Post by Xч on Dec 16, 2008 3:11:48 GMT -5
hands from the screen of the Rivoli yesterday and tried to hynotize blondes into killing their boy friends. A legion of individuals, with deceased minds but alert bodies, threw butlers into subterranean streams. Eagles screamed and vultures carried on a terrific caterwauling all around a mountainous castle. And half way through the picture that inspired all these things an actor wistfully remarked:
"The whole thing has me confused; I just can't understand it."
That was, as briefly as can be expressed, the legend for posterity of "White Zombie." Charity still the greatest of the trilogy suggests that the sentence be allowed to stand as comment. To go on would lead only to a description of why the eagles screamed, and that would prove very little, indeed, in the orderly scheme of life. There was, in short, no great reason. Nor was there, to be candid, much reason for "White Zombie." The screen, shuddering slightly, can go on; it can forget, it can be a Zombie, too.
The idea of the picture is that in Haiti there are individuals who dig up bodies, invest them with motive power but not with intelligence, and set them to work. They make good servants. They can carry off blondes without getting ideas in their heads, which helps in these mad days. When they have served their fell purposes, moreover, they can walk off high cliffs and out of the picture. But not the necromancers; they must be shoved over, off and out.
Of the cast, Bela Lugosi plays the chief part that of the lad who has the power to turn corpses into automatons. Madge Bellamy is the blonde, John Harron the young man in the affair and Robert Frazer a sort of semi-tropical villain. All the actors have strange lines to say, but appear to enjoy saying them. Those given to Mr. Harron seem, on retrospection, to be the most fantastic if a superlative of any sort is allowable in a discussion of "White Zombie."
"Not that," he says at one point. "Better death than that."
Yes, indeed, much better. --The New York Times
One of Bela's greatest films.