Danse Macabre   ::   Кинг Стивен

So instead of shooting in daylight with a heavy filter, a technique that shows up as even more glaringly faked, Tourneur quite sensibly opted for the soundstage-and it is interesting to me that, some forty years later, Stanley Kubrick did exactly the same thing with The Shining . . . and like Lewton and Tourneur before him, Kubrick is a director who shows an almost exquisite sensitivity to the nuances of light and shadow.

To theatrical audiences of the time there was no false note in this; they were used to integrating movie sets into their imaginative processes. Sets were simply accepted, the way we might accept a single piece of scenery or two in a play that calls (as Thornton Wilder's Our Town does) for mostly "bare stage"-this is an acceptance that the Victorian playgoer would simply have balked at. He or she might accept the principle of the bare stage, but emotionally the play would lose most of its effect and its charm. The Victorian playgoer would be apt to find Our Town outside her or his set of reality.

For me, the scene in Central Park lost its believability for the same reason. As the camera moves with Ms. Randolph, everything surrounding her screams fake! fake! fake! to my eye.

While I was supposed to be worrying about whether or not Jane Randolph was going to be attacked, I found myself worrying instead about that papier-mache stone wall in the background. When the bus finally pulls up, the chuff of its air brakes miming the cat's cheated growl, I was wondering if it was hard getting that New York City bus onto a closed soundstage and if the bushes in the background were real or plastic.

*William F. Nolan, mentioning this film, said that the memory which remained with him most strongly from the Central Park sequence was the pattern of "light-shadow-light-shadow-light-shadow" as the camera moves with Ms. Randolph-and it is indeed a fine, eerie effect.

The set of reality changes, and the boundaries of that mental country where the imagination may be fruitfully employed (Rod Serling's apt phrase for it, now a part of the American idiom, was the Twilight Zone) are in near-constant flux. By the 1960s, the decade when I saw more movies than I ever have since, the "state of the art" had advanced to a point where a set and soundstages had become nearly obsolete. New fast films had made available-light shooting perfectly possible. In 1942 Val Lewton could not shoot in Central Park by night, but in Barry Lyndon Stanley Kubrick shot several scenes by candlelight. This is a quantum technical leap which has this paradoxical effect: it robs the bank of imagination. Perhaps realizing the fact, Kubrick takes a giant step backward to the soundstage with his next film, The Shining . *

All of this may seem far afield from the subject of radio drama and the question of whether or not to open the door on the monster, but we're