Val Lewton Movies

For fans for Val Lewton movies. Share your personal film reviews or opinions about his works. According to Wikipedia: Val Lewton was born as "Vladimir Ivan Leventon" in what is now Yalta, Ukraine. He was a nephew of the actress Alla... [more]

For fans for Val Lewton movies. Share your personal film reviews or opinions about his works.

According to Wikipedia: Val Lewton was born as "Vladimir Ivan Leventon" in what is now Yalta, Ukraine. He was a nephew of the actress Alla Nazimova. In 1909, he immigrated to the USA with his sister and mother (where his name was changed to Val Lewton). He was raised in suburban Port Chester, New York.

Prior to beginning his film career in the early 1930s (as an MGM publicist and assistant to David O. Selznick), he studied journalism at Columbia University and authored eighteen works of nonfiction, fiction, and poetry.

Lewton once lost his job as a reporter for the Darien-Stamford Review after it was discovered that a story he wrote about a truckload of kosher chickens dying in a New York heat wave was a total fabrication.

In 1932 he wrote a best-selling pulp novel No Bed of Her Own. The book was later made into the film No Man of Her Own, with Clark Gable and Carole Lombard. His first screen credit was "revolutionary sequences arranged by" in David O. Selznick’s 1935 version of A Tale of Two Cities. Lewton also worked as an uncredited writer for Selznick’s Gone with the Wind, including writing the scene where the camera pulls back to reveal hundreds of wounded soldiers on the battlefield.

In 1942, Lewton was named head of the horror unit at RKO studios. He was paid $250 a week. And as head of the B-horror unit he would have to follow three rules: each film had to come in under a $150,000 budget; each film was to run under 75 minutes; and Lewton's supervisors would supply the title for each film.

Lewton's first production was Cat People, with Simone Simon. Made for $134,000, the film went on to earn nearly $4 million, and was the top moneymaker for RKO that year.

Lewton died of a heart attack on March 14, 1951, at the age of 46.