Brief Reviews: Two by Samuel Fuller

SHOCK CORRIDOR (1963) * * ½
"The picture that breaks the shock barrier!" proclaims the trailer to this movie directed by Samuel Fuller. The real shock here is that the man who directed Pickup on South Street and The Big Red One could have made such a preposterous movie as this one, evidently in perfect seriousness. In the film Johnny Barrett (Peter Breck), an investigative newspaper reporter of overpowering ambition, is convinced he will win a Pulitzer Prize by impersonating a madman, having himself admitted to a mental hospital, and solving the murder of a patient that took place there a year before. He plans to do this by pretending to have an incestuous sexual obsession with his sister, who is actually his girl friend, Cathy (Constance Towers).

This plot allows Fuller to portray mental illness in the most outrageous ways, his concept of mental illness consisting of a pastiche of a little bit of knowledge and a large helping of myth, imagination, and misinformation. The patients at the hospital show the most clichéd symptoms of psychosis, shuffling around like zombies, lounging about in catatonic stupors, or indulging in compulsive repetitive behaviors. In their "mad" scenes, the entire cast tends to overact without restraint. Fuller also throws in gratuitously lurid details (Cathy is a stripper in a sleazy nightclub) and dialogue: "My love for you goes up and down like a thermometer," Johnny says to an imaginary Cathy his first night in the hospital. "I used to work in the female wing, but the nympho ward got too dangerous for me," a friendly orderly confides to Johnny. In fact, the highlight of the movie is the scene in which Johnny gets trapped in the "nympho ward," where a pack of wild-eyed females surround him, throw him to the floor, and maul him.

Eventually Johnny gets around to interviewing the three witnesses to the murder, lunatics who fortunately snap into lucidity just long enough to reveal important evidence about the crime. These characters allow Fuller, who also wrote the screenplay, to inject into the plot commentary on some of the big political issues of the time—political defectors, segregation, and the Cold War. They also allow him to depict some of the more dramatic psychotic disorders—delusions of grandeur, dissociative identity (multiple personality) disorder, and regression to an infantile state. By the end of the movie, Johnny has solved the murder but been so traumatized by his experiences in the hospital that he develops a bad case of "catatonic schizophrenia."

Is there a reason to watch this movie? Well, yes, especially for fans of Fuller. Despite its sensationalistic excesses (and frequent unintentional hilarity), it is so flamboyantly directed, so imaginative in its visualizations (especially considering that it was shot in ten days on one set), and so unexpectedly and consistently over-the-top that it never fails to entertain.

THE STEEL HELMET (1951) * * *
In an excerpt from an interview I saw recently on Turner Classic Movies, Samuel Fuller spoke of the transition from being a journalist and novelist to becoming a movie director. He said he realized that as a film director he didn't need to use words to tell the story, that he could do this with the camera and the images. If Shock Corridor—with its long-winded speechifying and constant voice-over internal monologue narration by the main character—belies this observation, The Steel Helmet, in contrast, clearly illustrates it.

The movie takes place during the Korean War and was filmed during the early days of that conflict. Sgt. Zack (Gene Evans, excellent in the first of six films he made with Fuller), the lone survivor of a massacre by North Korean troops, tries to find his way back to his unit, along the way picking up a young Korean orphan and joining another group of soldiers who have become separated from their unit. After groping their way through a dense fog, the group eventually stumble on a deserted, pagoda-like Buddhist temple and hole up there, unaware that a North Korean sniper is hiding on the upper level of the building.

Visually, Fuller makes the most of the sequence in the fog and especially the temple, where much of the movie takes place. His camera glides around the interior of the temple and moves fluidly from level to level. Interspersed as a sort of unifying image are recurrent cuts to the giant statue of the Buddha dominating the interior of the temple, with its serene facial expression that forms such a contrast to the tension between the soldiers and to the danger they face from both the sniper inside the temple and the enemy troops closing in from outside.

But perhaps the most fascinating thing about the movie is how much it seems a trial version of Fuller's nearly three-hour long WW II epic The Big Red One (1980), with many elements from The Steel Helmet worked into that later masterwork and more fully developed. The Steel Helmet opens with a shot of Sgt. Zack lying in a field of dead soldiers with a bullet hole in his helmet, prefiguring the scene on the beach during the Normandy invasion in The Big Red One when The Sergeant (Lee Marvin) shoots a bullet through the helmet of a fallen soldier as a warning of what will happen to any soldiers who might pretend to be hit. The gruff Sgt. Zack, with his half-smoked cigar permanently stuck in his mouth, resembles both Fuller himself and Fuller's alter ego in The Big Red One, Pvt. Zab (Robert Carradine). The Korean orphan brings to mind the dying boy Marvin rescues from the concentration camp. At one point in The Steel Helmet Sgt. Zack tells of an enlisted man he served with in WW II who kept a detailed diary of his experiences, just like Pvt. Zab in The Big Red One. And he also reminisces about his sergeant in that war and quotes him as saying on the beach at Normandy on D-Day, "There are two kinds of men here: those who are dead and those who are about to die." This is, in fact, the most familiar line of dialogue from the later film, repeated verbatim by Marvin as he directs his soldiers when they land on the beach at Normandy. (Interestingly, Robert Mitchum has a very similar line in the 1962 D-Day epic The Longest Day: "Only two kinds of people are gonna stay on this beach: those that are already dead and those that are gonna die.")

Aside from some dated Cold War rhetoric, it's not necessary to gloss over any deficiencies in The Steel Helmet—filmed in ten days mostly in L.A.'s Griffith Park and in the studio with stock footage interpolated, on a budget reported to be only $100,000—to appreciate the feeling and the visual imagination Fuller put into the movie. And the resemblances to The Big Red One show how meaningful and how formative Fuller's own war experiences were to him and to the view of life he expressed in his films.
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1962: Hollywood's Second Greatest Year? Part 3

In my two previous posts on the great American films of the year 1962, I discussed a historical epic, Lawrence of Arabia, and two brilliant adaptations of stage plays, Long Day's Journey into Night and The Miracle Worker. The fourth American masterpiece released in 1962 was a Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Directed by the undisputed master of the genre, John Ford, the movie was at the time dismissed by most critics as a throwback, a relic of an outdated genre. Since then the reevaluation of the films of Ford and his recognition as one of the major American auteurs have led to the reevaluation of this movie. It is now rightly regarded as his last great work, and of the same caliber as his greatest Westerns: Stagecoach (1939), My Darling Clementine (1946), and The Searchers (1956).

The film begins with the arrival by train in the small Western town of Shinbone of a distinguished U.S. Senator, Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart), and his wife, Hallie (Vera Miles), who have returned to Shinbone for the funeral of an old friend—and onetime rival of Stoddard for Hallie—Tom Doniphon (John Wayne). Stoddard is known as the man who first gained fame for killing the notorious gunman Liberty Valance in a gunfight in Shinbone, an event that launched his political career. When newspaper reporters pressure Stoddard into giving an interview, he agrees in order to set the record straight about his own history and his friendship with Doniphon. Most of the rest of the movie consists of a flashback that begins with Stoddard's arrival in the town decades earlier as a recent graduate of law school.

It is on the stagecoach ride into Shinbone that Stoddard has his first encounter with Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin) when Valance and his cronies rob the stagecoach. Valance, a vicious sadist, not only robs the passengers but also humiliates Stoddard and vandalizes his most prized possession, his set of law books. With this irruption of violence and cruelty into the orderly world of Stoddard, the thematic concern of the movie is immediately established (and will be elaborated on in many variations for the duration of the film): the conflict between might, represented at this point by Valance, and right, represented by Stoddard, the enduring conflict between anarchy and the rule of law.

In the restaurant/saloon in Shinbone, Stoddard first meets his future wife, Hallie, who works in the kitchen, and Tom Doniphon, who comes there to visit her. When he hears of the encounter with Valance, Doniphon offers Stoddard a pistol and tells him, "Out here, a man settles his own problems." Stoddard refuses the gun. Amused by the naiveté of Stoddard and his idealistic belief in the power of the law, Doniphon nicknames him—half-affectionately, half-condescendingly—Pilgrim. Is he alluding to the self-righteous innocence of Christian Pilgrim in The Pilgrim's Progress, or perhaps to the Pilgrims of New England, who came to settle a new continent and encountered more difficulties than they had ever imagined?

Lee Marvin, James Stewart, and John Wayne

Embarking on a campaign to civilize and bring democracy to the Old West, Stoddard quickly gains many followers. He founds a free school in the town to teach literacy to both children and adults. He organizes a town meeting to discuss the territorial convention to petition Congress for statehood. He befriends the local newspaper editor, the alcoholic Dutton Peabody (Edmond O'Brien), and persuades him to write articles and editorials in support of statehood.

But Liberty Valance is hired by the big cattle ranchers, who feel threatened by the regulation that statehood would bring to their industry and by the Constitutional rights that the people of the territory would gain. The school is destroyed, the newspaper editor Peabody savagely beaten after he writes in support of statehood, and the town meeting disrupted. The cattle barons and their hired gun, Liberty Valance, have set themselves in opposition to the most hallowed institutions of democracy: the rights to education, free speech, a free press, and free elections.

This is all too much even for a pacifist like Stoddard, who declares, "When force threatens, talk's no good any more," arms himself, and goes looking for Valance. It is this decision that leads to the nighttime showdown between the two men in the streets of Shinbone. It seems certain that Stoddard, no match for a practiced gunman like Valance, will be killed, but he miraculously manages to shoot Valance dead. In the rowdy town meeting that follows, Stoddard, treated like a hero, is elected to be the town's representative at the territorial convention.

At the convention Stoddard, whose reputation as the man who shot Liberty Valance has preceded him, is nominated to present the convention's petition for statehood to Congress. However, appalled at being lionized for committing an act of violence, an act that in retrospect he feels went against his conscience, he declines the nomination and walks out of the convention. Outside, he finds himself face to face with Doniphon, who has followed him, and who drops a bombshell: It was he, hiding in the shadows, who actually shot Liberty Valance, and we are shown the true version of events in flashback from Doniphon's point of view, Rashomon-style. Stoddard is at first stunned and then, relieved at last of the guilt he felt over killing Valance and becoming a celebrity for committing an act that violated his personal ethics, he returns to the convention and accepts the nomination.

As the film returns to the present, Stoddard has finally told the truth to the newspapermen and acknowledged that it was actually Doniphon who was the hero. He is unprepared for their reaction. They refuse to print the story, preferring to preserve the false version of history that has become accepted as the truth. "When the legend becomes fact, print the legend," they tell Stoddard, a line that itself has become almost legendary.

The truth behind the legend

One of the reasons this movie was dismissed when it was released is that much of the black-and-white picture was shot in the studio and very little on location. Because of this it lacks the pictorial grandeur of Ford's other Westerns shot in the Monument Valley and Moab, Utah, an essential element of those movies and one of the things that give them their distinctive character. But to make up for its lack of spectacular scenery, Liberty Valance has a far greater emphasis on theme than any of Ford's other Westerns. In his last great movie, Ford chose to explore larger issues than the character-centered conflicts of his earlier Westerns, specifically the question of the proper role of force in a democratic society. One critic, Richard Brody, writing about The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance in a recent issue of the New Yorker (Oct. 26, 2009), went so far as to call it "the greatest American political movie."

Doniphon's revelation at the territorial convention causes Stoddard to modify his position on the use of force. Stoddard learns that where force is concerned, things are not as simple as he thought. He learns that force is in itself neither right nor wrong, but that it is the application to which force is put that makes it right or wrong. In The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance Ford suggests that force is necessary to create and maintain order, that force and the rule of law must work together to defeat anarchy and deflect destructive violence. Without force, the rule of law is powerless, but the controlled use of force and the rule of law working together can create an environment in which democratic institutions are able to flourish and civic stability is assured.

And Ford the storyteller seems to argue that the element of meaning created by mythology is just as important in forging a sense of community and civic identity as the facts of history. No matter how an individual viewer reacts to Ford's views—if indeed this is Ford's view, for equating the ideas of Ford with the ideas expressed by the characters in his movies can be a risky thing for a viewer to do—he makes a reasonable case that at the least must be given serious consideration. And as Peter Bogdanovich, perhaps the greatest Ford scholar and interpreter, points out, in Liberty Valance Ford does expose the facts behind the mythology, and one could argue that the idea that the facts don't always correspond to the myth is actually another important theme of the film.

In casting John Wayne and James Stewart in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Ford achieved a real coup. The familiar screen persona of each makes him the ideal embodiment of the attitude his character represents. As the embodiment of force, the ultra-masculine Wayne is the ideal Tom Doniphon, a realist, a stolid loner who lives outside society but uses his strength to protect its most cherished values. As Doniphon's opposite, the embodiment of the rule of law, Stewart (the man who played Destry, the sheriff who refused to carry a gun) is the perfect Ransom Stoddard, an idealist who longs to establish and become part of a community based on order and democratic values.

Each man represents one of the elements essential to the maintenance of a civilized community: the power of reason sustained by the power of physical strength. And perhaps most important, by the end of the movie each man comes to see the philosophy of the other as complementary to his own and to incorporate in his own philosophy elements of the philosophy of his opposite.
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In the fourth, and concluding, installment of this series, I'll be examining the final American masterpiece of 1962 and naming the other notable movies of that remarkable year.

Ghost Images: Ten Classic Movies of the Supernatural

With Halloween last week and the Day of the Dead this week, movie blogs have been buzzing with posts on films about the occult. The IMDb Hit List recently featured a post about the top ten ghost movies. While the selections were thoughtfully chosen, the emphasis was on movies of the last thirty years or so, and none of the pictures on it were the kind of classic films that most appeal to me. So in this post I'd like to offer ten ghost movies from 1937-1962 that I think would appeal to lovers of classic film like me—admittedly not all of them masterpieces, but still entertaining and in some cases unusual examples of the genre from that era. One film that normally would be on the list is Robert Wise's The Haunting (1963), but I'm forgoing that one because I've already written an entire post on it. So here they are, in chronological order:

• Topper (1937). Ordinarily you expect a ghost story, or a movie about ghosts, to be scary. But Topper is a rarity—a comedy about ghosts, one of three I'm including in this post. The fast-living, hard-drinking socialite couple George and Marion Kerby (a rather manic Cary Grant and Constance Bennett) are killed in a car crash returning home from a night club. Fortunately, their car, a custom-built fin-tailed 1936 Buick, survives the crash intact and is bought by a staid banker, Cosmo Topper (Roland Young). But along with the car come the Kerbys as ghosts, and under their influence he defies his repressive wife (Billie Burke) and breaks out of his conservative shell. Of course, only Topper can see and hear the Kerbys, and this leads to many humorous complications and misunderstandings. The movie was produced by Hal Roach, who was responsible for the early Harold Lloyd shorts, the Our Gang comedies, and many of the Laurel and Hardy movies, so it's no surprise that Topper is full of hyperkinetic physical comedy. The director, Norman Z. McLeod was no stranger to broad comedy either, directing movies with the Marx Brothers, W. C. Fields, Danny Kaye, and Bob Hope. Topper was followed by two sequels (without Grant, who in the meantime had gone on to greater things). One of them, Topper Returns (1941), is a fun comic ghost story/mystery without the Kerbys that stars the always delightful Joan Blondell as a ghost who enlists Topper to help her solve her own murder.

• Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941). After saxophone-playing prizefighter Joe Pendleton (Robert Montgomery) crashes his airplane, an overzealous heavenly messenger (Edward Everett Horton) snatches his soul to Heaven, not realizing Pendleton was supposed to have survived the crash. When Joe's manager (James Gleason) has his body cremated, the heavenly Mr. Jordan (Claude Rains) is forced to rehouse Joe temporarily in a recently deceased body until he can sort out the situation. The body is that of a crooked millionaire investment banker named Farnsworth, who has just been murdered by his scheming wife and her lover. The movie is not only a seriocomic ghost story, but has elements of both the body-switch movie (we see Robert Montgomery but everyone else sees the real Farnsworth) and the Capra social conscience movie as Joe tries to rectify Farnsworth's financial swindles, especially to one of his victims, Bette Logan (Evelyn Keyes), with whom he has fallen in love. The movie is full of clever and imaginative twists, unexpectedly comic in its approach to death and reincarnation, and thoroughly entertaining. Montgomery gives one of his best performances as an honest working-class man trying uncomfortably, and with often humorous results, to impersonate an upper-class crook, and character stalwarts Rains, Horton, and Gleason form a dream supporting cast.

• The Curse of the Cat People (1944). This was one of three movies Robert Wise directed for famed producer Val Lewton. (Actually, he replaced Gunther von Fritsch and the two get co-directing credit for this film.) The movie carries over the three main characters from the first horror film Lewton produced for RKO, The Cat People (1942), but otherwise has little connection to its predecessor. In this film, Oliver Reed (Kent Smith) has married his colleague Alice (Jane Randolph) after the death of his first wife Irena (Simone Simon), the strange young woman who believed herself the victim of an ancient curse in The Cat People. The couple now have a troubled young daughter, and the ghost of Irena (pictured above) appears to her. This ghost, though, is no menace, but rather a protector and guide to the unhappy girl, a sort of spectral equivalent of the imaginary friend. The movie is not frightening, but instead dreamy—closer to a supernatural fantasy than a classic ghost story—and quite unlike the other Lewton thrillers or the typical movie about the supernatural.

• The Uninvited (1944). A wonderfully atmospheric ghost movie that deserves to be better known. A brother and sister from London, Roderick and Pamela Fitzgerald (Ray Milland and Ruth Hussey), visiting the south coast of England, discover a picturesque unoccupied seaside house called Windward House and determine to live there. The owner, Commander Beech (Donald Crisp), at first refuses to sell the house but eventually relents after warning them of the house's evil reputation and the reports of strange occurrences there. It turns out that his daughter died in a fall from the cliff outside the house, which in part explains his overprotective attitude toward his granddaughter Stella (Gail Russell)—who has charmed the Fitzgerald's, particularly Roderick—and the fact that he refuses to let her visit them at Windward House. The new owners soon begin to experience events that convince them that an evil presence does indeed haunt the house and that it is not only connected to the ethereal Stella but poses a real threat to her. The movie includes ghostly apparitions, an exorcism of the house, and a very memorable séance (pictured above), walking a fine line between explicit and suggested ghostly manifestations. It also features the beautiful Victor Young melody "Stella by Starlight."

• Blithe Spirit (1945). The third comic ghost story on my list is based on a play by Noel Coward, a perennial favorite of amateur theater groups. Writer Charles Condomine (Rex Harrison), a skeptic about the occult in search of material for a new book, invites the local medium, Madame Arcati (Margaret Rutherford, above), to conduct a séance at his home. The séance has unfortunate consequences when Madame Arcati accidentally summons up the headstrong ghost of Charles's first wife Elvira (Kay Hammond, in appropriately weird green make-up and shroud-like gown). Complications ensue in the form of conflict with his second wife (Constance Cummings) and Madame Arcati's ineffectual but hilarious attempts to rid the Condomines of Elvira's ghostly presence and the supernatural ménage à trois it has created. The plot—especially its resolution—is reminiscent of Topper, but with director David Lean at the helm, the humor is drier and more subtle, emphasizing verbal wit over physical shenanigans. The acting is more subtle too, but Rutherford goes all out in her characterization of the wacky medium and easily manages to steal the movie in the process, in a comic performance that is a genuine classic.

• The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947). One of the most romantic of all ghost movies, this is the story of a love affair between a living woman and a ghost. The young widow Lucy Muir (Gene Tierney, at her loveliest) and her daughter leave London to live in a small house called Gull Cottage on the English coast. The superstitious locals believe the house to be haunted by its former inhabitant, a sea captain named Daniel Gregg (Rex Harrison again), who is thought to have committed suicide there. On her very first night at Gull Cottage, Lucy finds the tale of haunting to be true when the irascible Capt. Gregg appears to her. The two soon make a truce, though, and over the years develop a close friendship. When Lucy finds her income gone, the captain even devises a clever scheme that permits Lucy to remain the tenant of Gull Cottage and stay close to him. The movie is quite poignant in its depiction of the decades-long devotion of Lucy and the captain to each other. A very touching tale directed with uncharacteristic tenderness by the usually acerbic Joseph L. Maknkiewicz.

• Portrait of Jennie (1948). On a snowy winter day in New York City, artist Eben Adams (Joseph Cotten) meets a teenaged girl named Jennie (Jennifer Jones) in Central Park and strikes up a friendship. But Jennie disappears from the park suddenly before he can find out more about her. Eben keeps returning to the park hoping to meet her again but is unsuccessful. A few weeks later he runs into her again, and she seems a few years older. Time and again this pattern is repeated: Jennie disappears suddenly, only to reappear later, each time a bit older. Eben, who is having a hard time finding inspiration and establishing himself as an artist, soon begins a portrait of her, working on it intermittently when he can get her to sit for him. As he investigates Jennie's past, the mystery surrounding her deepens as he is told things that don't seem possible. Jennifer Jones is quite good as the beautiful, gentle Jenny who becomes Eben's ghostly muse, and the cast is rounded out by veteran character actors Ethel Barrymore, Cecil Kellaway, and Lillian Gish. Debussy's "Clair de Lune" is used most effectively as a recurring musical theme to suggest Jennie's otherworldly nature. In a way the movie is a bit silly and at times a trifle overly earnest in its treatment of its slight story. But Luis Buñuel named it one of the ten best movies of all time in a Sight and Sound survey, so there must be something to it, mustn't there?

• Scrooge (1951). Hands down the best version ever of Dickens's A Christmas Carol and one of the very best adaptations of a work by Dickens ever filmed for the big screen. Is there anyone unfamiliar with this irresistible tale of greed and redemption, with its trio of Christmas ghosts who show Ebenezer Scrooge the error of his ways just in time? The production design, the cast (including in a small role a young Patrick MacNee, John Steed of TV's The Avengers), the photography, the direction—everything about the movie is first-rate. But as good as those things are, it is Alastair Sim as Ebenezer Scrooge who dominates the picture. This was the role of a lifetime, and even if he had never made another movie, this performance would have secured his place in cinema history.

• The Innocents (1961). In Victorian England Miss Giddens (Deborah Kerr) is hired by their uncle as governess to his two young wards, Miles and Flora, who live at a remote country estate. She soon begins to suspect that something is not right in the house when she keeps seeing two strangers furtively prowling the grounds. The housekeeper says her description of them sounds like the children's former governess and her lover, the estate manager, both now dead, and hints at some unspeakable scandal they were involved in. Miss Giddens, convinced that the two have somehow corrupted the children and have returned from the dead with evil designs on them, gradually becomes obsessed with protecting the children from the ghosts and with finding out exactly what hold the ghosts have over them. The Innocents is based on the short novel The Turn of the Screw by Henry James and reproduces both the ambiguity of the book about the existence of the ghosts and the book's suggestions that there is something implicitly sexual in Miss Giddens's preoccupation with the "corruption" of the children by the ghosts. Are the ghosts figments of her imagination, or are they real? Are the children really in danger, or is her concern for their safety and purity an idée fixe born of repressed sexual hysteria? Is Miss Giddens the children's protector, or is she a delusional neurotic projecting her own phobias about sex onto the children? The movie provides no answers, giving us evidence that could support either view. But it does provide atmosphere galore, and the governess's belief in the evil hanging over the children, whether real or imaginary, is genuinely unsettling. Of all the movies covered in this post, The Innocents, brilliantly directed by Jack Clayton and photographed by Freddie Francis, is the most successful as a work of cinema art, and it contains what in my view is the great Deborah Kerr's finest performance.

• Carnival of Souls (1962). A car with three young women in it plunges off a bridge and into a turbid river. As rescuers search for the submerged car and pull it from the river, the lone survivor, a young woman named Mary Henry (Candace Hilligloss), staggers from the river dazed and covered in mud. Trying to put the trauma of the crash behind her, Mary moves to another state and gets a job as a church organist. But strange things keep happening to her. The most unnerving of these are recurrent encounters with a ghoulish-looking stranger and Mary's fascination with a derelict carnival pavilion on the edge of a remote lake, to which she inexplicably feels drawn. The movie climaxes in a late-night danse macabre at the pavilion, in which bizarre-looking couples who could have come from a zombie movie directed by Fellini move stiffly around the dance floor and Mary herself dances with the ghoul. Shot in two weeks by a crew of five, the movie was filmed in 16mm and blown up to 35mm for release to drive-in theaters. The director was Herk Harvey, a Kansas-based filmmaker who directed over 400 short educational and industrial films with titles like Your Junior High Days and Why Study Industrial Arts? but no other feature films. The movie's twist ending will come as no surprise to anyone who has seen the Twilight Zone episode with Inger Stevens about the mysterious hitchhiker, but it still packs a satisfying punch. Carnival of Souls is a bona fide proto-indie/cult/sleeper film that despite its budgetary limitations is in its way as chilling a ghost tale as any movie on this list.
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Movie Houses: Memorable Homes from Ten Classic Films

Ever since Aristotle wrote his Poetics breaking down narrative literature into its constituent parts, setting—where and when a story takes place—has been considered one of the fundamental elements of narration. In narrative film, which is essentially a visual art, where the action occurs is if anything even more important than in literature. In the past I've written about the importance of setting in Mon Oncle, The Haunting, and The Magnificent Ambersons, specifically the houses where those movies take place. In this post I'd like to discuss ten more movies where the setting not only is visually striking and vividly atmospheric, but also plays an important part in the narrative. Here they are, then, in no particular order:

• Citizen Kane (1941). "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree," wrote Samuel Taylor Coleridge. That Charles Foster Kane named his mansion Xanadu is a good indication of the character's megalomania. The house depicted in Citizen Kane certainly seems to be the residence of a man with delusions of grandeur. And its position high on a hilltop—part fortress, part prison—underscores the isolation of Kane in his later years. Xanadu is the first thing we see in the movie, a light in one window, the window of the room where Kane lies dying and utters that enigmatic last word "Rosebud" as the snow globe slips out of his hand and rolls across the floor. It's also the last thing we see, in complete darkness now with smoke rising from the chimney. What a frisson when we realize exactly what is burning in that massive fireplace in front of which the second Mrs. Kane whiled away the hours with her jigsaw puzzles.

• Lost Horizon (1937). Shangri-La has become synonymous with paradise, and practically everyone, not just moviegoers, recognizes the name. When Frank Capra filmed James Hilton's novel, his set designers came up with an unforgettable vision of that exotic Himalayan home of ageless monks and their Utopian community. The design details could only be called eclectic, an eccentric fusion of modernist, Babylonian, Moorish, and Asian elements, both inside and out, that mirrors the vague East/West mysticism of the monks. The grounds are complete with reflecting pools, wandering ornamental wildfowl, architectonic conifers, and weeping Chinese trees. Dominating it all are the radiant blue skies and brilliant sunlight of Southern California.

• Meet Me in St. Louis (1944). This house could have come right out of a Currier & Ives print, so closely does it conform to the archetype of the upper middle-class American home circa 1900. The movie, all about the tribulations of the Smith family when they learn they must leave St. Louis after the father of the family takes a job in New York City, follows what will be the last few months in their familiar home as the family faces the approaching move with mounting apprehension. This house should be an idyllic place, a place of security, stability, and happiness. And everything about it does indeed convey exactly those feelings of wholesome normalcy. Who could bear to leave a place of such idealized Midwestern homeyness for the uncertainty of life in the big city?

• The Beauty and the Beast (1946). Cocteau's vision of the Beast's home is ravishingly beautiful, strange, and magical. This is a living house, where everything—from the caryatids supporting the fireplace mantelshelf to the candelabra held by human arms that swivel to light Belle's passage down the dark hallway to her room—is alive. The imaginative detail that went into this setting—indeed, into everything about the movie, including its props, costumes, and makeup—is astounding and, once seen, impossible to forget. There has never been anything quite like it in any other live-action movie: a fairy tale vision that easily does justice to the fantastic story it's such a big part of.

• Rebel Without a Cause (1955). One of the first, and probably the definitive, teen alienation movies, with James Dean, Natalie Wood, and Sal Mineo as the alienated teens. Near the end of the movie the three meet at an abandoned mansion and in a poignant sequence role-play the ideal family they long for in their real lives. This is a place of escape and fantasy, and its dereliction suggests the impossibility of their dream world. The actual location used was the Getty Mansion in Hollywood, where those scenes were shot over the course of several nights. This is, coincidentally, the same location used as Norma Desmond's mansion in Sunset Boulevard, and the empty swimming pool with Dean, Wood, and Mineo in it pictured above is the same one in which the body of Joe Gillis floats as he narrates that movie in flashback. This and other filming locations for Rebel are described in a fascinating post at the blogsite Dear Old Hollywood, which is where I located the screenshot above.

• Rebecca (1940). "Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again." Nobody who has seen this movie will forget that line. Nor will they forget the spooky seaside mansion where Maxim de Winter takes his shy, unassertive second wife and where so many memorable scenes take place. At Manderley the second Mrs. de Winter's isolation is not only physical but also social. A former paid companion, she is intimidated by the responsibility of being in charge of such a large house and staff (especially the resentful, domineering Mrs. Danvers) and by trying desperately to fit in with the idle rich with whom her new husband socializes. Alfred Hitchcock, himself the son of a greengrocer, makes Manderley a representation of the profoundly ingrained class system of pre-World War II Britain and makes it easy for the viewer to identify with the class insecurity of the timid young bride unaccustomed to the privilege and wealth of her new social position.

• Gone with the Wind (1939). So essential is Scarlett O'Hara's plantation Tara to the movie that composer Max Steiner actually gave it its own musical theme. Tara represents an idealized vision of the antebellum South. Its destruction in the Civil War devastates Scarlett, and her obsession with restoring it to its previous glory becomes the driving motivation of her life. To achieve this she marries two men she doesn't love for their money and even kills. At the end of the movie, after she has lost everything else, she returns to Tara and vows to make it the Edenic place it once was. In its way, Tara is nearly as essential to the plot of the movie as any of the main characters. In a movie of lavish expenditure, clearly not a dollar was spared by David O. Selznick on making Tara the image of everything it stands for in Scarlett's memory.

• Last Year at Marienbad (1961). Shot at several palaces in Bavaria, this movie would be inconceivable without its locations. Remove those and what would remain? Little but enigmatic characters and an impenetrable fugue of a plot. It's the look of this movie that makes it an unforgettable one of a kind: those people encountering one another in baroque salons encrusted with elaborate ornamentation or in mind-bending halls of mirrors, or standing about like statues in those absolutely symmetrical, geometric French-style gardens. Forget the people, forget trying to make sense of the plot or the dialogue. Just lose yourself in those timeless, hallucinatory images. Location, location, location—that's what this film is all about.

• A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). While most of the other homes I've written about are rather grand places, the setting of this film is just the opposite. Located in a run-down building ironically named Elysian Fields, the home of Stanley and Stella Kowalski is a shabby, cramped apartment. The set designers (who won an Oscar for their work) actually turn the movie's stage origin to its advantage by creating a claustrophobic vision of poverty that looks all the more stark in the film's black-and-white cinematography by Harry Stradling, better known for opulent movies like The Picture of Dorian Gray or Technicolor extravaganzas like The Pirate and My Fair Lady. Here he perfectly captures the bleakness of the Kowalskis' apartment, with its sparse furnishings, overstuffed appearance, harsh lighting, and hanging electric cords snaking across the top of the frame. Stanley Kowalski, in his sweaty T-shirt, looks right at home here, but his fantasist sister-in-law Blanche du Bois, in her frilly, virginal Southern belle frocks, seems completely out of place in this absolutely realistic vision of limited resources and frustrated hopes.

• Psycho (1960). How else could I end this post but with what is probably the most identifiable movie house in all cinema? Old-fashioned, a bit dilapidated, and in need of a fresh coat of paint it may be, but once you've seen what goes on inside, that ordinary-looking old house looming eerily on an isolated hilltop will be burned into your memory, the ultimate image of creepiness, menace, and perversion hiding behind an innocuous facade—just like its inhabitant, Norman Bates. Who but Alfred Hitchcock could have taken such a hackneyed idea and made it so thoroughly convincing and so thoroughly entertaining?

I've limited myself to ten memorable movie homes drawn from my favorite era in cinema, some of the ones that made the strongest impressions on me. If anyone would like to add favorites of your own, please do leave a comment.
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