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Böcklin's painting is readily acknowledged, though the Ibsen of The Lady from the Sea looms just as significantly amid Val Lewton's Nordic influences. The theme is pestilence in the time of militarism, "he follows the wars" astride a pale horse. Greece ca. 1912 is an endless night, soldiers work overtime to bury contaminated corpses, the grimly obsessed general (Boris Karloff) dubs himself "The Watchdog." The cemetery island receives him and the American journalist (Marc Cramer), watched over by a statue of Cerberus ("He only guards the dead, I have to worry about the living"). At the cliffside mansion owned by the Swiss archeologist (Jason Robards, Sr.), a stage for the morbid intrigue of wanderers and refugees—a cast-whittling surge of plague triggers the debate between science (Ernst Deutsch as the fatigued physician) and mysticism (the threat of "Vorvolaka," a nightmarish mutation of ancient mythology). "We'll see who dies and who is saved." The most purely elemental of Lewton's visions, sacramental fire for Hermes and purifying swirls of water and the flag flapping in the wind, as lugubrious as it needs to be. A political-spiritual crisis for the complex allegory of the rise and fall of tyrants, a "contagion of the soul" for the heavy-spirited landscape. Old superstitions seep into the young gypsy servant (Ellen Drew) and madness into the British colonel's widow (Katherine Emery), whose greatest fear comes to life in a composition of stony crypt and echoing drip. (A dollop of Poe's "Premature Burial" perks up Mark Robson's direction with flowing gown and trident.) "Fight death all your life, then die, knowing you know nothing," two years later there's Camus with La Peste. With Helene Thimig, Alan Napier, Sherry Hall, and Skelton Knaggs. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |