9 - “Dainty Little Notes, Ain't they?”: Roy Webb's Age of Reason in Bedlam

Summary

On May 25, 1945, The Body Snatcher opened at the two most famous theaters specializing in showing horror films, the Rialto in New York City and the Hawaii in Los Angeles. The reviews were uniformly positive and the opening weekend box office receipts smashed records at the Hawaii and approached doing so at the Rialto.

RKO rewarded Lewton with a vastly increased budget of US$350,000 for his next horror vehicle for Boris Karloff. This budget represents a considerable increase over his earlier films, which ranged in budget from The Seventh Victim's punitive US$116,000 to Isle of the Dead's inflated US$246,000. To place these figures in context, consider RKO's “A” budget pictures from the same period. Bedlam went into production at the same time as The Bells of St. Mary’s, a vehicle for star Bing Crosby. That film's budget of US$. million provides a sense of scale. RKO produced fourteen films in 1945 with budgets greater than a million dollars. Bedlam is not an “A” picture by any stretch of the imagination, although it did benefit from getting to recycle the church set from The Bells of St. Mary's for its titular asylum.

The film's core story concerns the efforts of a young woman, Nell Bowen (Anna Lee), to reform the treatment of the mentally ill at St. Mary's of Bethlehem Hospital, known colloquially as “Bedlam.” But first she must journey from cynical entertainer, to injured party seeking revenge, to inmate at Bedlam wrongfully interred, and only then to reformer.

Nell's antagonists are Lord Mortimer (Billy House) and Master Sims (Boris Karloff), members of the upper classes who seek to thwart her reforms. These hypocrites congratulate themselves for residing within an Age of Reason, but they defend an inhuman order that makes sport of the afflicted. Unusual within the series, Roy Webb devotes considerable musical attention to the film's antagonists. He accomplishes this through a vivid conjuration of eighteenth- century musical manners that led his orchestrator, Gilbert Grau, to comment to his copyist in marginalia in the orchestral score “Dainty little notes, ain't they.” Yet generic demands pull at Webb as topics of suspense and horror rooted in modern musical procedures unlike anything produced in the eighteenth century upend his stylistic evocation of the past.