Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Lewton's and Tourneur's best film, November 20, 2002
Jacques Tourneur's work in general and this film in particular contains the most creative use of lighting in the history of small to medium budget films. Narrative ellipsis, elegance,and modulated low-key performances are the defining characteristics of all the Lewton-Tourneur collaborations of the 1940s. What a meeting of minds and sensibilities must have existed between these two gifted film makers-it's all up there on the screen within the boundaries of RKO's miniscule budgets. This is a truly haunting and mysterious film, Jane Eyre transported to the West Indies with voodoo mysticism in place of the atmosphere of the English moors. J Roy Hunt's creative chiaroscuro and Sir Lancelot's insistent balladeer's chorus help to build a cumulatively uneasy mood which extends to the almost dream-like performances of Frances Dee (the gravely beautiful Mrs Joel McCrea), James Ellison and Tom Conway among others. Tourneur blends all these elements into a poetic tour de force about reason struggling with the unknown. Whyever are the Lewton films at RKO unavailable in DVD? I would have thought they would be among the first classics to arrive in this exciting new medium.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A CULT FAVOURITE., November 1, 2001
Frances Dee (she was also Mrs. Joel McCrea for 50 years) is a private nurse hired by handsome plantation owner Conway to care for his wife, who is suffering from a mysterious illness that has left her mute and in a permanent trance-like state.........Like JANE EYRE, the nurse falls in love with her employer, and in order to free him of his burden, she takes the woman to a voodoo doctor in the film's heart-pounding climax. Unlike its classic predecessor WHITE ZOMBIE (1932) which believes in zombies, Lewton's film lets you make up your own mind. Exquisitely paced by director Tourneur, the film unravels the motivations of its characters slowly, keeping you slightly off balance while trying to decide if the supernatural is fact or only belief. Adding to the uncanny mood is a calypso score plus amazing Darby Jones as a dude you wouldn't want to meet on a dark night! One of the great supernatural mood pieces of the cinema, this cult favourite derives from a series of articles written for a Hearst Sunday supplement by Inez Wallace. Initially skeptical, she claimed to have actually seen zombies working as slave labour on a Haitian plantation. Rather than being dead, however, they were very much alive, but deprived of the their voices and free-will by poisonous drugs!
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7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Poetic Masterpiece, October 5, 2001
I often wonder what war-time audiences of the forties thought after leaving "...Zombie". Who could have been prepared for what lay behind the penny-dreadful title, surely one of the most poetic renderings of horror in genre history. Books have been written about its creator Val Lewton, and deservedly so. But what's on screen is traceable to the unerring pictorialism of director Jacques Tourneur, and his mastery of the fluid camera. Forget the plot and dialogue, too much of which is half-baked philosophising, and the performances which, excepting Sir Lancelot's lovely sing-song, are barely adequate. Focus instead on the lyrical scenes that unfold like an opium dream as the camera pulls back to reveal the poetic beauty of atmosphere. This is the perfect antidote for viewers max'ed out on the over-FXed, overly literal staple of today. "Zombie" shows that Tourneur grasped what Lewton and Hitchcock already knew - that the greatest fright repository is your own imagination.
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