The carriage carrying the main couple (Madge Bellamy and John Harron), traveling through nocturnal Haiti, runs across a native burial on the road, eyes superimposed on the screen for a slow triple dissolve -- Bela Lugosi's eyes, natch. The movie, scratchy and unforgettable, is an independent, low-budget production by the Halperin Brothers (directed by Victor, produced by Edward), as if on a trance following a viewing of Vampyr, only Dreyer shot his own gliding reverie that same year. Tourneur, Bergman, Romero and Fulci are to draw from it, though the walking dead here are folkloric dread made palpable, silhouetted against a slanted cemetery or, in one indelible bit, locked in the unending circles of Lugosi's mowing vat, one ghoul soundlessly falling into the grinding blades along with the sugar cane. "They're not worried about long hours," Lugosi quips of his lurching slaves, but death is his real business, and plantation owner Robert Frazer, obsessed with Bellamy, arrives with a job. Her scarf, along with the incantatory force of clasped hands and caterpillar-brows in close-up, is enough to conjure a soul away from the body, Bellamy and Harron enjoying the wedding night while outside, scored to tribal drums, Lugosi fashions the voodoo doll out of a candle. The Halperins' blunt montage clouds up Bellamy's silent-movie gamine visage, then cuts to Lugosi striding in and out of focus toward the lens -- blank-eyed and petrified when seen next, she tinkles "Liebestraum" in the piano in Frazer's lair in the mountains. Lugosi and his undead entourage have since taken over, however, accentuating the film's pioneering view of zombiedom as possession, emotional and mystical and colonial; the lovebirds share physical space but not spiritual planes, so the film arranges for their rupture as a diagonal split-screen taken from Mamoulian, perhaps. The somnambulism gets spiked with shrieking buzzards, moaning chorales, and more than a bit of dissociated necrophilia, the better to sear its visions onto the screen, and the mind. With Joseph Cawthorn, Brandon Hurst, and Clarence Muse. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce
|