There is Only Beauty Here
I Walked with a Zombie (1943)
directed by Jacques Tourneur
rating: 5 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from the vaults
The "mother who cares too much about her sons" routine doesn't have to come from Hitchcock, doesn't have to be shrill, and can even seem mysterious in the wake of the movie's central revelation. What would the zombie really have done if Wesley hadn't fled into the sea? After all, we never see Carrefour kill someone. And isn't it, in fact, Carrefour walking beside Betsy along the beach of the opening credits?
Like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, I Walked with a Zombie is smarter about race relations than most movies made today, although it superficially looks like the worst kind of exoticism (jungle drums, the shadows of black men on the bedroom walls of sleeping white women, superstitious maids). The West Indies island where the drama plays out is steeped in hatred and oppression; everyone Betsy encounters, from the carriage driver to Sir Lancelot, tells her so. Sir Lancelot, the calypso singer with the funny name, is - like Hoagy Carmichael in Canyon Passage - the avatar of menace in the picture's dreamy tropical spell.
The magic at work is like nothing else in the movies, unless another horror film like The Fog or The Beyond, though this has romance that must operate at the register of life and death to try and succeed. Maybe it doesn't; maybe Betsy needs her Ottawa winters again. One never finds out in 70 minutes, but the time couldn't be spent better.
directed by Jacques Tourneur
rating: 5 out of 5 cravats
on DVD from the vaults
The "mother who cares too much about her sons" routine doesn't have to come from Hitchcock, doesn't have to be shrill, and can even seem mysterious in the wake of the movie's central revelation. What would the zombie really have done if Wesley hadn't fled into the sea? After all, we never see Carrefour kill someone. And isn't it, in fact, Carrefour walking beside Betsy along the beach of the opening credits?
Like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, I Walked with a Zombie is smarter about race relations than most movies made today, although it superficially looks like the worst kind of exoticism (jungle drums, the shadows of black men on the bedroom walls of sleeping white women, superstitious maids). The West Indies island where the drama plays out is steeped in hatred and oppression; everyone Betsy encounters, from the carriage driver to Sir Lancelot, tells her so. Sir Lancelot, the calypso singer with the funny name, is - like Hoagy Carmichael in Canyon Passage - the avatar of menace in the picture's dreamy tropical spell.
The magic at work is like nothing else in the movies, unless another horror film like The Fog or The Beyond, though this has romance that must operate at the register of life and death to try and succeed. Maybe it doesn't; maybe Betsy needs her Ottawa winters again. One never finds out in 70 minutes, but the time couldn't be spent better.
posted by NPK at 7:25 AM
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