Bedlam
Monday, June 23, 2008
Just saw Bedlam again. The Lewton/Robson team puts almost too fine a point on redeeming the lunatics in this, one of the last films Lewton produced before he lost his wartime pull in the industry. Lewton was determined, as he usually was, to draw a humanist parable out of the raw material of the horror film, and it is in this spirit that Boris Karloff, as Chief Apothecary Simms, represents archetypal tyranny while his inmates of his asylum represent, in almost Capraesque fashion, ordinary folks. They all have bunny eyes. It's Karloff's corrupt order versus the inmates' Romantic disorder.
Yet these inmates are also the monsters on the lobby poster, and as such they are contractually obligated to spring out of the shadows now and again and give the audience a jolt. You don't see their eyes in these scenes, just grasping hands. The horror/civics-lesson divide always gets a little muddled in a Lewton film, which is what's great about them and what turns them into unofficial Hollywood tragedies. Simone Simon, torn between her desire for her husband and her instinct to bite his face off in Cat People, is a clean, classic example. In the case of Bedlam, however, the tragic character is a voiceless mob, and the effect is pretty bizarre.
The climactic horror setpiece in the film, in which the inmates hold court over their tyrannical warden, is a neat set-up, one that echoes M and Fury and even Sullivan's Travels, yet with the promise horror films have that these films don't: that no lawful hand will necessarily come down on Peter Lorre's shoulder at the end of the movie and whisk him away, that no ingenuity or plot contrivance will get Joel McCrea off the chain gang. Yet there's no through-line in the scene in Bedlam, no empathetic characters, just two monsters, tyranny and democracy, pulling the moral of the story into taffy. You've got a guy screaming "cut him in half!" (entertainment!) over and over as the more principled inmates argue (humanism!) for his release: and, since Bedlam is a principled movie, all too much so in this case, this release is granted. Immediately after the inmates enact Roosevelt's Universal Declaration of Human Rights Karloff is (entertainment!) stabbed -- not luridly, almost gently -- with a trowel, and so the panicked inmates mortar Karloff into a wall. When, a few scenes later, the stalwart Quaker hero discovers the fresh mortar, he is inclined to say something about it, but the heroine compels him to keep his mouth shut. (Humanism! no wait, that's awfully pragmatic, isn't it?) "Why should thy hand be added to the weight that those people must bear?" she asks, eyes still large and electrified; she's obviously become unhinged from having been a forced inmate of the asylum herself. You expect him to do his UDHR routine and lecture her about the rights of all men, weak and strong, etc. No. He simply laughs, and it almost looks as if they are going to kiss as the Hogarthian end title appears on the screen. Weirdest scene in Bedlam: the only horror movie I can think of that ends with an explicitly stated moral compromise.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 12:49 AM,
