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Synopsis:
In Haiti, Madeline Short (Madge Bellamy) and Neil Parker (John Harron)
travel towards the estate of Charles Beaumont (Robert Frazer), where
they are to be married. Their coach stops suddenly. Ahead, a native
ceremony is under way; a funeral. The coach-driver (Clarence Muse)
explains to the newcomers that in fear of grave-robbers, the locals
sometimes bury their dead in the road, so that they may be protected by
the passing traffic. The coach moves on, only to stop again to allow the
driver to ask directions of a man standing by the road. The man, Murder
Legendre (Bela Lugosi), does not answer, but leans into the coach,
staring intently at the frightened Madeline. At that moment, several
figures emerge from a nearby cemetery. With a cry of, “Zombies!”, the
driver sets the coach in rapid motion. As it drives away, Legendre
snatches the scarf from about Madeline’s throat, tucking inside his coat
with a satisfied smile. Arriving at the Beaumont estate, Neil takes the
driver to task for his reckless handling of the coach, saying that they
might have been killed. The driver tells him solemnly that they might
have been worse than killed; that the men from the cemetery were
not men at all, but zombies – the living dead, resurrected to work in
the sugar mills. Several of these mysterious creatures are then seen
passing over the crest of a nearby hill, and the driver flees in terror.
The shaken Madeline recoils as a shadowy figure approaches Neil and
herself – but it proves to be Dr Bruner (Joseph Cawthorn), a missionary
who has been summoned to perform the marriage ceremony. Neil and
Madeline explain to Bruner that Beaumont has been extremely kind to them
both, insisting upon hosting their wedding, and arranging a job in New
York for Neil. Bruner is surprised – and suspicious. Meanwhile, Silver
(Brandon Hurst), the butler, goes to inform his master of his guests’
arrival. Initially, Beaumont orders his butler to announce that he is
out – then changes his mind, observing that this might look odd. Silver
agrees, telling Beaumont that Bruner has already voiced his scepticism
of Beaumont’s motives. Silver also reports that there has been no word
from “that man”, and then implores his master to abandon his dangerous
plan. Beaumont tells him simply that if he can’t have Madeline, nothing
matters. He then goes to greet his guests, alarming Neil with his warmth
towards Madeline. As Silver shows the guests upstairs, Beaumont answers
a knock at the door. From the balcony of his room, Neil sees Beaumont
climb into a carriage – a carriage with a rigid, blank-faced driver.
Beaumont is taken to a sugar mill, where more of these strange silent
figures work, and enters an office, to be greeted by Murder Legendre.
Beaumont complains of Legendre’s lack of action, insisting that if he
had just one month, he could win Madeline’s affections away from Neil.
Legendre scoffs at this, but insists that there are ways of
preventing the marriage. Beaumont says wildly that if Legendre can do
this, he may ask for anything in the world as payment. Legendre glances
significantly at one of his zombies, whispering a few words in
Beaumont’s ear – then forcing upon the horrified yet tempted man a small
phial of a certain drug….
Comments:
After the huge successes achieved by Universal Studios with
Dracula and
Frankenstein,
the other studios and various independent film-makers alike, recognising
that the public’s taste for “horror” was no mere flash in the pan, were
swift to jump upon the bandwagon. In the early thirties, movie screens
were flooded with tales of the macabre. Most of these were adaptations
of existing literary sources, novels and stage-plays. One film, however,
gave audiences something entirely new. In 1929, author William B.
Seabrook published “The Magic Island”, a book on Haiti, and in it
introduced the American public to the concept of the zombie:
“The eyes
were the worst. It was not my imagination. They were in truth like the
eyes of a dead man, not blind, but staring, unfocused, unseeing. The
whole face, for that matter, was bad enough. It was vacant, as if there
was nothing behind it. It seemed not only expressionless, but incapable
of expression.”
The brothers Victor and Edward Halperin
had both enjoyed moderately successful film careers during the silent
era, Victor as a writer-director, Edward as a producer. In 1932 the two
joined forces, and with a $50,000 budget and an 11-day shooting
schedule, and working on leftover sets on the Universal and RKO lots,
not only gave the world the very first zombie movie, but managed also to
create one of the most remarkable horror films of its time. With only
occasional exceptions, such as Rouben Mamoulian’s startling version of
Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde, by 1932 the American horror film was still
much as it had been at the dawn of the sound era: static, dialogue-heavy
and, frequently, overly beholden to its material’s stage origins. The
Halperins strongly disapproved of the state of film-making in general at
the time, and of talking pictures in particular, and set out to make a
film that harkened back to the silent era; a film with the story carried
by its visuals, with minimal dialogue and stylised acting, and imagery
informed by the Expressionism of the previous decade; a film entirely
anachronistic, yet anachronistic as a deliberate artistic choice.
White Zombie almost defies conventional criticism. Much of the
acting is bad – very bad; the sparse dialogue is, on the whole,
equally undistinguished; yet these defects seem barely to matter when
set in the context of the film’s superb style and eerie, dreamlike
atmosphere. This is one of those rare films where, you feel, the planets
must have aligned during production: nothing that any of the
participants created in later years comes close to matching the
technical virtuosity on display here. White Zombie is a minor
masterpiece, a nightmare in chiaroscuro.
Right from its opening moments, White
Zombie declares its intention to be a different kind of film. It
begins, not with the standard credits, but with a scene; a native
funeral, set at night and overlaid by chanting. Instantly, the viewer is
swept up into the mood of the piece. Arthur Martinelli’s photography
throughout is quite exceptional; this is one of the most visually
beautiful films of its time. Although White Zombie is not
classically Expressionistic, wonderful use is made of light and shadow,
which adds immeasurably to its atmosphere and its air of menace. The
camera is also mobile. Particular notice should be taken of the
unavoidably talky scene in which Neil learns the truth about Madeline’s
fate. Scenes such as these, dialogue-bound, can be (and often were) a
total mood-killer – but here Martinelli kept his camera moving, gliding,
giving life to a sequence that otherwise would be very heavy going.
White Zombie also differs from many contemporary productions in its
welcome determination to wring as much as possible out of its sets and
its special effects. This attitude gives us not just the shivery scenes
of the zombies emerging from the cemetery, or passing over the horizon
at twilight, but the glass matte shots of Legendre’s castle, and above
all the fabulous deep shot inside the hall of the castle, with the
zombie Madeline playing the piano at one end of the room, and Beaumont,
sprawled in a chair, listening to her, at the other – and all the
details of the production design around and in between. Care was also
taken with the costuming. Befittingly, considering the deliberate
fairy-tale quality of this film, everything tends to be spelled out in
black and white. Legendre himself appears in a variety of outfits,
sometimes hatted, caped and gloved, sometimes in evening dress, but
always, always in black. More unusually, perhaps, the male hero,
Neil Parker, is just as consistently dressed in white. As for Madeline,
the White Zombie of the title, she spends most of the film clad in long
white gowns that are part wedding-dress and part shroud, and which
emphasise her position, trapped and unnatural, as virgin wife.
Ironically, considering the Halperins’
dislike of sound pictures, one of the most notable aspects of their film
is its sound design. In those early days, the idea of a “soundtrack”,
per se, was still a novelty. (Bird Of Paradise, the first
film for which a wholly original score was written, was released the
same year as White Zombie.) Consequently, White Zombie
relies more upon existing, well-known pieces of music to create the
desired emotional ambience – for example, using the spiritual, “Listen
To The Lambs”, to convey the psychic reconnection of Madeline and Neil
after the girl has fallen into the power of Charles Beaumont and Murder
Legendre. But it is the film’s sound effects that are truly
worthy of notice, particularly, unusually for this era, in those scenes
where the Halperins chose to impart information through sound rather
than a visual. One such scene is Neil’s discovery that Madeline’s body
has been stolen from its resting-place. We see the distraught, drunken
young man following his vision of his lost love (his haunting by
Madeline’s image is a clever piece of work in itself) all the way into
her tomb – but we do not see his discovery of the violated grave.
Instead, we hear Neil’s scream, high and agonised, echoing from deep
within the mausoleum. The most unsettling use of sound, however, comes
during Beaumont’s visit to Legendre’s sugar mill – a scene equally
unforgettable for its visual qualities. The mill itself is entirely
staffed by zombies – silent, relentless, unseeing, uncaring. Against
their silence, the grinding of the mill is doubly evocative – and doubly
disturbing, particularly when one of the zombies stumbles and falls into
the mill itself. The other zombies do not react, any more than the
victim himself does: they go right on grinding, grinding, grinding….
As would prove to be the case for many
years to come, the zombies of White Zombie pose little danger to
the central characters in and of themselves. The horror of the
story lies elsewhere, in the threatened loss of self; in the loss
of the soul, if you prefer. As do so many horror films of this era,
White Zombie centres upon the disruption of a new marriage, and the
resultant spiritual and sexual jeopardy of the bride. Our heroine,
Madeline Short, has travelled by sea from New York to the West Indies to
join and marry her fiancé, Neil Parker. On the journey she meets Charles
Beaumont, a wealthy plantation owner in Haiti, who develops an
uncontrollable passion for the girl that drives him, while posing as her
friend, to plot against her. Unable to turn Madeline from marrying Neil,
Beaumont succumbs to the temptation of placing himself in the hands of
Murder Legendre, an “evil spirit man” of strange and dangerous powers,
and demanding his help. Lacking any specific literary or dramatic roots,
White Zombie draws upon a variety of sources, shaping them to its
own ends. Apart from William Seabrook’s book, the most obvious
inspiration for the screenplay was the story of Faust. Bela Lugosi’s
appearance as Murder Legendre is unmistakably Mephistophelian, and in
the guise of helping Beaumont to attain his heart’s desire, the “spirit
man” instead lures him, first figuratively and then literally, into
selling his soul. Another important influence upon White Zombie
would seem to have been George Du Maurier’s novel “Trilby”, in which a
free-spirited girl falls under the hypnotic power of a sinister
musician, who finds that although he can control her every action, he
cannot force her to love him. (The story was filmed only the year before
as Svengali, with John Barrymore in the title role.) This, too,
is the situation in which Charles Beaumont finds himself – or worse.
Although he has Madeline seemingly in his power, although he begs and
pleads with her to respond to him, it is Legendre whom she obeys,
gliding instantly from Beaumont’s side when the zombie master appears.
Sick at heart, Beaumont undergoes the kind of enlightenment that,
frankly, we do not see enough of, either in films or in society itself.
So often, physical beauty is held up as all that matters about a woman:
it was a face that launched a thousand ships, we are told, not a heart
or a mind or a spirit. By this standard, Charles Beaumont has everything
that a man could desire: Madeline’s lovely shell is his to do with as he
wishes. But it is not enough. “I thought beauty alone would satisfy me –
but the soul is gone,” Beaumont mourns as he sits beside the
empty-eyed, impassive figure in white, recognising too late that having
sacrificed the inner woman to get her into his power, he has destroyed
the very essence of what he loved.
Unfortunately for White Zombie as a
whole, the power of much of this is severely undercut by the fact that
the Madeline we see before she falls under Legendre’s spell seems to
have precious little going for her by way of heart or mind or
spirit. Madge Bellamy was an actress who had enjoyed success in the
silent era – she played the female lead in John Ford’s The Iron Horse
in 1924 – but who could not build a second career with the coming of
sound. With their policy of making White Zombie a deliberate
throwback to an earlier period of film-making, the Halperins’ casting of
Bellamy is entirely understandable – and physically, she was well cast.
However, as an actress she was quite unable to invest Madeline with the
right kind of qualities. On the contrary, Bellamy’s performance as the
“conscious” Madeline is one of the film’s weakest aspects; while her
flat and grating delivery of her opening line – “In the road?” –
is enough on its own to jolt the viewer out of the dreamy mood created
by the night-time burial scene that begins the film. Worse still is the
scene in which – while escorting her to the altar! – Beaumont tries to
talk Madeline out of marrying Neil: Madeline barely reacts to his
fervent declaration of passion, finally uttering no more than a
toneless, “Please don’t.” The result of all of this, much to the
detriment of the film, is that we are left mystified as to why even one
man should become so obsessed with Madeline, let alone two – or even,
depending upon how one interprets Legendre’s behaviour, three.
Of course, many horror films from the
early days of sound – and not just then, either – suffer from
colourless and uninteresting central characters; but frankly, I’m not
sure that the powers of “good” were ever more weakly drawn than they are
in White Zombie. Matching Madge Bellamy’s inadequacies as
Madeline, we have John Harron’s Neil, a “hero” who makes most of David
Manners’ characters of this era seem vibrant and forceful by comparison.
Neil’s rapid sinking into helpless drunkenness following Madeline’s
“death” on their wedding day we can understand and forgive; but his
subsequent faints and collapses (“fever”, you know), just when he learns
that Madeline can be rescued, are likely to inspire contempt rather than
sympathy. The third point of this uninspiring triumvirate is Joseph
Cawthorn’s Dr Bruner, an exceedingly confused characterisation, being at
once a most unmissionary-like missionary, the film’s Van Helsing
substitute and – thankfully, just barely – the comic relief. (One of the
reasons that White Zombie plays well to modern audiences is, I
think, that unlike many contemporary productions, its sombre tone is
almost uninterrupted. Apart from a feeble running joke about Dr Bruner’s
pipe, the film is mercifully free of “comedy”.) Bruner’s main function
in the film – although he behaves more heroically than supposed hero
Neil during the climax – is to carry the necessary exposition scene, in
which he explains zombies to both Neil and the audience of the time, and
reveals that the “dead” Madeline may be nothing of the kind. (Well –
eventually. He actually starts off by breaking the cheery news that
Madeline’s bones may have been used in native ceremonies.) It is
Bruner’s knowledge, and Bruner’s relationship with the natives of Haiti,
that allows for the rescue of Madeline – and it is Bruner who strikes
down Murder Legendre at a critical moment, revealing how the zombie
master’s grip on his slaves may be loosened. Yet for all this, he is no
more memorable than our alleged hero and heroine.
It is an extraordinary feature of White
Zombie that this character vacuum at its heart causes so little
damage to the film as a whole. This is partly because this fundamental
lack is well compensated for by the production’s technical excellence –
but it is predominantly because the film’s critical performances, its
critical characterisations, lie elsewhere. For all the apparent focus
upon Madeline and the three men who desire her, White Zombie’s
crucial relationship is that between Charles Beaumont and Murder
Legendre. Along with Madge Bellamy’s woodenness and John Harron’s
invisibility, as Beaumont Robert Frazer offers up yet another
incongruous acting style. However, while his florid, declamatory manner
is occasionally jarring, it is not entirely inappropriate. We draw from
it the sense of Charles Beaumont as a man of uncontrolled passions, one
accustomed to his own way and entirely unused to being thwarted. (And in
justice to Frazer, the fact that he has to act opposite Madge Bellamy’s
negativity makes his performance seem further over the top than it is.)
Having failed by fair means to win Madeline’s affections from Neil,
Beaumont is quite prepared to resort to foul. His fatal error is
assuming that he may simply use Legendre, not recognising that he
is placing himself in his co-conspirator’s power just as much as he is
Madeline; his arrogance, his undisguised loathing of the man whose
assistance he demands, is finally his downfall. Beaumont’s growing
despair over the zombie Madeline leads him to implore Legendre to change
her back, to restore her soul; and Legendre agrees, offering Beaumont a
glass of wine so that the two of them may toast “the future”. In his
relief, Beaumont is, fatally, off his guard. We, on the other
hand, remember only too clearly the original scene of temptation, in
which Legendre handed Beaumont a phial of a certain drug, informing him
in the most purring of voices that it needs, “Just a pin-prick….in
a glass of wine….or perhaps….a flower?” It was indeed a flower that
spelled Madeline’s doom, a poisoned rose handed to her after her
rejection of Beaumont’s declaration of passion. Here, thoughtlessly,
Beaumont sips his wine….and that is enough. His horrified recoil, his
awareness, comes just too late. (If the horror films of the thirties
teach us anything, it that we should never drink….wine.)
There is much in White Zombie that
probably shocked audience of the 1930s: Madeline’s plight; the zombies
themselves, with their lack of will and their unnervingly blank faces
(make-up by Jack Pierce); the physical horror of Neil’s point-blank –
and wholly ineffective – shooting of one of the undead horde. Today’s
audiences will probably be unmoved by these things; they may even find
them a little – quaint. Yet there is a scene in White Zombie
that is one of the most chilling of its decade, and which to my mind has
lost none of its power to disturb, even to this day. Whether Legendre
has deliberately lowered the dose, or whether Beaumont’s mere sip of
wine is to blame, we cannot be certain; but the effect of the ingested
drug is tortuously slow. Beaumont slips into the zombie state inch by
agonising inch – and remains fully conscious, though unable to speak,
throughout. And before him sits Murder Legendre, carving the wax effigy
needed to complete Beaumont’s subjection to his will. With one last
effort, Beaumont forces out his hand, clasping Legendre’s own in a
gesture of heartbreaking desperation. And Legendre smiles. “You
refused to shake hands once. I remember,” he comments, calmly
freeing himself before uttering these unforgettable words, words both
seemingly innocuous yet deeply unsettling: “Well, well….we understand
each other better, now….”
Along with its technical brilliance, the
outstanding feature of White Zombie is the performance of Bela
Lugosi as the fabulously named Murder Legendre, which is certainly one
of the three or four best of his career. The vagaries of Lugosi’s
professional and personal lives would in time lead him into situations
both painful and embarrassing. Although he was frequently the best thing
about the films he appeared in, watching those films is not always a
comfortable experience. The satisfying quality of White Zombie
stems from the fact that both as a film and as a vehicle for Lugosi, it
can be enjoyed without reservation – not least because Lugosi was so
obviously enjoying himself. Furthermore, his evident pleasure in
his own performance colours his characterisation of Legendre, who
displays throughout a candid pleasure in his own capacity for evil.
Obviously cast for his performance in Dracula (and having already
shot himself in the foot professionally, handing Frankenstein’s Creature
over to Boris Karloff), Lugosi’s supposed “hypnotic” personality is
exploited to the full by the Halperins. The very first we see of Murder
Legendre is his disembodied eyes, superimposed over the landscape
through which Madeline and Neil are travelling; a shot that conveys
instantly the scope of the man’s powers, and the threat to the young
couple who have so unwisely entered his domain. With his dialogue
restricted by the Halperins’ film-making policy, Lugosi is able to wring
the maximum effect out of every malevolent word that he utters – and
indeed, White Zombie gave to the world another of those endlessly
quotable Lugosi lines. At the climax of the film, Neil and Dr
Bruner invade Legendre’s castle in an effort to rescue Madeline, and
Neil finds himself confronted by zombie master’s personal staff of the
undead. “What….are they?” he stammers. “For you, my
friend,” Legendre shoots back, relishing every syllable, “they are the
Angels of Death!”
In the pre-Production Code era of the
early thirties, horror films were frequently transgressive in a way
that, in my opinion, they have hardly ever been since. White Zombie
sits a little uncomfortably amongst its brethren in this respect. While
the film is certainly transgressive, there is an odd sense that it is so
almost against its will. The sexual possibilities of Madeline’s
enslavement cannot help but be there, but they are strangely
unexploited. It is not until Beaumont pleads with Legendre to restore
her to normality that the full horror of Madeline’s absolute
helplessness is fore-grounded. “I have other plans for
Mademoiselle!” Legendre retorts ominously – adding a few moments later,
and with a most alarming gleam in his eyes (as if the Halperins felt
they might as well be hanged for a sheep as for a lamb!), “And I have
taken a fancy to you, M’sieur!” On the whole, however, both
Legendre and Beaumont seem more consumed by a lust for power than by the
sexual kind – not that the two are unrelated, of course. Certainly
Legendre’s choice of victims is informative. There is, inevitably I
suppose, but still unfortunately, an undercurrent of racism in White
Zombie. This may be a story of Haiti, but it is by no means a story
of the natives of Haiti – even on the production level. Clarence
Muse stands out like a sore thumb amongst the “black” characters in this
film, many of whom are white actors in blackface. The zombies who slave
in Legendre’s sugar mills are given only a passing glance; it is the
white zombies, they who form Legendre’s bodyguard, in whom the
film’s horror is located. A former native witch-doctor is amongst them,
true (and it was he from whom Legendre, via the use of torture, gained
his knowledge), but the majority are former figures of official
authority who threatened Legendre: a Minister of the Interior; the head
of the Gendarmes; and the State Executioner! (The latter, played
by Frederick Peters, is the be-whiskered, bug-eyed zombie whose image is
most frequently reproduced in respect of this film.) This emphasis seems
to imply that for these things to happen to white people is
automatically worse than for it to happen to black people – and for it
to happen to a white woman is worst of all. (Although not the
worst that could happen, apparently: when Bruner is revealing to
Neil the various fates that could have befallen Madeline, the young man,
a product of his time, reacts with an appalled, “In the hands of the
natives!? Better dead than that!”)
It seems likely, though, that viewers of
1932 may indeed have sympathised specifically with the zombies trapped
in Legendre’s sugar mill. Beaumont’s visit to Legendre takes him through
the mill itself, and he is shaken by what he sees there – enough so to
react with unconcealed disgust when a smiling Legendre suggests that he,
too, employ zombie labour on his estate. Still smirking, the zombie
master goes on to extol the virtues of his unwitting, insensible
labourers: “They work faithfully – they are not worried about
long hours!” – words, surely, to strike a Depression-era audience to the
heart. There is, on the whole, little overt politicking in White
Zombie, although it is difficult to determine whether this is
because this would have been in conflict with the Halperins’ conscious
creation of a fairy-tale world, or whether certain realities were
considered best avoided. In 1932, Haiti was still under US military
occupation. Although slavery as such was not re-introduced, forced
native labour was commonplace, while the white landowners who flocked to
the country to take advantage of the situation rarely paid their workers
more than twenty cents a day. Almost certainly it was under conditions
such as these that Charles Beaumont rose to his position of wealth and
power, which lends an interesting moral shade of grey to his instinctive
recoil at the thought of zombie labour.
And what of the zombies themselves? One of
the more intriguing aspects of White Zombie is the obvious
uncertainty of the film-makers as to the actual creation of the
zombies. Though ready to insist that such things can and do happen – and
quoting the Haitian Penal Code to back up their claims – the Halperins
hesitate over ways and means. The gaining of power over an individual is
variously posited as essentially “natural” (i.e. done through the use of
drugs) and also the result of black magic. Moreover, Legendre afterwards
controls his captives’ actions via telepathy, a power he occasionally
exerts over the normal, the living, as well. Despite this three-level
attack, it is implied that in some cases complete recovery by the victim
may be possible. When Legendre finishes gleefully filling in the
backgrounds of his personal servants, Beaumont demands to know what will
happen “if they regain their souls?” “They will tear me to pieces!”
replies Legendre almost smilingly; the fact that the zombies may yet be
capable of taking revenge on him seems a part of his pleasure. While
Legendre’s drug is clearly necessary to the process of zombiefication,
in the case of Madeline he further performs a ritual requiring a
personal object, the scarf we see him steal from her in the opening
sequence, and a wax effigy, which is thrust into a flame. (With
Beaumont, Legendre gets only so far as the drugging and the carving of
the effigy….to his cost.) Yet despite all this, Legendre’s hold on his
victims is uncertain. When Dr Bruner manages to creep up behind Legendre
and strike him down, his brief unconsciousness is enough temporarily to
free Madeline from his control. This is not the case for the rest of
Legendre’s prisoners, however: in the end, the only act of free will on
the part of the other zombies is self-destruction. A generous reading of
this would be that the probability of recovery diminishes with
increasing time under control – but in truth, White Zombie has
little interest in any of its undead but Madeline. This is an attitude
that would prevail, too, in numerous films to come. For the first three
decades of their screen careers, despite their constant star billing,
zombies would be little more than set-dressing in their own films; the
supporting cast, never the leading players. It would not be until the
late 1960s that this scenario would begin to change – and ironically
enough, as with the original introduction of the zombies to the
cinematic world, this would be as the result of an imaginative,
low-budget, black and white production made outside the confines of the
Hollywood system. But that, of course, is another story….
Want a second opinion of White Zombie? Visit
1000 Misspent Hours And Counting.
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