Val Lewton’s films have always existed in my mind as one extended work, realized without pretension or dishonesty. They are workingman’s movies made by craftsmen with a collective sense of beauty that appears to have been discovered as they applied themselves to their material. Without knowing it, Lewton and his team were responding to the mood of a people at war, creating a light and supple poetry built from the most exquisite interplay of shadow and light, presence and absence, wonder and abject despair. I treasure them, and I consider myself lucky that I was able to make a film about their guiding spirit. Lewton’s output has always been classified under horror, which seems less and less appropriate as the years go by. 5 of his 14 completed films have no horror element whatsoever, in either the subject matter or the title. The inappropriately titled Youth Runs Wild was a disappointing experience for Lewton. Large sections of the storyline were dropped because the studio was nervous about creating too negative a portrait of the home front. Yet, compromised as it is, the film has an extraordinary tenderness and quiet vivacity, and, as my friend Manny Farber put it when he reviewed the film in 1944, “a beautiful eye, memory, and a feeling for gesture and attitude.” I dedicated The Man in the Shadows to Manny, partly because he was the only film critic who had the refinement to recognize the virtues of Lewton’s filmmaking.
Kent Jones