Black Moon (1934)

 "If I ever find him in the house again, I'll have him whipped."

This is... well, a very racist film. We're not talking a few dated attitudes, we're talking the whole hog. It's not Birth of a Nation or anything: it doesn't emanate hate. It's just... well, first things first.

This film isn't anything special, but for a B kovie of the time it has a somewhat impressive director and cast, starring noless a figure than Fay Wray. It's well shot, with some impressive sequences, but also manages to be both slow and too rushed at the end. If we ignore the implications of the film being about a handful of white people being surrounded by thousands of hostile Black "natives" and their weird voodoo, there's a fairly effective threat.

However, you see the problem. The setting is an island in the Caribbean, based on Haiti, There's a comedy Black American Uncle Tom figure, and every other black character is a creepy Voodoo savage. The white patriarch at the centre of the island lives in a "plantation" and his white underling, killred fairly eaerly on,is an "overseer". It's clear that this family, which takes pride in having ruled the island for two centuries despite six uprisings and "not running away", once ran a brutal slave regime and its morals in 1934 seem little better: Dr Perez actually utters the line quoted above. The Black population of the island are called "natives", glossing over how and whythey came to be on the island. The original sin of slavery, and its horrors, are completely glossed over. Just othering the Black population like this, and treating the white family as virtuous, is extremely problematic. None of this is deliberately hateful, and I'm sure would not have caused the disgust in 1934 that Birth of a Nation did in 1915, but it's impossible to ignore.

The social attitudes of the time permeate everything. FayWray's secretary heroine is besotted with her married boss but "won't live in sin", and spends the whole film acting out all the features of traditional feminine virtue before, it's implied, eventually marrying Stephen. And it's not usual for a film even of this vintage to be so utterly alienating in its attitudes. Still, it's a fascinating curio from a very different time in a way so many films from the same era are not.

Cat People (1942)

 "I like the dark It's friendly."

I can't quite put my finger on why, but this film- as with many directed by Jacques Tourneur and produced by Val Lewton- doesn't quite do it for me. It doesn't seem to cohere.

It gets a lot of things right. It manages to be pacey as well as having very strong characterisation for a horror film- fantasy elements and dodgy Serbian history aside, this is a film that could be about real people, and has an actual subtext of the wildness of female sexuality, kept repressed in what they would not, in 1942, have referred to as our patriarchal world.

The horror is well done, with suggestion and direction rather than spectacle as something seems to follow Alice- the footsteps and bus scene, and the swimming pool scene, are both very well done. Kent Smith is a little bland, but the rest of the case is superb.

And yet, there's an unevenness of tone. It doesn't become a horror film until the last part of the film, instead the story of a woman's fear of the harm she can do with her sexuality, causing her to remain repressed until she meets the nice but dull Oliver. There's a bit of a vague love triangle with Alice, who comes across as very real. Then there's the Doc, who probably isnt intended to come across quite as creepy as he seems in 2020. And the threat is, perhaps, undersold and left overly vague.

Nevertheless, this is a good and interesting little film.