As I write this review, I hear that film studios are bidding over the rights to Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, a cut and paste job of the original Jane Austen novel inserting zombie fights into random scenes. This idea is not exactly new – Charlotte Brontë’s classic Jane Eyre already has its own zombified B-movie.
Like Hitchcock’s Rebecca, I Walked With a Zombie (directed by Jaques Tourneur of Cat People fame) is loosely inspired by Jane Eyre rather than being a straight adaptation. Its premise focuses on Bertha and the novel’s connection to the Caribbean, which is one of the most controversial and, arguably, least developed aspects of the novel. In a story with otherwise believable and human characters, the Bertha story dehumanizes the mentally ill. The novel also hints at racism; depending on how one reads the text on Bertha’s family ties and “stock,” and her “purple” skin, Bertha Mason may have been biracial with her black Creole side being a liability in Brontë’s world. I Walked With a Zombie touches on this – albeit lightly. Rather than being a serious exploration of a theme, it takes it and toys with it playfully, as one would expect from a 1940s horror B-movie.
The main character, Betsy Colonel (Frances Dee), focuses on both Jane’s morality and naïve ignorance of racism – traits that could be extended to Charlotte Brontë herself. Instead of a governess, she is a modern-day Canadian nurse eager to take a job and see the world. She accepts employment at a Caribbean plantation run by Paul Holland (Tom Conway), the Rochester analogue. Paul’s wife Jessica (Christine Gordon) needs a caretaker, but Betsy does not know the details. She meets Paul on the ship toward the Caribbean. Echoing an early conversation in Jane Eyre where Rochester tells the title character she hasn’t seen much of the world, Paul labels Betsy “a newcomer” who does not see “the death and decay.” Betsy, on the other hand, finds Paul to be “clean and honest but hurt. Badly hurt.”
Betsy’s naïveté is highlighted when she arrives at Fort Holland and the surrounding area. When her Afro-Caribbean driver alludes to his ancestors being transported as slaves, she tells him that at least “they brought you to a beautiful place.”
A statue of an arrow-struck St. Sebastian, which had once been a slave ship figurehead, is a prominent tragic image in the deceptively sunny and palm tree-dotted enclosure. “I told you, Miss Colonel, this is a sad place,” Paul Holland tells her as he explains the statue’s history.
Betsy Colonel’s initial ignorance is overshadowed by her will to do the right thing. Like Jane Eyre, she falls in love with her employer. Knowing his wife is still alive (more or less), however, she does not pursue this relationship. Instead, she expresses her love for Paul by trying hard to restore Jessica back to life. In another scene, Wesley tries to convince Betsy to put Jessica out of her misery by euthanasia. Bound by her Hippocratic oath, she again refuses. Similar to the title character from the original novel, Miss Colonel has a passionate love moderated and defined by a pursuit of the higher good – even if her patient is a little creepy.
While this B-horror film’s premise of zombies and voodoo conjures up all manner of eye-rolling stereotypes, one has to take into account that this was merely four years after the blockbuster classic Gone With the Wind, which painted an idealized picture of slavery and stereotyped its African-American characters. Old films like Huck Finn portrayed black people as easily frightened and somewhat immature. In I Walked With a Zombie, the black characters are strikingly normal for 1940s cinema.
For this reason, the character Alma (Theresa Harris) stands out in this film. Harris had the talent, screen charisma, and photogenic looks equal to any white Hollywood starlet, but she was almost always typecast in a maid role. While she plays a servant in this movie, she is not subservient. She lacks privilege and a prestigious job, but she clearly has her own life outside of working for Fort Holland and converses with Betsy Colonel as an equal. I like to think of her as the other Jane Eyre in the movie.
Christine Gordon is another great performance as Jessica, the loose equivalent of Bertha – even though her role involves little more than sitting around listlessly... and walking around catatonically… and following orders… and staring out into nowhere with her genuinely creepy hollow eyes. She has a strong entrance, ethereal against a dark twisted staircase with her blonde hair and long white dress. She frightens Betsy, who says, “Nobody told me Mrs. Holland was a mental case.”
The source of Jessica’s malady becomes a point of contention among the characters and the film’s main conflict. Her history is similar to Bertha’s history: She married the rich male lead, cheated on him – she wanted to run off with Paul’s half-brother Wesley Rand (James Ellison) – and then grew insane at some point. Paul and Wesley’s mother Mrs. Rand (Edith Barrett) dismisses the local voodoo beliefs, insisting that Jessica is plagued by normal causes. The question haunts Betsy: is Jessica a true zombie, or does she just happen to be in a perpetual catatonic state? This core conflict – whether supernatural beliefs have any credibility – has little to do with the themes explored in the original Jane Eyre.
I Walked With a Zombie works as a popcorn B-movie for classic horror fans and is listed on Stylus Magazine’s Top Ten Zombie Films of All Time. Unlike the highbrow Rebecca, It does not work so well if one is hoping for a serious interpretation of Jane Eyre. The one thing it does add is exploring the novel’s Achilles’ heel, the Caribbean subplot, giving a backstory to the land Mr. Rochester left behind. Even so, it is a film made for entertainment rather than deconstruction or post-colonial literary critiques – a way to pass a late night with macaroni and Mountain Dew.
Sources:
Cliff’s Notes – Jane Eyre
Internet Movie Database
Stylus Magazine (http://www.stylusmagazine.com/articles/movie_review/stylus-magazines-top-10-zombie-films-of-all-time.htm)
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