I Walked With A Zombie (1943)

Despite the painfully lurid title, I Walked with a Zombie is not a horror film, but an unsettling melodrama with lashings of ambiguity and ambience.

Betsy Connell (Frances Dee) is a nurse, sent to Haiti to care for Jessica (Christine Gordon), the wife of sugar plantation manager Paul Holland (Tom Conway). Jessica, always seems to wandering around in a silent stupor, and the Voodoo practising natives think she is a zombie. But is there something more to it than that? Something that involves Paul's missionary mother and his jealous alcoholic half-brother Wesley?

This was the second collaboration between French director Jacques Tourneur and RKO producer Val Lewton, following their box office smash Cat People. Both films share a visual palette steeped in shadows, a plot steeped in ambiguity and uncertainty, and a shocking advertising campaign from the studio.

However, unlike Cat People there are no jumps or shocks, as Tourneur prefers a slow burning atmosphere of creeping dread. The world of this film is one of unresolved conflicts and contrasts - light and dark, Caribbean Voodoo and Western Christianity, science and superstition, slavery and freedom, none of which are ultimately resolved.

The script is the other strong point for this film, with characters that are not as straightforward as they first appear, and a refusal to provide any easy answers. It is also refreshing to see our zombies were originally presented on screen, a world away from the flesh eating, rotten corpses we are used to nowadays.





I Walked With A Zombie (1943 horror film... by Altair_IV

Sherlock Holmes Faces Death (1943)

The recent BBC TV series was not the first attempt to move Sherlock Holmes from Victorian times into a more contemporary setting. Universal set several of the series of films starring Basil Rathbone as Holmes and Nigel Bruce as Dr Watson, during the wartime 1940s world that they were released in. What makes Sherlock Holmes Faces Death one of the best of these is that the war is now the backdrop to, not the driving force behind, the story, and the filmmakers went back to the source, adapting the Conan Doyle story "The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual".

The plot sees Watson working at to the Musgrave estate, a country mansion turned makeshift hospital for soldiers wounded in World War Two. When one of his colleagues is mysteriously attacked, Watson asks Holmes to help investigate, but when the great detective arrives, he finds one of the Musgrave family murdered, a long list of suspects, and a possible link to an old and sinister family tradition.

The script plays fast and loose with the original short story, making it more of a straightforward murder mystery, set in a slightly hokey haunted house, complete with thunder, lightning, suits of armour, secret passages and cobwebs. The story plays out in a somewhat formulaic manner, quickly setting up the story and showing us the suspects one by one.

Rathbone's take on Holmes is one that keeps many of the traits of the books, such as the unpredictable energy, fierce intelligence and eccentricity (we first see him shooting bullets into his living room wall in order to test a theory, and he also has an encyclopaedic knowledge of train times and current affairs). His portrayal is the one that I grew up with, and is the one that perhaps set the public perception of the character in the twentieth century,

Watson is not as quick-witted as in the books, but he is a loyal and likeable fellow, as well as, for the audience sake, filling the role of giving Holmes someone to explain the story to (and being the sort of Doctor who prescribes patients "those American cigarettes you like")

Regular Holmes foil Inspector Lestrade is on hand to provide the comic relief, bumbling from one mishap to the next, even though nobody has any explanation for why a London police officer is investigating a murder in Northumberland. Having said that, nobody has any explanation as to why the English village has a distinctly Mediterranean look either.

Unlike previous wartime Holmes films, here, he is not working for the Allies, and the conflict seems rarely to get a mention. Interestingly though there are hints at some tensions between the British and the billeted US soldiers, with one villager talking disapprovingly of somebody "running off with a Yankee". The only time war comes to the fore is the stirring speech by Holmes at the very end, talking of "a new spirit abroad in the land" where "the old days of grab and greed are on their way out". It feels tacked on, and jars somewhat with the rest of the film, which is a fun, interesting, and atmospheric mystery thriller.

The Falcon in Danger (1943)

The Falcon in Danger, the sixth of RKO's Falcon films, is an unremarkable affair, where an annoying sidekick, a dull script and flat direction undo the charming lead.

The story starts intriguingly, with freelance crime solver the Falcon, aka Tom Lawrence (played by Tom Conway) somehow getting roped into investigating a plane crash at an airport in New York. Missing from the wreckage is the pilot, two wealthy businessmen and $100,000 in securities.

Sadly instead of spending time developing this mystery properly, there is instead too much attention given to the Falcon's grating fiancée Bonnie Caldwell, and her, ultimately unsuccessful, attempts to keep Lawrence out of crime fighting. It is not that a character like the Falcon cannot work with a female sidekick; it is more that, whoever that sidekick is, they need to serve a function in the storytelling, whether that is getting the hero into or out of scrapes, or providing somebody for the hero to explain plot points to, for the benefit of the audience. Given that the film only has just over an hour to tell the story, the fiancé diversions are a mistake, and when we do return to characters and elements related to the crash, they feel rushed or poorly thought out.

Tom Conway took over the character of the Falcon from the original star, his brother, George Sanders, and while Conway is no George Sanders – who could be? – he still manages to be suave, (even when on roller skates) and entertaining enough to keep us watching, and make for mostly pleasant, if unessential viewing.