Inner Sanctum

Inner Sacntum -- Greil Marcus, writing about Bob Dylan's work with The Band, has coined the phrase "the old weird America" -- in fact, I think he quotes Dylan who used those words in an interview.  "The old weird" America is spook-haunted terrain of homicidal fiancees, deranged prophets, drunks suffering ecstatic visions, haunted barnyards and misty hollows wracked by fraticidal feuds.  This is the zone from which ancient, creepy murder ballads originate -- the nightmare topography of the small-town carnival just before midnight closing time.  Inner Sanctum channels this landscape -- a 1948 no-budget film, scarcely visible now on DVD (no Criterion style restoration for this picture) is convincingly strange, dire, and bizarre.  The opening shot propels us headlong into "the old, weird America" -- a train is plunging through the night, frighteningly close to the camera.  Inside a eerily white and featureless dining car, travelers sit like zombies, ministered to by comatose-looking black waiters.  A old man pronounces prophecies and seems to know the future.  A woman about to be married indulges in strange hysterical fits.  Obviously, she suspects that her upcoming marriage will be a disaster.  The old man tells a story:  it starts with a man leaving a train in the darkness; a woman follows him and there is a brief struggle in which the man stabs the woman to death with a nail file.  He pitches her body onto the cabooze of the train as it exits the station.  As he is about to walk away, a high-pitched asexual voice emerges from the darkness -- the effect is terrifying, the viewer just about jumps out of his or her skin.  It turns out that a child has witnessed killing but doesn't know exactly what he has seen.  The man flees in the night after trying to kill the boy, but being thwarted. (It is shocking how casually the hero assumes that more homicide is his only exit from this situation.)  The film's nightmare logic posits that there is no way to flee the site of the killing.  The movie keeps returning to the town where the killing took place, and, indeed, to the train station.  Everything loops.  When the man is picked-up as a hitchhiker on the rain-soaked night, he gets lost -- the bridges have been washed away in a flood shown in newsreel footage that is so dark and ravaged that it can't really be seen -- and ends up right where he started, in the town where he committed the crime.  For the next hour, Inner Sanctum is populated with small-town grotesques, refugees, it seems, from an anthology of Sherwood Anderson stories.  Someone characterizes the film by saying:  "It's just like a nightmare, isn't it?"  The murderer tells one of the denizens of the boarding house, a middle-aged divorcee-type who lasciviously licks her teeth when she looks at him:  "You look just great so long as your lips aren't moving."