Fearing the Dark - The Val Lewton Career

Edmund G. Bansak  (McFarland  1995)

Legendary producer Val Lewton has acquired a new generation of admirers in the past few years, what with the release of his RKO films on DVD and a documentary about his career.

If your looking for an in-depth bio on Lewton you won’t find it here.  Author Edmund G. Bansak does provide the basics about Lewton’s early years as a pulp writer and his journey to Hollywood and his association with David O. Selznick.   But as the subtitle suggest, this book is about Lewton’s career, not so much his personal life.   As such you will not find a more definitive source on Lewton’s time in Hollywood.  

This book was first published in 1995, before DVDs and when most of Lewton’s films were not available.  Bansak devotes a chapter to each of the 11 films Lewton made at RKO.  The circumstances of each production is intriguing, but Bansak’s descriptive retelling of each of the film’s stories  makes for some extraneous reading.  Bansak also goes into some detail profiling the careers of the people who Lewton mentored as part of his staff while at RKO.  

This book goes a long way in explaining the legacy of Val Lewton.  So much so that the appropriate subtitle for this book should have been:  The Val Lewton Influence.  For that influence is well documented by Bansak and certainly extends to film noir.