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.

Out of the Past (1947)

USA, 97 minutes
Director: Jacques Tourneur
Writers: Daniel Mainwaring, James M. Cain, Frank Fenton
Photography: Nicholas Musuraca
Music: Roy Webb
Editor: Samuel E. Beetley
Cast: Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, Kirk Douglas, Rhonda Fleming, Richard Webb, Steve Brodie, Virginia Houston, Dickie Moore

Out of the Past is a great little movie made out of many great small things, such as cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca's shimmering black and white. It's set mostly in the Lake Tahoe region of northern California and the scenery often reminds me of Ansel Adams photos: streaming showers of sunlight etching well-defined shadows, with silvery leaves rustling in the foreground and stoic gray mountain skylines beyond. Director Jacques Tourneur, whose previous work included the best of producer Val Lewton's low-key B-movie approach to horror in Cat People, I Walked With a Zombie, and The Leopard Man, is just about as deceptively casual creating one of the greatest examples of film noir.

That's a pretty big statement but in fact I've been a little surprised by how much it's agreed on (here for one example is what they were saying on the Goodfella's Movie Blog eight years ago). The term for me evokes more the splashier exercises such as Double Indemnity, The Maltese Falcon, or Touch of Evil, so on so forth, or the extremely low-budget pictures, viz., Gun Crazy, Kiss Me Deadly, or Detour. Don't get me wrong, I think they're great, and so is Out of the Past, but it's the one that sneaks up on me. I think of it as small, maybe even a little slick and dull, though it has all the ingredients of dangerous men and even more dangerous women, low motives and high living, jealousy, vengeance, gnawing dissatisfaction, cigarette smoke, drawn guns, and the deep shadow that goes like frosting on a cake. Out of the Past definitely has one thing that the best of film noir has and maybe a majority doesn't, which is a coherent well-oiled plot with lots of the narrative pieces working together like a machine, and no stinting on the clarity. It gets to be perfectly absorbing as it unfolds, and it's also one of those movies that gets better the more it is seen.