by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I ran out of time writing
yesterday’s journal and didn’t mention the third film Charles and I watched on
our Hallowe’en movies marathon: White Zombie, the quirky and fascinating film made by the
Halperin brothers (producer Edward and director Victor) in 1932. They picked a
grim story by Garnett Weston in which white voodoo master “Murder” Legendre
(Bela Lugosi) runs a sugar mill on Haiti with a crew of zombie workers, all of
them former enemies of his he has tricked into zombie-dom with a secret drug he
can administer either in a glass of wine or on a flower (the victim sniffs the
flower and the drug puts him or her under), after which the zombie-to-be is
officially buried (the drug creates a convincing simulacrum of death), then
exhumed and turned into a mindless slave for some kind of menial work. In one
of the film’s most famous scenes, the zombies are turning the wheel on which
huge, ultra-sharp blades for cutting the sugar cane are mounted — and one falls
into the apparatus, and the zombies neither react nor make a sound while the
blades are cutting the victim to shreds. The plot centers around young couple
Neil Parker (former D. W. Griffith leading man John Harron) and his fiancée,
Madeleine Short (former MGM silent sort-of star Madge Bellamy), who met on a
ship taking them to Haiti for a vacation. They fell in love with each other and
agreed to marry on the island, but Madeleine also attracted the attention of
Haitian planter Charles Beaumont (Robert Frazer). Beaumont offers to put the
lovebirds up and even host their wedding, but he’s secretly scheming to get
Madeleine away from Neil so he can have her himself. Madeleine also attracts the attention of “Murder” Legendre, who
encounters her en route from the docks to the Beaumont home and, as her
carriage is stopped at a crossroads — a body is being buried there and she’s
told that it’s so that it cannot later be exhumed and turned into a zombie —
Legendre steals her scarf. Later Beaumont, who loathes Legendre but also knows
that he needs him, cuts a deal with the zombie master to turn Madeleine into a
zombie so she’ll forget about Neil and stay with him.
The treatment works but
Beaumont decides he doesn’t want a zombie girlfriend, and he pleads with
Legendre to restore her to full life. Instead Legendre kidnaps Beaumont and
turns him into a zombie — or at
least starts the process, explaining in Lugosi’s most cultured tones (it’s
refreshing to watch this movie and note that while Lugosi has very few lines —
remember that he learned his parts phonetically and cheap producers like the
Halperins didn’t want to wait around for him to learn a long part that way — he
speaks the ones he does have in
a cultured, almost delicate way, a far cry from the snarling overacting he
resorted to later under less creative, less conscientious directors than Victor
Halperin) that he’s the first person he’s ever put through the transformation
who was actually aware of what was going on. Neil and his local confidant, Dr.
Bruner (Joseph Cawthorn, basically playing the Edward Van Sloan role from Dracula,
Frankenstein and The Mummy), search for Legendre’s castle (a marvelous
glass-painted manse matted
into scenes with real water — off the Malibu coast, no doubt). Bruner enters
first, warning Neil that he’s tired and therefore in no shape to confront the
zombie master, but Neil sneaks in anyway and, with a series of malevolent
hypnotic stares and a gesture of clenching his hands together, Legendre orders
Madeleine to take a knife (it looked like a letter-opener to me) and stab Neil
with it. But she has enough of her humanity — and her love for Neil — left not
to do it, and while she hesitates Bruner is able to grab her hand and get her
to drop the weapon. Neil, knocked out in the struggle, comes to and tries to
shoot Legendre’s zombies when Legendre has them attack him — bullets don’t have
any effect on them (there’s a marvelous shot in which Neil shoots one in the
chest and the bullet leaves a hole but does not cause the zombie any harm), but
when Bruner sneaks up behind Legendre and knocks him out, the zombies, without his guidance, march
themselves off the cliff and into the sea below. Later Legendre tries to flee
but is cornered by Beaumont, who’s come to enough to attack him, and in the
ensuing struggle both men fall to their deaths in the sea below and Neil and
Madeleine are together again, she restored to full humanity by Legendre’s
death.
Apparently the Halperins originally shot this via a distribution deal
with one of the short-lived Depression-era indies, but when the company went
out of business after the film was finished but before it could be released,
the Halperins were able to sell it to a semi-major company, United Artists, and
get it seen more widely than it would have with only independent distribution.
They also got a one-film deal with Paramount, where they made Supernatural, a great movie in which Carole Lombard plays a
socialite whose body is taken over by the soul of a convicted and executed
murderess (and, Universal Home Video, where is that one on DVD?). White Zombie is one of two remarkable films Lugosi made in 1932
(the year after the release of Dracula) that quite frankly stand at the summit of his career (the other is Murders
in the Rue Morgue); though Garnett Weston
was obviously ripping off the Dracula iconography (notably in Lugosi’s caped appearance, his nocturnal
habits, the use of a coach driver — played by African-American actor Clarence
Muse — to bring him and the leads together, and above all in his attempt to win
a woman through supernatural means even though she’d have nothing to do with
him if her will to resist was intact), the film is far superior to the Dracula movie, mainly due to Halperin’s skill as a visual
director. He and his brother rented space at both Universal and RKO to shoot White
Zombie, and for that they gained
access to spectacular sets they couldn’t have afforded to build on their budget
— but it’s Halperin’s use of them that really makes this film amazing: it’s
full of oblique angles, picturesque gratings and moldings through which the
characters are visualized, split screens and wipes, including an odd
double-angled effect that makes it seem as if a stage curtain is opening.
White
Zombie has virtually no dialogue,
and while that may be simply the Halperins and Weston adjusting to the limits
of their cast (Lugosi learned his lines phonetically and the other cast members
weren’t used to acting with their voices at all — the film’s credibility
suffers because Madge Bellamy is so wooden it’s hard to tell when she’s
supposed to be a zombie and when she’s supposed to be normal), much of it is
clearly artistic choice, Halperin going for what Sergei Eisenstein had called
“the sound film” rather than the talkie — a movie in which music and sound
effects would be used to amplify the emotion without drowning the screen in
dialogue. White Zombie is a
refreshing reminder of the days when the term “zombie” in a movie meant a story
about ordinary humans drugged into a simulacrum of death and then forced to
work as slaves, rather than what it’s come to mean since Night of the Living
Dead: corpses revivified by
atomic radiation out to consume the brains of living people as their source of
food. It’s also an amazing film, dragged down by its crudities (like the
terrible stock music Halperin was stuck with — if his budget had been able to
extend to a real composer, or if he’d used classical-music records instead of
the dreary stock cues he did, this could have been an even more haunting and
atmospheric film than it is; as it is, the best cue is a wordless a cappella chorus singing the melody to the spiritual “Listen
to the Lambs,” Halperin doing well what the makers of the 1934 film Black
Moon did poorly and unsubtly:
contrasting the Christian faith of the spirituals to the voodoo basis of the
zombie ritual) but exalted by Halperin’s visual imagination and near-unerring
sense of atmosphere. If on balance I like Rue Morgue better it’s more because of the major-studio
infrastructure and the even more extreme stylization (and Lugosi’s part is
longer and gives him more of a chance to act with his voice), but White
Zombie is one of Lugosi’s
greatest films and one of the few times he was given a vehicle worthy of him.
