[In the following essay, Jenkins summarizes the critical reception of Lewton's films, examining the various positions taken regarding the relation of the producer to his films.]

American producer, former writer, notable for a group of low-budget, high quality horror films made for RKO in the Forties. … Later films unremarkable. (Leslie Halliwell, The Filmgoer's Companion)

The above 'definition' is a neat guide to Val Lewton's accepted place and significance in film history and criticism. He is considered primarily responsible for the particular qualities discernible within a group of generically locatable films produced within a definable Hollywood context (history, studio). Working with sympathetic collaborators, and with strict financial constraints, the creative producer turned pulp titles into low-budget poetry, stamped with the seal of 'quality.'

The writings of Manny Farber and James Agee in The Nation and New Republic helped form this picture, but also revealed 'Lewton' as a figure constructed in order to grind particular axes. For Agee, Lewton "and the rest of his crew … have a lot of taste and talent and they are carrying films a long way out of Hollywood". It was "startling to see such a film as Youth Runs Wild coming out of a Hollywood studio". Watching the work of Lewton's actors and technicians "you would hardly think they had ever heard of Hollywood, much less wanted to go there". They became "one group of men working in Hollywood who have neither lost nor taken care to conceal the purity of their hopes and intentions". Agee's championing of Lewton as producing work "resolutely against the grain of all we have learned to expect from the big studios" was echoed by Farber who, writing after Lewton's death, criticised the industry which never considered his films Oscar-worthy, which "in acclaiming people like Ferrer, Mankiewicz and Holliday … indicated its esteem for bombshells who disorganise the proceedings on the screen with their flamboyant eccentricities and relegate the camera to the role of a passive bit player". Lewton was a key figure in Farber's 1952 tirade against "the present crowd of movie-goers, particularly the long-haired and intellectual brethren, (with) a taste for precociously styled, upper-case effects and brittle sophistication … and whose idea of good movies is based on an assortment of swell attitudes". This audience once performed a "function as press-agents for movies that came from the Hollywood underground" (e.g. Lewton's), but had been led astray by the "snobbism" of the critics.

Farber was the more perceptive as regards the surface qualities of the films (The Leopard Man "shows a way to tell a story about people that isn't dominated by the activity, weight, size and pace of the human figure"), but it was Agee's fantasy of the man of taste transcending 'the system' that survived. Whether it was Sight and Sound's 1951 obituary ("Lewton experimented with the tastefully macabre"), or Joseph McBride in the January/February 1976 issue of Action ("The tradition of taste and subtlety Lewton established in the genre proved highly influential on later film-makers"), the image held. Lewton's RKO work, with Mademoiselle Fifi and Youth Runs Wild (both praised by Agee) conveniently forgotten, neatly plugged a gap in chronological histories of the horror film, coming between the Thirties Universal 'classics' and the Fifties science-fiction cycles. Assumptions about genre became a way of defining Lewton's personal sensibilities, almost by default. Thus, David Robinson in The Times (17.8.73): "Above all one is struck in these little films by the taste and tact Lewton was able to deploy. What made him unique as a master of horror was that he never resorted to the crude visualisation which characterised the films made at Universal".

Joel Siegel in his book Val Lewton: the Reality of Terror (1972) bolstered the opposition between Lewton (the artist) and the studio front office (the system) through an accumulation of biographical detail. But Sight and Sound had already hinted at a problem in 1965: "Clearly this ('Lewton') is a case of that mysterious and problematic animal, the producer auteur who prints his taste and his personality on his films whoever happens to direct them". This 'animal' was soon threatened with extinction by film culture's investment in the director-as-author, and it was Robin Wood (Film Comment, Summer 1972) who, rather hesitantly, championed Jacques Tourneur against his producer. Describing Lewton's work as "at once a demonstration of the limitations of the auteur theory and its vindication", Wood opposes Wise's The Body Snatcher as "a potential masterpiece (a producer's film cannot be more than potential)" to Cat People and I Walked with a Zombie which "should be regarded as group achievements (but) under Tourneur their implicit poetry reaches sensitive visual expression". 'Lewton' was dealt another blow by the auteurist/Tourneur thrust with Paul Willemen's Notes Towards the Construction of Readings of Tourneur (1975) which dismissed Siegel's book as "gossip, plot synopses and the kind of 'criticism' one tends to associate with fan magazines and publicity hand-outs". Thereafter, the producer's name was completely repressed from his account of 'Tourneur', a name "used as a formula to designate a particular activity of reading/writing, a practice of textual production".

While this abandonment of 'Lewton' in favour of auteurist textual analysis is historically understandable (writings on the producer essentially amounting to endless repetition of the same ideas of taste, subtlety, making the best of limited financial resources, etc.), it is hardly desirable. The producer's name was/is at least the basic signifier of a specific production context and as such should be useful. In this respect, it is interesting to look at contemporary trade press reviews of Lewton films, examples here being taken from Motion Picture Herald, Kine Weekly and Today's Cinema. It is immediately apparent that almost everything subsequently written about Lewton was said by the trade at the time. The films are distinguished from the "conventional thick-ear thriller" by "restrained directorial treatment" in which "all the tricks of light and sound are used to produce an effect of menace and eeriness", resulting in something "a cut above the average horror picture". At the same time, the films' evident aspirations towards 'art' (the most obvious sign of Lewton's input) are firmly dealt with: "The director, Jacques Tourneur, definitely has ideas and imagination, but in trying to convert a conventional creepy to something a little more intelligent he falls between two stools … lacks the power of the popular thriller without rising to the heights demanded by the connoisseur". More aggressively: "We prefer our thrillers straight and we think the industrial masses share our views".

This leads to the significant fact of the trade papers' reluctance to classify these products as horror films, a crucial element in the critical attempt to establish Lewton's 'difference.' Other terms abound: "melodrama", "psychological thriller", "dual personality melodrama", "out-of-rut-thriller", "supernatural melodrama", "murder-mystery melodrama", "high falutin' thriller", "suspense film", "pseudo-thriller", "psychological melodrama", etc. This plethora of labels (concentrating on melodrama) hints at a way out of the Lewton critical impasse. In his article "Out of What Past? Notes on the B-Film Noir" (Screen Education, Winter 79/80), Paul Kerr suggests that "By the end of the 1930s … double bills were beginning to contrast the staple A genres of that decade … with a number of Poverty Row hybrids, (including a mixture of) melodrama and mystery". This "hybrid quality", a description which certainly fits Lewton's work, is seen by Kerr not only "in terms of studio insecurities about marketing their B product", but also as pointing forward to the "cross-generic quality of the film noir … perhaps a vestige of its origins in a kind of 'oppositional' cinematic mode" (Farber's "underground"?).

If one sees 'Lewton' in a noir spectrum reaching from, say, Stranger on the Third Floor (1940) to Out of the Past (1947), both RKO and both photographed by Lewton regular Nicholas Musuraca, the visual style becomes unreadable as a simple sign of the producer's radical reworking of the horror genre. The ideological significance of that style, and of 'Lewton' as a construct, is thrown into question. Which is not to replace 'horror film' with 'film noir' as a catch-all phrase coherently binding a body of work beneath a particular name, but rather to suggest the illusoriness of coherence. The Lewton unit worked in conditions of relative autonomy within RKO, but the work it produced was subject to a battery of constraints, pressures and influences (a complex field that Kerr concisely maps out) which have so far been effectively ignored by Lewton admirers, except insofar as they suit the ideology of hero worship. Essentially, 'Lewton' remains to be deciphered.