"The Curse of the Cat People," "The Leopard Man," "I Walked With a Zombie." The problem with producer Val Lewton lies in convincing casual movie fans that his movies aren't just better than their titles but different: poetic and inventive, charged with subtle European gloom. "Zombie" retells "Jane Eyre" on a midnight Caribbean isle. "Curse of the Cat People" isn't a horror sequel at all but a piercing tale of childhood loneliness and imagination. Martin Scorsese calls it a portrait of "reality as understood by a child."
The documentary in which the "Departed" director says those words premieres tonight at 8 on Turner Classic Movies. It's called "Val Lewton: The Man in the Shadows," and it makes a quiet, painstaking case for its subject as one of the few movie producers with the vision and voice of an artist. Working for RKO Studios in the 1940s, Lewton made 11 low-budget horror movies in four years; the pace is astonishing, the quality more so. It's correctly stated here that while Lewton never had any ambitions to direct, "the films he produced belong to him."
"Man in the Shadows" is directed by Kent Jones, a critic, historian, festival programmer, and film archivist for Scorsese, which explains the latter's presence as narrator. The documentary is more academic than the usual cable-TV bio, or it would be if the movie clips weren't so unsettling. If you've never seen the original 1942 "Cat People," the scene in which a mysterious, feline-faced woman approaches Simone Simon in a bar and murmurs "My sister. . ." in a dark Slavic tongue can convert you all by itself.
The case Jones makes is that the melancholy linking the films comes straight from Lewton himself, no matter that others wrote, directed, and spoke the lines. Born Vladimir Levinton in Yalta, Lewton had a privileged Russian upbringing that possibly explains the sense of loss in his films, of a vanished but still potent other-world. He grew up around strong women - the actress Alla Nazimova was his aunt - and his movies, too, wrestle with issues of female power in a male society.
How else to explain "Cat People," a film in which a moody European woman (Simon) can't consummate her marriage to a bluff, unironic American man (Kent Smith) because she's afraid she'll tear him to shreds? The film never really decides whether Irena turns into a panther when her emotions get the better of her or whether it's all in her head (or ours). The ambiguity fuels the story; when the "other woman" (Jane Randolph) is trapped in a nighttime swimming pool by something growling in the shadows, our own fears do the work.
In large part, this was a budgetary restriction. The producer arrived at RKO in 1942 just as the studio had bounced Orson Welles and taken a new pledge of fiscal responsibility. Lewton was coming off a successful stint as David O. Selznick's assistant - the majestic boom shot of wounded soldiers in "Gone with the Wind" was his idea - and was handed a title that had tested well and told to make a movie out of it. For $125,000.
The studio brass were horrified at the lack of outright horror in "Cat People," but the movie played for 13 weeks, one longer than "Citizen Kane." Lewton solidified his team and was off and running: director Jacques Tourneur (later, Mark Robson and a young Robert Wise), writer DeWitt Bodeen, cinematographer Nicholas Musuraca, composer Roy Webb. The Lewton unit was successful and profitable, so it was allowed to do as it pleased.
What pleased Lewton was inserting doubt into Hollywood's sunny worldview. The films have a trancelike poetry unlike anything else made at the time, and they suggest a Continental darkness that lurks beneath daily life. "The Seventh Victim" (1943) may be the key Lewton film, with its tale of Satan worshipers in Greenwich Village - "Rosemary's Baby" decades ahead of schedule.
After the last three RKO films rescued Boris Karloff from the Frankenstein monster and, in the actor's own words, "restored my soul," Lewton drifted to other studios and made a few more movies, none with his distinct stamp. When critic James Agee told MGM's Dore Schary that the studio had "one of the three greatest filmmakers" working for it, the executive had no idea who he was referring to.
The fade-out was halted by Lewton's death of a heart attack in 1951. He was 46; he had worked himself to death, basically. "The Man in the Shadows" - followed immediately tonight by "Cat People," "I Walked With a Zombie," and an all-night marathon of eight other Lewton films - marshals various voices to testify to the producer's legacy. Producer Roger Corman (a man who knows his way around a non-existent budget), Japanese director and fan Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and Lewton's son provide insights, and directors Wise and Tourneur chip in via archival interviews.
None speak so simply and chillingly as Lewton himself, in his response to a reviewer's swipe that "Isle of the Dead" (1945) had no message. "I'm sorry, Mr. Holt, but we do have a message, and our message is: Death is good."
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/movies/blog.
