I Walked with a Zombie. 1943. Directed by Jacques Tourneur.

(5/28/00)

I kept thinking that this film could have been a pilot for Strange Paradise. It has a sort of highbrow feel to it with fine photography and dignified action, but I found it disappointing.

It is hard to follow, or maybe part of it was that I kept expecting more--more secrets to be revealed. Two brothers were in love with thye same woman. She was married to one of them. She is in a coma or is a zombie or something similar. The nurse is determined to bring her back to health, believing that her husband loves her and wants her back. But he indicates that he doesn't want her to be restored to himin a way that suggests that we are going to learn something startling about their relationship. We don't.

The big revelation is that the mother used voodoo to kill thye woman. She's really dead. Or is she? The doctor points out that she still has the characteristics of the living. This is never resolved. Is the woman alive or dead?

The scenes of voodoo ceremonies are nice to watch. I didn'tfind them frightening or anything like that. This could be from living in a more sophisticated time and having seen the same sort of thing in Live and Let Die. If the filmmakers could have developed more intrigue about the voodoo I might have become more involved.

There is a fantastic character of a black man who seems to be a zombie. He has large, bulging eyes. He comes to the house where the people live and his presence there, since we don't know what he is there to do) is genuinely unnerving. But I think that the best, most haunting scene in the film is when the nurse and one of the brothers go to a cafe. A singer sings te tale of the family's story, not knowing that one of the brothers is there. When informed of this he immediately desists and comes over and obsequiously apologizes. But after the brother passes out he takes on a totally different demeanor and finishes the story (the song). He is like a figure of fate or something.

We keep seeing a statue of St. Sebastian pierced by arrows, which was the figurehead of a ship. It was a slave ship or the ship that first brought the family to the island. I don't know what it was intended to symbolize.