeling Boyd has encountered this treatment before. He appreciates the kindness, but plainly all he wants is to be treated like anyone else. Johnny is the only person who seems to be genuinely colorblind here. The giveaway about Mrs. Wilson is when she becomes annoyed Boyd won’t accept anything but a small lunch from her. And what works more than anything is the clarity of this story, clarity being one of the greater virtues in Shirley Jackson’s work. It’s a very short story, maybe four pages, and you may want to call it obvious but Jackson packs a lot into it. The title comes from a joke whose sources lie in a turn-of-the-century comic strip about hobos, a joke that Johnny and Boyd share, politely exchanging with one another, “After you, my dear Alphonse,” and then, from the other, “No, after you, my dear Alphonse.” The story is excellent, as clear a crystallization of racism as you could hope to find even today and a painful reminder of how deeply enmeshed with race so many of our problems still are.

Shirley Jackson, Novels and Stories
Read story online.
Listen to story online.

"The Crowd" (1943)

This Ray Bradbury story has turned up in both the Dark Descent and Weird anthologies, and lots of others too, including Weird Tales magazine where it was originally published. It plays a typical Ray Bradbury trick of taking something reasonably normal—in this case the phenomenon of looky-loo crowds that inevitably gather around accidents, suicides, and other unusual public occurrences—and turning it into something mistily malevolent. For the most part it works really well, with Bradbury using his effects cunningly. Some of it even retain a certain prescience now too, looking forward for example to the ludicrous excesses of J.G. Ballard's Crash (and David Cronenberg's film adaptation of the same name) in the way it puts the common daily occurrence of auto accidents so top of mind. Even the mild-mannered Bradbury seems to be indulging some excess by necessarily including three of these accidents, and the same guy, our main character, is in two (the second deliberate). Simple details propel the best effects in this story: first, how rapidly the crowd forms after an accident. The emphasis is a bit overdone, with Bradbury detailing some of it down to the second as if with a stopwatch. The best effect is when our guy notices that exactly the same people are seen in the crowd at different accidents in different parts of town at the same time. Much like the investigator in The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, he has gone to the public library archive to look up newspaper photos. These anonymous people are marked out by simple identifying details: a boy with freckles, a red-haired woman, certain facial features. They are anonymous but they are recognizable and they are the same people. At this point, about two-thirds into a pretty short story, we reach an almost perfect crescendo of menace and mystery, wondering what in the heck is going on around here. Our guy becomes almost like one of them, appearing at an accident, seeing members of the crowd he recognizes, trying to follow them. But they elude him. In my opinion somewhere around here was the place to end the story. We know for a fact that these same people are showing up at the scene of accidents in impossible ways but we don't know why or even how. That's perfect. What strange mad universe are we, etc. Bradbury, however, the Charles Schulz of horror, wants to inject an explanation for our edification and satisfaction, which unfortunately is even more preposterous than the premise. Bradbury often aims to be elegiac but some of his stories have such sharp edges they can only be classified as horror—which, in turn, Bradbury seems to fight in himself sometimes, dulling them with bucolic platitudes, as if his own imagination frightened him. In fairness, I think I might be scared too if I were dreaming up stuff like the first two-thirds of this story in a room by myself.

The Stories of Ray Bradbury (Everyman's)
The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell
The Weird, ed. Ann and Jeff VanderMeer
Listen to story online.

Illustration from YouTube video.

"They Bite" (1943)

Anthony Boucher's moody classic WWII-era horror / Western story has a desert setting and unsettling spy overtones. It's fast and effective with lots of surprises, but I think what I like best is its working knowledge of terrifying true-crime cases, such as the Bender family in Kansas circa the early 1870s. These fiends set up as an inn for westering pioneers and murdered an unknown number but at least 11. The motive was robbery but they were notable butchers. Boucher even throws in a preening name-check of William Roughead and one of his classic case write-ups about a 16th-century murder by poisoning within the royal family of Scotland, nothing to do with anything here but fun to see. The Benders were human beings in real life but not exactly in this story, which says they moved west and become the Carkers, long slender brown weird immortal monsters that strike swift and sure. Interesting theory. Yes, they bite. They're never seen except in reaches of peripheral vision, fleetingly. "They Bite" takes place in a desert town in the West called Oasis. Our hero is a regular white guy but also a spy for Axis powers. He's there checking out the doings at a nearby military airfield. He has an old friend who blackmails him when he figures out what's going on. Our hero is not a good man. Outside of town are abandoned adobe dwellings where no one lives anymore, except the Carkers. Carkers is a good word—you sort of have to clear your throat or bark like an animal to get it out. Boucher's descriptions are more dancing and allusive about them than concrete for most of the story, a nice use of misdirection until we finally come face to face with one. There's also a mysterious grizzled old miner guy who won't say any more about them than the title of the story. The reader is allowed to imagine them and then compare notes with the shuddering reality at the end, as the story explodes to its inevitable conclusion. This subtle approach to exposing monsters as such is reminiscent of the original 1942 Cat People and other movie productions where the viewer is asked to do a lot of the work of imagining the menace. "They Bite" does not particularly rise to the level of jolting fear but instead is better, much better, at gnawing tension, with a nice blast at the end. Considering that our good guy is actually a bad guy—you'll see more about why—you might say it's a happy ending. Either way a stone classic.

Realms of Darkness, ed. Mary Danby (out of print)
Read story online.

The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)

UK, 163 minutes

Directors/writers: Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger

Photography: Georges Perinal

Music: Allan Gray

Editor: John Seabourne Sr.

Cast: Roger Livesey, Anton Walbrook, Deborah Kerr, Roland Culver, James McKechnie, Albert Lieven, Arthur Wonter, A.E. Matthews, David Hutcheson, Ursula Jeans, John Laurie, Harry Welchman, Ian Fleming

Things I didn't know: "Colonel Blimp" was a British political cartoon that began in the 1930s. The character was an ancient harrumphing military veteran with a walrus mustache, potbelly, and reliably fatuous opinions on issues of the day, which he brayed from the comfort of Turkish baths. So that explains why this UK Archers production has no one named Blimp in it (I don't believe the word or name even occurs across this lengthy picture). What's more, the character who is obviously set up as his type, Clive Candy (Roger Livesey with literally a stiff upper lip—you'll learn why, and also why the mustache), is still in good health at the end of the movie and quite alive.

This epic, lively, and colorful picture came out in the depths of World War II. The death it seems to be talking about is more of a Colonel Blimp-like idea: faith in German honor. A lot of people had a hard time shaking that off. It's one reason the Nazis were so effective. Only a few years before, French director Jean Renoir was celebrating the class solidarity of aristocrats across national lines in La Grande Illusion, showing the respect and decent treatment officers accorded one another even in P.O.W. camps. That's the world Colonel Blimp knew, and it's the world Clive Candy knows too, a veteran of the Boer Wars and the Great War and in the present day with duties in the Home Guard, protecting against the air raids of 1940. His best friend in all the world is the German Theo Kretschmar-Schuldorff (Anton Walbrook), who Candy must face in a duel of honor before they find their way to fast friendship.

I Walked With a Zombie (1943)

USA, 69 minutes
Director: Jacques Tourneur
Writers: Curt Siodmak, Ardel Wray, Inez Wallace, Charlotte Bronte, Val Lewton
Photography: J. Roy Hunt
Music: Roy Webb
Editor: Mark Robson
Cast: Frances Dee, Tom Conway, Darby Jones, James Ellison, Christine Gordon, Edith Barrett, James Bell, Sir Lancelot, Theresa Harris, Jieno Moxzer

When RKO Pictures hired producer Val Lewton to make what turned out to be a famous series of mild horror pictures in the '40s, the studio had three requirements for him: the movies had to be cheap (under $150,000), short (under 75 minutes), and use the evocative titles they gave him ("Cat People," "Bedlam," "The Seventh Victim"), as if they were creative writing instructors dispensing cues. Yet the results are undeniable, strange and quiet, straining against rules, expertly made, bruised moody and beautiful, though often undercutting their own effects by so resolutely looking away from things they suggest. Too expensive to shoot, no doubt. The Curse of the Cat People, a sequel to Cat People, is barely related to the first movie. In fact, it's barely horror—much closer to fairy tale fantasy, with a unique sympathy for lonely children. And one of the best Lewton made.

Speaking of best, director Jacques Tourneur (Out of the Past, Curse / Night of the Demon, Canyon Passage) was probably the best director Lewton had. He directed Cat People and I Walked With a Zombie, as well as the somewhat less effective Leopard Man. I Walked With a Zombie is based on a magazine article about workers in Haiti controlled through drug dosing, but Lewton gave it some literary torque by picking up one of the main plot threads from Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and injecting it into his Haitian mood. This Zombie is a movie more about voodoo than George Romero's reimagining of zombies as some horrific virus that reanimates corpses. See also an RKO picture with Bela Lugosi from more than 10 years earlier, the 1932 White Zombie, working much the same idea. Voodoo and a tinge of racism lurking in the back are what give I Walked With a Zombie most of its juice, of which it has plenty.

Shadow of a Doubt (1943)

USA, 108 minutes
Director: Alfred Hitchcock
Writer: Thornton Wilder, Sally Benson, Alma Reville, Gordon McDonell
Photography: Joseph A. Valentine
Music: Dimitri Tiomkin
Editor: Milton Carruth
Cast: Joseph Cotten, Teresa Wright, Patricia Collinge, Henry Travers, Hume Cronyn, Macdonald Carey, Wallace Ford, Edna May Wonacott

In my attempts to make the case that Fritz Lang's M is flawed and overrated, too much a propaganda exercise pushing for return of a death penalty in Germany in the early '30s—hey, we all have our blind spots—I used to counter claims it was the best serial killer movie of all time by calling attention to Shadow of a Doubt, director Alfred Hitchcock's first movie set exclusively in the US and also reportedly his own favorite of all the movies he made. In 1986, Henry made the whole argument moot, of course (though not all fans of M see it that way), and in hindsight I would have to say that Hitchcock's conception of a serial killer and his society is nearly as romanticized and off-key as M, though both movies also have many things right about the curious brutal phenomenon of modern life.

M focuses on the sexual perversion, general skulking pathetic qualities, and the heinousness of the crimes, preying on children, whereas Shadow of a Doubt makes Uncle Charlie (Joseph Cotten, typically great even in an unusual role for him) more of a preening Nietzschean superman type, openly, almost compulsively scornful of social institutions such as banks and churches. A soul of darkness. He's the one you'd think more likely to send postcards to newspapers and police. But Uncle Charlie is actually a good deal more circumspect and ultimately perhaps rational, going to great pains to hide his identity and in many ways committing his crimes for the money. He's closer to Patricia Highsmith's Mr. Ripley than Jack the Ripper. The genius here is to set this serial killer down in the middle of California small-town Leave it to Beaver land.