Bedlam

(1946) dir. Mark Robson
viewed: 06/07/10

Closing out my Val Lewton series (actually one more to go of currently available titles on Netflix), my latest venture into the great RKO B-picture horror film was Bedlam, another of Lewton’s films to star legend Boris Karloff.  Actually, these are all good Karloff films, including Isle of the Dead (1945) and The Body Snatcher (1945), not just the campy, occasionally dialed-in performances by a man who the studio system of Hollywood like to typecast beyond typecast, not merely as a villain but as the Frankenstein (1931) monster or other.

In all three films, Lewton gave Karloff a lot more with which to work.  In Isle of the Dead, he’s a tough, potentially cruel Greek general given to superstition but motivated to save lives of his soldiers.  In The Body Snatcher, he’s a ghoul of sorts but also feeding knowledge and science.  And in Bedlam, well, though they try to redeem him to an extent at the end, he’s a cruel supervisor of a “mental hospital” more along the lines of a prison or freakshow, whose social-climbing and attempts to make good with a wealthy aristocrat lead him to further crimes of imprisoning a “sane” woman who he has reason to dislike.

Bedlam, interestingly, is “inspired” by a series of popular engravings by William Hogarth, a series titled The Rake’s Progress, which in many ways was a sort of pulp fiction of its time, depicting the notorious St. Mary’s of Bethlehem Asylum, which came to be known as “Bedlam” and is at the core of the term’s definition, that of pure insane chaos.  And this Bedlam is the setting for the story, an early version of the “insane asylum” or mental institution movie that I noted in recently watching The Snake Pit (1948), which in an interesting aside was a moniker given to writer/producer Val Lewton’s writing team at RKO.

So far, I have to say, which I still stick to, that Robson’s work, while probably stronger here than in his other pictures for Lewton, still pales in comparison to Jacques Tourneur, Lewton’s other director of note in his days at RKO.  Perhaps such an opinion as that is simply that, an opinion, but I raise it because many historians and critics note that Robson was most-attuned to Lewton’s vision and Lewton’s favorite collaborator.  While I have one movie left in my Lewton/RKO DVD catalog, and with a couple of notable other Lewton films unavailable on DVD through Netflix, I also have a couple of documentaries on Lewton to round out my long-delayed investigation into his canon.  More to come…