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The "glitter of putrescence" of the Caribbean colonial past is at once acknowledged, the visions of tropical enchantment of the Canadian nurse (Frances Dee) are curtly dismissed by the death-scented plantation owner (Tom Conway), "quite the Byronic character." The Gothic manor in Val Lewton's West Indies transmutation of Jane Eyre is a military fort turned sugar mill, Brontë's madwoman in the attic is a catatonic blonde in flowing robes (Christine Gordon) atop a spiraling tower. The wife of the harrowed businessman and the mistress of his alcoholic half-brother (James Ellison), the "sleepwalker who can never be awakened" is the center of a buried family crisis, a stormy figure stilled by fever and, perhaps, by the prayers of the matriarch (Edith Barrett). Another form of painful past infuses the island at large, where memories of slavery take the shape of a wooden figurehead studded with arrows and the Calypso refrains of a local balladeer (Sir Lancelot) waver from ironic commentary to confrontation protest. "Ah woe, ah me. Shame and sorrow for the family." Between Halperin's White Zombie and Mizoguchi's Ugetsu lies Jacques Tourneur's masterpiece, a single scream amid whispers and chants and foliage rustled in the wind. The zombie is the mysterious zone between spiritual states, the somnambulist who does not bleed when pierced by a native saber, the towering guardian (Darby Jones) staring with blank eyes over a sugarcane maze. Guilt and superstition, the penitence of sinners and the murmurs of gods, a wealth of tenebrous material woven gracefully by Tourneur, who cuts devastatingly from a pin pushed into a voodoo doll to an act of lethal sacrifice. Not just Romero's undead, but also Marguerite Duras' specters and Belkis Ayón's prints are here in the inexorable, unknowable shadows. Cinematography by J. Roy Hunt. With James Bell, Theresa Harris, Jeni Le Gon, and Jieno Moxzer. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |