The Living Idol (1957)

The Living Idol (1957) is a real oddity.  Its plot comes straight out of a forties Universal B-picture, but made with A-picture production values, in widescreen and Eastmancolor.  Befitting its A-movie pretensions, the film treats its central idea - of possession and reincarnation - as completely novel and original, dressing it up with all manner of pseudo scientific and anthropological mumbo jumbo, in endlessly talky scenes which seem to assume that the audience needs every detail laid out for them, so novel are the ideas.  Consequently, the film's pace is glacial, frequently feeling as if it has come to a complete halt, with no clear idea of how to proceed.  In truth, though, it's plot is overly simplistic: the discovery of an idol of a jaguar god in some Mayan ruins triggers strange feelings and dreams in a young girl - these are accompanied by a series of strange, apparently accidental, deaths, including that of her father, crushed by an altar stone his archeological expedition is trying to raise.  Adopted by her father's colleague, she moves to the city, where he teaches at the local university, but remains plagued by strange thoughts and visions, eventually falling ill.  Her adoptive father naturally concludes that she is the reincarnation of a Mayan priestess of the jaguar god, having found an ancient bust that resembles her, and in the process of becoming possessed by her spirit.  The obvious solution is to release a real jaguar from the local zoo, which makes a bee-line for his house and the girl, where it faces off against her reporter boyfriend in what the professor believes is the re-enactment of an ancient legend.

The average B-movie would have raced through such a flimsy plot in less than seventy minutes, without ever leaving the studio back lot, working up some monochrome scares along the way.  The Living Idol, however, spends an hour and forty minutes strolling through the story - narrated in flashback by the hero, in the manner of a weird anecdote being told in a gentleman's club - at a languid pace, frequently stopping off to show us widescreen vistas of the Mexican landscape.  Stylistically, it seems to be trying for the sort of understated suspense typified by Val Lewton's 1940s RKO B-horrors, but only fleetingly managing to conjure up the unsettling feel of the supernatural pushing in around the edges of the everyday characteristic of those films, principally in a carnival scene a somewhat surreal dance scene in a back-projected nightclub.  The casting and characterisations all feel very haphazard.  French actress Lilliane Montevecchi is exotically beautiful as the possessed girl, but never really manages to summon up the sort of otherworldly presence required for such role, all too often seeming like a merely petulant teenager rather than the reincarnation of an ancient priestess.  The character of her adoptive father is hampered by the fact that he is played by James Robertson Justice, an actor whom, by 1957, had such a well established screen persona that it is impossible to see him as anything other than a brusque, egotistical professional, bulldozing his way through the plot.  His attempts to shock his daughter out of her stupor with his vivid descriptions of ancient Mayan ritual sacrifices and by forcing her to participate in re-enactments of these rituals are doubtless intended to show him as a deeply caring parent, forced into desperate measures to save the soul of a loved one.  But instead, they come over as cruel and insensitive bullying which, when he releases the jaguar, seem to tip over into the sort of insanity usually reserved for B-movie mad scientists.  Steve Forrest as the heroic boyfriend is, well, stolid and completely overshadowed by James Robertson Justice's powerful screen presence.

The film does, however, look very good, Jack Hilyard's cinematography making the most of the Mexican locations, drawing striking contrasts between the isolated ruins and rural Mexico with the modernity of the bustling city.  Producer-Director Albert Lewin had previously tackled fantasy-orientated material with greater success, in 1945's The Portrait of Dorian Grey and 1951's Pandora and the Flying Dutchman,  But with these films he had had more substantial material to work from, in contrast to the thin plot and characters of The Living Idol.  It really is a very strange film to watch, its allusions to Lewton making the viewer hope for something along the lines of Cat People (1941) or The Leopard Man (1943), with apparently supernatural events having possible psychological explanations, but the plot and scenario raising expectations of bloody curses and human sacrifices in low budget idiom.  Sadly, it delivers neither of these, instead settling for leaden paced turgid drama, often in danger of drowning in its sea of pretentious-sounding expository dialogue.  It only really comes to life in the final few minutes, after that jaguar is set free, (and rather improbably fatally mauls James Robertson Justice who, as anyone who had seen him as sir Lancelot Spratt in  Doctor in the House would know, was more likely to bite the jaguar, rather than the other way around).