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Saturday, September 18, 2004Murders in the Rue Morgue
1971, United States. Starring Jason Robards, Herbert Lom, Christine Kaufmann, Adolfo Celi, Maria Perschy, Michael Dunn, Lilli Palmer, Peter Arne, Rosalind Elliot, Marshall Jones, Maria Martin, Ruth Plattes. Directed by Gordon Hessler. Available on DVD from Amazon
Director Gordon Hessler is back for another AIP Poe adaptation, this one cleverer than most in the way it incorporates the Poe elements into the film. As we saw with The Oblong Box and many others, it was common to take the title of a Poe short story or poem, apply it to the film, then have not the slightest thing to do with the Poe story of the same title in the plot. Murders in the Rue Morgue takes the title from Poe's story, but instead of adapting it or discarding it, sets its action around a theatrical production of Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue that becomes plagued with murders and yet another vengeful disfigured madman who was buried alive. According to Hessler, this was done because Murders in the Rue Morgue had already been made into a movie, and everyone knew how it ended. Thus there was no suspense in the film - not that Hessler was all that great at creating suspense anyway. Murders in the Rue Morgue is also a good example of how important Vincent Price was to the success of these films. His special talent was making bad movies good, and making boring scenes interesting simply because he's so much fun to watch. Even The Oblong Box, which is heavy on Price sitting there and talking, is made more enjoyable simply by virtue of the fact that Price is doing the talking. By all accounts, he should have been the man in the lead for Murders in the Rue Morgue as well, but contract disputes led to him taking time away from AIP, or so the story goes. The contract dispute was settled, but Price came back and went to work on The Abominable Dr. Phibes rather than on this next Poe adaptation with Hessler. For all I know, though, he could simply have been to busy with Phibes to do this picture, and contract negotiations never came into it. Whatever the case, The Abominable Dr. Phibes is considered by many including myself to be a deliciously macabre horror classic. Murders in the Rue Morgue, on the other hand, is regarded as something less than classic, when it is regarded at all. It's another in that long line of "not bad, not great" films that manage to satisfy people who are predisposed to like a particular type of film (in this case, gothic horror) but certainly won't win over any new fans.
With Price unavailable, AIP went shopping for a new leading man and hooked Jason Robards, fresh off his stint with Sergio Leone in Once Upon a Time in the West. Robards was a real catch of a lead at the time, but he looks about as thrilled to be in this film as I would be to find myself the winner of Celine Dion's complete discography. That is to say, not very. I like Jason Robards a lot, but it seems that he considers Murders in the Rue Morgue to be the type of film that was beneath him. I'm never a big fan of the "this type of film is beneath me" attitude. Hey man, work is work, and it's not like the people who sport this attitude have artistically impeccable resumes. Instead of just giving it their all and turning in a memorable performance - the kind that can make a bad movie good, the kind we'd expect from a man like Vincent Price - too often these stars half-ass their way through the film just to collect the paycheck. Robards is never bad in this film, but neither is he ever engaging. He looks bored, and his performance lacks the conviction and enthusiasm it requires to work. He plays Cesar Charron, the most American Frenchman you'll ever hear. Didn't Robards know that when playing a foreigner -- any foreigner - you're supposed to fake a British accent? Cesar is the lead actor and manager of a Parisian theater troupe performing their stage version of Poe's ghoulish tale. Things get going quick. If nothing else, Hessler could make an interesting start of his films. The actors discover that the man who was supposed to be playing the ape in the play was murdered, and the murderer himself had donned the costume and done the entire performance himself. You'd think a backstage murder followed by the murderer going on stage to rave reviews would be enough to cause a postponement, but I guess the show must always go on. It's soon revealed that the murderer is Rene Marot, played by Herbert Lom, who starred in Mysterious Island and Hammer's version of Phantom of the Opera, which is fitting since this film has more to do with Phantom than with Poe's story. It could be that Lom got the role because he already had himself a mask. Yes, as with The Oblong Box, our murderer is an unhinged madman with a disfigured face. It turns out that Marot was once a member of Cesar's acting troupe, but after an accident resulted in real acid rather than prop acid being splashed on his face, he ended up killing himself. Or did he? Well, no, of course he didn't, because there he is a-killin' his former stage mates. But why? And how did he survive burial? And how does all this tie in to the bizarre nightmares Cesar's wife, Madeline (Christine Kaufmann) has been having, in which a masked man whirls an ax around and around before chasing her down a hall until she sees a corpse fall from the rafters? And what's with the midget? Answering these questions is how the film passes its running time.
As was often the case with Hessler's Poe films, the story is either complex or convoluted, depending on your mood, and there are a lot of disparate plot threads that have to be woven together by film's end. The film's ambitions perhaps outreach its ability to deliver, but it still makes for an interesting experiment and attempt to do something just a little bit different. There are a lot of dream sequences. Well, no. There's one dream sequence, repeated over and over, sometimes with a little more information added here and there as the film attempts to unravel the central mystery. Murders in the Rue Morgue has fewer scenes of people sitting around talking about the plot than previous Hessler Poe adaptations. The nightmare is effective, and the strange slow-motion scenes of the masked tuxedo-wearing killer whirling a giant medieval ax over his head is suitably spooky. Hessler also makes good use of the shadows and all the billowing cloaks and capes one is afforded in a period production, but overall the film is too brightly lit and lacks the chilling atmosphere of AIP's better Poe films or Hammer's gothic horrors. Outside of the dream sequence and a few shots around a carnival, Hessler's direction lacks direction, if you know what I mean, and it really fails to create any sort of impact or identity for the film. European genre regular Adolfo Celi (Thunderball, Danger: Diabolik!) is on hand as the captain of the most useless police force in France. I mean, Marot manages to stroll up and kill a man with a vial of acid while Celi and the the cops are standing not more than three feet away and looking right at him. Then they can't even catch the man, presumably because he does "billowing Jack the Ripper cloak" running to confuse them. One would think that an acid-scarred madman in all black and wearing a ceramic mask would attract attention, even in France. On several occasions, the police prove utterly incompetent at catching Marot, even though all it seems like they'd have to do is stick their hand out and grab him. He doesn't exactly keep a low profile. He keeps coming back to the theater. He keeps murdering members of the cast. How hard can it be? He even manages to evade police while dressed as a monkey despite the fact that they knew from the beginning of the play that he was on stage yet again as the ape, having murdered yet another cast member who was supposed to play the ape. And still he manages to escape. In another scene, police corner Marot and his assistant, the diminutive Pierre Triboulet (an excellent Michael Dunn) in an old crypt/theater. Marot escapes yet again, and then they just seem to sort of let Pierre go free despite the fact that he's obviously an accomplice, an accessory to murder, a kidnapper, and also guilty of perpetrating annoying Punch and Judy puppet plays on the citizens of Paris. If one is going to worry about the inability of the police to catch a dwarf who is standing right next to them or successfully nab an acid-scarred murderer kneeling before them, one may as well go on and wonder why, as monkey actors keep getting strangled, no one ever thinks to cancel the show or, for that matter, post any sort of security back stage even when they know Marot is going to be back there skulking about. I mean, it's really not that good of a play they seem to be putting on, so what's the harm in taking a few nights off while your cast is being stalked and killed?
You may be worried that the change of venue from England to Paris (although the film was actually shot in Spain) means no bawdy ale house shenanigans. Well, you'd be wrong. Have faith in AIP. Jason Robards still finds time to visit a brothel full of can-can dancers and, yes, patrons hollerin' and groping women and waving mugs around in the air. Unfortunately, the brothel scene showcases another of the film's many weaknesses, in this case it timidness. No gratuitous nudity? Not even in the bawdy ale-house scene? In France? Are you telling me those repressed Brits are willing to doff their blouses in the peasant pub, but those liberated French women are going to remain modestly clothed? What crazy kind of world is this? For that matter, Marot's murders are fairly tame in comparison to other AIP and Hammer films of the time. I guess there's only so much you can do with acid, but even when the ax comes into play, the camera is atypically shy in lingering over the grue. The goriest setpieces come in Cesar's stage show, where they're firmly established as Grand Guignol and "just part of the act, folks," thus lacking any real sense of shock. If I'm going to be pretentious enough to use the term Grand Guignol, then I want to apply it to the film itself, not to the play within the film. The film's twist ending is telegraphed about half an hour too early, but it's still a decently interesting ride before you arrive at the big revelation. Once again, the horribly scarred face of the killer is not all that terrifying, but it's not built up as such as much as Edward's face in The Oblong Box, so that's no real disappointment. No, the only real disappointment in Murders in the Rue Morgue is how substandard the whole thing ends up being, thanks largely to Jason Robards' disinterest in everything around him. His boredom infects the viewer and makes an already dubiously boring film even more so. As I said, this is the sort of film that could easily have been saved by Vincent Price, but without his services, and with a leading man who couldn't care less whether or not he was on screen, Murders in the Rue Morgue is dragged down by the weight of its own plot. With no conviction, with no sense of horror communicated by Robards, the movie is sapped of any tension it might have otherwise generated. All of Hessler's Poe films suffered from the same problem: his inability to pace a film or keep the entire thing interesting. With Vincent Price in the lead, you could cover, more or less, for that deficiency. Without Price, you mostly just spend the entire movie missing Vincent Price. It's a shame, too, because despite Robards throwing his little fit, the rest of the cast is pretty good. Celi is as he always is, only this time with one of those fake upturned Poroit mustaches the French so adored at the time. Michael Dunn is wonderful and mysterious as Pierre. He's actually more interesting than any of the principal characters, and one wonders more about his never-told back-story than the story that becomes central to the plot's resolution. The French period costumes are good, and the carnival-theater setting is sometimes interesting, but never as sinister or effective as is should be. Despite some promise and some quality moments scattered throughout more mundane events, Murders in the Rue Morgue is really nothing more than a good example of something that might have been. It's not good or bad enough to be striking in any way, and so remains a minor effort in AIP's Poe canon, and if it is remembered at all, it will be as "the one that would have been good if Vincent Price had starred in it." Labels: Director: Gordon Hessler, Horror: Poe, Netflix Diary, Studio: AIP, Year: 1971 posted by Keith at 11:38 PM | 0 Comments The Oblong Box
1969, United States. Starring Vincent Price, Christopher Lee, Alister Williamson, Peter Arne, Hilary Dwyer, Rupert Davies, Uta Levka, Sally Geeson, Maxwell Shaw, Carl Rigg, Harry Baird. Directed by Gordon Hessler. Available on DVD from Amazon
Hessler and Price are together again (for the first time) for a Poe adaptation that actually has a little something to do with Poe, or at least as much as any AIP Poe film has to do with Poe. Poe's short story, "The Oblong Box," has to do with a man who witnesses the obsession of an artist friend on a ship with an oblong shipping crate. So committed is the man, seeming delirious and mad, to this box that when the ship is wrecked during a storm, he sinks to the bottom of the ocean with the box rather than abandon it. Not to spoil the surprise, but it was a coffin containing his dead wife, though no one knew of the contents lest they refuse to travel overseas with a corpse. Hessler's film does indeed contain a coffin that is referred to as an oblong box. And there is an artist, though he himself has no coffin. Beyond that, and this film has as much to do with Poe as does the average movie in which someone inherits a wily, diaper-wearing ape that solves a crime. Vincent Price stars as Sir Julian Markham, a wealthy member of the British gentry who we first meet in Africa as his brother, Edward, is strung up and disfigured in a voodoo ritual for some horrible transgression he has committed against the native peoples. Upon their return home, Edward's sanity deteriorates and Julian must keep his mad, hideous brother locked in an upstairs room while Julian himself attempts to lead a normal life with his bride-to-be, Elizabeth (Hilary Dwyer, once again). Edward, though losing his mind, is scheming with the family lawyer, Trench, to fake his own death using more voodoo so that he can be free of the confines in which his brother has placed him. Nothing goes as planned, however, and rather than being freed, Edward ends up buried alive and abandoned by Trench. Luckily for Edward, his grave is robbed by body snatchers working for the local surgeon, Dr. Neuharrt (none other than Christopher Lee), who is always in need of fresh cadavers for his experiments. Edward vows revenge on those who left him to die in the grave, just as he vows to find a black magic cure for his affliction and the truth behind why he was disfigured in the first place.
Hessler, working with a script from frequent AIP writers Lawrence Huntington and Christopher Wicking, has crafted a complex tale with multiple plot points that must be woven together. It's ambitious for a horror film and for AIP to launch into such a labyrinthine narrative, doubly so when it is injected with all the civil rights politics that surround the movie's African prologue. The Markhams are plantation owners in Africa, keeping a host of slaves. Upon his return from the so-called Dark Continent, Julian seems to have had some sort of social and racial awakening and comments on the evils committed by the white man in Africa. Horror and science fiction films have often been at the forefront of tackling tough social and political issues in the guise of a tale about some monster or invading aliens. Throughout the 1950s, much of the rhetoric was decidedly one-sided and conservative, motivated as it was by the Cold War and Red Scare. The Oblong Box is a product of its time, the late 1960s, and reflects a more liberal and open-minded view of race and the need to own up to the atrocities committed during the colonial era - which, remember, had really only ended twenty or twenty-five years earlier - and then only to pass from colonialism by a nation-state to a sort of pseudo-colonialism perpetrated by large businesses. The Oblong Box' more progressive politics are similar, then to the same director's more liberal take on good versus evil, Christianity versus Paganism in Cry of the Banshee. Of course, it's still an AIP gothic horror film, so whatever politics may be on offer are wrapped in a tale about a disfigured madman coving his face with a crimson mask as he slits the throats of those who wronged him. And now that you mention it, why yes there is a scene of drunken, bawdy revelry in a lower class inn where people wave beer mugs about and buxom wenches dance on the tables and have their bosoms revealed. After all, AIP knows what people want, and people want buxom wenches dancing on tables. AIP's gothic "Poe" films are often compared to Hammer Studio's gothic films, which obvious influence heavily the look of AIP's films. Those comparisons were bound to get more common in the late 60s, early 1970s when the two studios teamed up for the first time in what would seem to be an obvious good match. The result was Hammer's superior vampire film, The Vampire Lovers, the first in the Karnstein vampire trilogy (which continued with the vastly inferior Lust for a Vampire and wonderful Twins of Evil) and the first Hammer film to feature nudity. Apparently someone at AIP told the reserved Brits that hey, it's the 1970s and it's okay to show some boobs. AIP, for their part, found themselves with the services of Hammer legend Christopher Lee, and it doesn't take a genius to know that the first thing they should do with the man is team him up with Vincent Price. Unfortunately, AIP seemed lost as to exactly how to use Lee, and so this screen pairing of two of the great icons of horror is more an exercise is wasted opportunity than it is the celebration and masterpiece it should be. Lee's doctor possesses very little character. We know he pays to have corpses delivered to him so he can expand his craft, but considering the fact that just about every doctor in a gothic horror movie does the same, that's hardly a defining characteristic. All in all, he's very dull despite Lee bringing his usual air of authoritative dignity to the role. What's worse, however, is that he and Price have only a single scene together, at the very end of the film, and it lasts for but a few brief seconds. Really, now! Why put Lee and Price together in a film then not put them together in the film? Lee is wasted in a throw-away role, and the film fails utterly to capitalize on this historic meeting of horror superstars. Or lack of meeting, I suppose I should say.
The film's other major mistake is ever bothering to show Sir Edward's horrible disfigurement. I mean, I know they have to do the big reveal in the final showdown between he and Julian, but the result is decidedly less than it should be. When you build a character up throughout the entire film as being the very picture of nightmarish terror, you have to come up with something better than some oatmeal on the cheek and a silly piggy nose. He looks like the doctor in that episode of The Twilight Zone where the beautiful woman thinks she is ugly because she doesn't have a wretched piggy face. Up until this point, the crimson mask has been effective and even a bit eerie. It winds up being much more frightening than the face beneath it despite attempts at the contrary. I guess it's the old Lovecraft conundrum, meaning that any adaptation of an H.P. Lovecraft tale is doomed to failure because his stories revolve around beings so absolutely horrifying that simply looking at them will drive the sanest man completely mad. There's no way to adequately realize that on screen, and so film adaptations are inevitably letdowns when the monster makes its appearance. Likewise for Edward's monstrous face. The film would have been better off to never show it. Cry of the Banshee was wise enough to never show the werewolf creature in its entirety, because it knew it looked silly. Wrapped in shadows, it was rather effective, however, and The Oblong Box should have kept Edward's face a mystery. The Oblong Box has some other problems, as most of AIP's post-Roger Corman films tended to have. It's a very talky movie, though unlike Cry of the Banshee, the conversation is more interesting if for no other reason than much of it involves Vincent Price. This is one of the more subdued films in the AIP gothic horror canon. The murders are directed with style and are fairly tame by the standards set in other films. There's blood, sure, but not much blood, and the camera lingers only slightly over the carnage. In addition, there are no torture scenes and, excepting one would-be robber-prostitute, the women of the film are mercifully free from the cruelty being perpetrated. Hessler's direction, like much of the film, is reserved. Maybe even a tad uninspired though perfectly competent. His biggest problem, as it would be in many of his AIP horror films, is the pace. The Oblong Box has several good moments. No great ones, but plenty to satisfy. Unfortunately the stretch between those moments seems much longer than it is or should be. There is also a fair amount of padding, more than one would want in a film that runs just over ninety minutes. The bawdy alehouse sequence goes on for too long, and conversations seem to drag on for a few minutes more than they need to. There are very few surprises in the film, so watching the lead-up get drawn out "in anticipation" is irritating at times. That said, the twist ending and revelation, though also not exactly a surprise by the time you get to it, is still effective. Though it has nothing to do with Poe, Poe probably would have approved. Both Price and Lee give good performances, but both of them also seem to betray a certain lack of enthusiasm. Price, in particular, is uncharacteristically subdued, playing as he is the more or less "straight" man. But it's not his fault. His character, like Lee's is given very little of interest to do. His job consists mostly of syrupy "let's begin our lives anew" scenes with his wife-to-be or moderately aghast, "but surely that can't be!" scenes that are never as urgent as they should be. Hessler simply can't sustain the film through the doldrums, where as a director like Hammer's Terence Fisher could make down-time in his films every bit as interesting as the parts where Peter Cushing was driving a stake through someone's heart. There is no real tension in the film.
With Lee is a tiny role and Price confined to looking forlorn in his country estate, the bulk of the film's action falls onto the shoulders of Alistair Williamson as Sir Edward. And since he spends most of the movie with a bag over his head, it's difficult to connect with him. The best scene involves his being taken awkwardly by two friendly drunks to the local brothel for the aforementioned rowdy alehouse scene that every AIP film had to have. It's a moment of humor in an otherwise humorless film. I didn't realize that so many beautiful women would be so willing to bed a guy walking around with a red sack over his face. Maybe it's worth trying sometime. Williamson, like Lee, appeared in a number of Hammer productions including The Evil of Frankenstein, Curse of the Werewolf, and The Gorgon. He also went on to a smaller role alongside Vincent Price in The Abominable Dr. Phibes. His character in The Oblong Box, like the movie itself, is too reserved to be fully effective. He manages to be a charmer even with a hood covering his wicked voodoo face, but his fits of homicidal rage are not effectively actualized. He ends up being rather dull for a hooded maniac suffering a voodoo curse. As you know by now, I have a soft spot for gothic horror films from this era of filmmaking, as well as for anything with Vincent Price. The Oblong Box is certainly not the zenith of his collaboration with AIP for the Poe cycle. That came in movies like Masque of the Red Death, Haunted Palace, and The Conqueror Worm (aka The Witchfinder General). Compared to those, The Oblong Box and Price's other outings with Hessler definitely fall well into the range of "lesser" works. That said, The Oblong Box is not without its charm. Price's character is complex even though he's more reserved that usual, and the revelation about what happened to him and his brother in Africa is a nice twist that makes the film's criticism of colonialism and racism something more intelligent than a simple black and white (if you'll excuse me) morality call. For most of the film, Julian is a likable character, though his willingness to snatch a body in order to hide the fact at a funeral that his brother was turned into a creature hints at a darker tendency that is further exposed in the film's excellent (minus the pigface make-up for Edward) finale. The supporting cast buoyed by Peter Arne (Khartoum, Murders in the Rue Morgue, Straw Dogs) as Trench is solid, and the music is effective. Set design and art direction is also typically good. AIP may not have been quite as good at this stuff as Hammer, but they were no slouches, and everything looks authentic and gorgeous. These positive elements conspire with my innate love of these kinds of movies to push The Oblong Box just into the lower end of my "like it" column. Seasoned fans and completists like myself will roll with the film's slower portions and appreciate the positive aspects. It's certainly not the first AIP gothic horror film I'd recommend, nor the first Vincent Price film. It's not a film about which one should get especially excited, but I certainly didn't mind spending some time with it. Labels: Director: Gordon Hessler, Horror: Poe, Netflix Diary, Stars: Vincent Price, Studio: AIP, Year: 1969 posted by Keith at 11:34 PM | 0 Comments Cry of the Banshees
1970, United States. Starring Vincent Price, Hilary Dwyer, Carl Rigg, Patrick Mower, Essy Persson, Marshall Jones, Elisabeth Bergner, Stephen Chase, Sally Geeson, Hugh Griffith. Directed by Gordon Hessler. Available on DVD from Amazon
I'm guessing child protection agencies today would cringe at the thought of a wee sprout staying up until two or three in the morning just so he can thrill as Boris Karloff lurks in some shadows or Vincent Price bugs out his eyes at some fantastic and horrible sight. But for you Teleport City readers, such behavior should be par for the course, and I figure its healthier than watching Nelly swipe a credit card through some stripper's ass cheeks. The first AIP horror films I remember seeing were Cry of the Banshee and The Terror. I would see Cry of the Banshee pop up once every couple of years, and then when I got cable television, The Terror seemed to pop up every other night. Cry of the Banshee, as I recounted back in my review of Plague of the Zombies, I first saw on a wildly enjoyable night that also boasted broadcast of the Hammer version of The Hound of the Baskervilles and Darby O'Gill and the Little People, from back when children's movies used to be fun and imaginative and sometimes even dark, scary, and not filled with sassy pre-teens driving go-carts and having sleepovers. Ironically - at least, I think it's ironic -- Darby O'Gill and the Little People not only featured the leprechauns you would expect, but also featured a banshee, and a fairly chilling apparition it was to my young eyes. Cry of the Banshee, however, did not feature a banshee, or even a regular ghost who simply fond of howling. It did feature some crying, but with a title like Cry of the Banshee one expects a banshee. That didn't stop me from loving the movie, however, and as the years passed I mistakenly thought that the banshee I was remembering was from Cry of the Banshee. I mean, that makes sense, right? After all, I was young and it was already pretty late. I also remembered a weird glowing dog that I assume was something out of The Hound of the Baskervilles, though now that I think about it, it probably wasn't. I guess I'll find out soon enough, since The Hound of the Baskervilles is coming up soon.
But anyway, a few weeks ago I was watching Darby O'Gill and the Little People on TV and well, what do you know? There was that banshee! I figured it was abut time, then, that I sat down and refreshed my memory as to the actual contents of Cry of the Banshee despite the fact that I'm always a bit hesitant to revisit childhood favorites - not because I'm afraid I'll realize how awful they are, but because I still won't realize how awful they are and will thus go right on praising the merits of a film like Cry of the Banshee even when the whole of the free world has pronounced it rather on the shabby side. But Cry of the Banshee doesn't just have nostalgia on its side. It also has Vincent Price, and a film has to phenomenally bad before Vincent Price can't make it watchable. He's one of my five favorite actors of all time, sitting on his thrown alongside the likes of Cary Grant, Peter Cushing, Robert Mitchum, and Michael Caine. In the case of Cry of the Banshee, he's sitting on his thrown while also wearing huge poofy Henry VIII robes. Price more than any other actor understood exactly how far over the top he had to go for every film he was in. Movies like Laura proved he was an accomplished and well-trained dramatic actor who, had he been given the chance, could have become known as such. But it was horror for Price, and horror is all the better for his participation. He knew when a film was could and thus could be played straight, but more importantly, he knew when a film was bad and required that he chew some scenery. The worse the film, the more Price would escalate his character, though he never crossed over into the realm of intentional wink-at-the-camera irony unless it was specifically called for. What made him so good was that even at the height of his hamminess he always made you believe the character. As we've discussed in relation to Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee and all the actors at Hammer, Price goes about portraying each character with gusto and total conviction. He was also one of the most well-respected intellectuals that acting ever saw, which puts him in the company of Christopher Lee, among others. Believe it or not, there was a time when you could go through movies and still find some gentlemen who cherished intelligence, culture, and wit. Price was reportedly a startlingly well-informed man of the world who could discuss with authority any number of topics from art history to the arcane. It'd be nice if there were more stars around today like him, but I reckon the fact that there aren't makes men like Price and Lee all the more impressive. The fact that they were in movies like Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs and Howling II: Your Sister is a Werewolf respectively, didn't keep them from being men of dignity, refinement, and sophistication. So remember, when you get up in the morning, to try and live your life a little more like Vincent Price and Christopher Lee. Another similarity between Price and Lee is that both men were so, so damn good at being evil on screen, and in particular and playing evil figures of authority. Price was the defining figure in just about all of AIP's Poe films, and he spent much of the time relishing his role as a thoroughly horrible figure of menace who, despite how horrendous he is, you can't help but kind of like since Price injects each character with his own undeniable charisma and glee for the macabre. His most famously rotten villain is perhaps that of the witchfinder general in AIP's wonderful Conqueror Worm, a film that is criminally MIA on DVD at the moment. Following not too far behind is the vile Lord Edward Whitman in Cry of the Banshee, a character so totally devoid of even the faintest trace of likeability that he inhabits a film constructed entirely around the anticipation of seeing this right bastard get his comeuppance. Whitman and his aristocratic family lord over a small Scottish town with an iron fist. Whitman is particularly fond of tracking down Scotland's few remaining pagans and either forcing them to convert to Christianity or simply torturing them to death. It doesn't really matter which, as long as he gets to burn someone alive. As is par for the course, many innocents suffer at the hands of Whitman and his thuggish bunch, but when they cross an actual group of witches with actual dark and mysterious powers, the Whitmans find themselves suddenly under a curse that sees the family members dying off one by one in the most spectacularly gory of fashions, generally at the hands, or paws, or claws of a hideous werewolfy sort of thing played in human form by Patrick Mower, who we last saw on Teleport City in The Devil Rides Out. The guy just can't seem to keep himself from getting involved with witches, can he? He worms his way into the Whitman family by romancing young Maureen Whitman, played by AIP regular Hilary Dwyer (aka Hilary Heath), who also starred alongside Price in The Conqueror Worm and The Oblong Box. She plays the closest thing this film has to a sympathetic character in the Whitman family, though her willingness to turn a blind eye other father's brutality flaws her character, just as her more enlightened and educated brother, Harry (Carl Rigg, also in AIP's The Oblong Box), seems at first to be a sympathetic character, right up until he starts slitting witch throats in defense of his father's reign of terror. You may be asking yourself one of two questions. First, what does this have to do with banshees? Second, what does this have to do with Edgar Allen Poe? The answer to both is that it has about as much to do with banshees as it has to do with Poe, which is very little, if anything at all. The "Poe films" was the blanket term applied to all of AIP's period horror films, even though quite a few of them had nothing to do with the works of Poe. For that matter, the ones that did often did little more than borrow the title and maybe throw up a convenient quote from Poe. Sometimes it would even be from the same work as that used for the title of the film! But the plots rarely bore any resemblance to the source material. I'm not unfamiliar with the works of Poe, as any self-respecting fan of horror and chills should have read at least a portion of the man's work, but I'm no student of Poe. I don't think he ever wrote anything called "Cry of the Banshee," at least not that I could find.
So a Poe film that isn't a Poe film is par for the course when it comes to AIP gothic horrors. It was just easier to relate all the movies to Edgar Allen Poe and be done with it, sort of like making all Italian sword and sandal films about Hercules. But what about the whole lack of banshee thing? That just doesn't seem proper for a film whose title primes you for some serious banshee action, or as much action as a banshee can afford. I reckon for my non-Scottish brethren who are also unacquainted with the various types of spooks and spirits we have haunting the moors in our homeland, I should tell you what a banshee is. It's a ghost, a female ghost, who appears and howls out the name of some unlucky soul, signifying that within 24 hours of hearing the banshee's howl, that person will meet their demise. If banshees do much more than that and scare Darby O'Gill, then I missed that part of Scottish supernatural heritage class. But it doesn't matter so much for this movie, in which there are no banshees. One scene pays lip service to banshees when a howl of the damn arises from outside. Someone says, "Hmm, must be a banshee. That sucks." Maybe that isn't the exact quote, but it's close. Anyway, anyone who has ever been locked in mortal or immortal combat with the forces of the supernatural will recognize that the howl isn't from a banshee' it's a werewolf's howl, an identification seemingly confirmed by the fact that a killer wolf creature shows up to dispense witch's justice. The reason Cry of the Banshee is called Cry of the Banshee even though it doesn't have any banshees in it is because AIP was in the practice of coming up with a title, selling the film based on the title, then drumming up a script to go with the title after the fact. According to director Gordon Hessler, who shot many of AIP's most sadistic gothic horror films, the original script for Cry of the Banshee was awful, so he and an associate set about doing rewrites. By the time they were finished, it was an entirely different picture, and AIP was upset since there was no banshee in the film. Some more rewrites were done to work in a mention of the banshee, and that was that. How bad the original script was and what sort of banshee quotient it contained remains a mystery. But frankly, given his track record and the evidence of his rewriting, Gordon Hessler was hardly the guy to be criticizing scripts. I like a lot a Hessler films (The Oblong Box, Scream and Scream Again, Murders in the Rue Morgue, and even his foray into ninja cinema, Pray for Death), even love a few of them (Golden Voyage of Sinbad, Kiss Meets the Phantom of the Park). But it's not like he was making high art. The script for Cry of the Banshee as it is filmed isn't exactly a stunner. As with lots of AIP films, there is a lot of talking. Some of it interesting, some of it less so. An uneven pace hampers the film, made worse by the fact that you either hate or don't care about any of the characters, meaning the only thing you have to look forward to is their inevitable death at the hands of Itchy the Werewolf Thing. Cry of the Banshee does manage to contain everything you need to have a successful "burn the witches!" movie. You have the dirty peasants. The rack. The hangings. The random accusations of witchcraft. And as was de rigueur for all AIP gothics, the random "bawdy ale house" scene where patrons shout a lot and spill their ale as busty wenches dance on the tables and have their blouses ripped open for the requisite gratuitous boob shot. What sets Cry of the Banshee apart from other similar period witchcraft movies is that, first, it ends up containing actual witches instead of just a bunch of hot but innocent women accused of being witches, and second, the witches are the nominal good guys. Oona the head witch, played by Elizabeth Bergner (who worked mainly in German and Austrian productions) looking kind of like Debbie Harry does now but with wilder "crazy witch woman" hair, wants nothing but to be left alone so her and her coven can frolic semi-nude in the woods like a bunch of rejects from some community theater production of Hair. As far as pagan rites go, theirs are pretty lame and consist mostly of sinewy extras thrashing about and doing "jazz hands!" The whole thing reminds me that I want to start a "take back paganism" movement meant to reclaim the Old Religion from the bunch of crystal-wearing hippies and new age sweetness and light freaks who have turned it into the most gutless and goofy pseudo-religion around. I mean, look at the old pagans. Scottish highlanders. Vikings. You think these cats pranced about all blessed out and talking about Goddess and greeting everyone with a hug and a "Blessed be!" Hell no! They ate each other, for crying out loud! Now I'm not saying that we need to start eating each other, but paganism really does nee dot get back to its pre-hippie roots. Except, umm, except for those cute goth girls who are into it. They can stay. Silly though they may be, Oona and her crew don't bother anyone. In fact, most of the villagers seem nominally Christian at best, forced into paying lip service to the belief but not-so-secretly still sympathetic to their native religion with its camping trips, drunken revelries and nudity. Who wouldn't be? You gonna willingly trade that in for a religion full of dour-faced old men with bulldog jowls barking on about how sinful you are as they whack your knuckles with a ruler and tell you to stop showing so much ankle in your dress? But the Whitmans and their sidekick priest will have no pagans in their territory. They harass Oona and even murder the guy who leaps about as if joyously proclaiming, "Behold! I am a fawn! A spriteful fawn!" Thus, you know, the curse and all.
None of the pagans save Oona have much of a character, so even though we're allowed to identify with the oppressed indigenous religion, we can't really identify with them. Even Oona is pretty one-dimensional, and you can't side with her entirely since she choreographed such lame pagan rites. Luckily, the Whitmans and The Church TM are so vile, so reprehensible, so thoroughly corrupt that Oona doesn't have to do much to be better than they. The casting of the witches and pagans as the good guys, and Christianity as the murderous oppressors seems bolder than it actually was for the time. Looking back from an era in which being negative about any organized religion is once again a taboo, Cry of the Banshee's pro-witch agenda seems daring. But remember that the 1970s were a time in which people were actually willing to make risky political and social statements. The late 1960s had paved the way via a series of films that cast Satanists in a more sympathetic, if not entirely heroic, light, and witch movies in which the church is portrayed as vicious and corrupt were a dime a dozen in the 1970s. Even so, it's nice to see the underdog represented and, for a change, even victorious over the wretched forces of the Inquisition. The other thing Cry of the Banshee has in common with the witch hunt movies that would come before and after it is a sadistic vicious streak a mile wide. Interrogations are extreme and the witches' vengeance doesn't stop to consider that some members of the Whitman family are not as evil as their father. Cry of the Banshee doesn't revel in or sexualize torture to the point of the most infamous title in the witch hunt sub-genre, Mark of the Devil, but the torture is still plenty explicit and manages to work in a couple gratuitous bare breasts. Everything is augmented by the film's nasty demeanor. The acting is uniformly good. Price's character lacks the depth and nasty appeal of his best villains, Matthew Hopkins from Conqueror Worm and Prospero from Mask of the Red Death, but he's suitably evil and Price is always a joy to watch as he scowls, sneers, and makes his bug-eyed "aghast" face. The supporting players are all good as well. Mower as the bestial Roderick shows suitable menace and, in line with the film's nasty streak of cruelty, never shows any remorse over the fact that he transforms into a hideous beast that claws out throats, even though he's mostly murdering the Whitman women before getting down to extracting a vague but undoubtedly deliciously gory vengeance on Lord Edward during the film's eerie finale. There's also a great score by famed exotica composer Les Baxter, who aside from writing tunes about pyramids and Polynesia and various sorts of globe-trotting adventure, was also an accomplished compose of music for films. AIP used him frequently either to score their own films or provide replacement scores for imported and dubbed films like Black Sunday, Baron Blood (both films by Mario Bava), and a pile of sword and sandal epics. Baxter's score sets the mood perfectly, as do the bizarre animated opening credits by none other than Monty Python's resident animator and future director Terry Gilliam. The main problem with Cry of the Banshee is that all of this should be a lot more interesting than it turns out to be. With naked witches, pagan rites, vengeful landlords, corrupt priests, witch burnings, and a ratty werewolf tearing out throats, Cry of the Banshee should be a thrilling, chilling, grotesque affair. It manages a few chills, a fair deal of grotesqueness, but definitely no thrills until perhaps the very final shot. As I said earlier, too much of the film is taken up with unlikable characters saying uninteresting things. If I was coming into this film without a bias toward Price and costumed gothic horror films, it would probably be less enjoyable and a whole lot more boring. But those biases are firmly in place, as well as my own nostalgia over watching the film as a kid, so Cry of the Banshee is still an entertaining film for me. Not Price's best, by far, and not AIP's best gothic horror or even their best witch hunter movie. But good enough and mean enough to satisfy the darker, more malicious parts of my brain. Labels: Director: Gordon Hessler, Horror: Poe, Netflix Diary, Stars: Vincent Price, Studio: AIP, Year: 1970 posted by Keith at 11:26 PM | 0 Comments Tuesday, September 14, 2004The Premature Burial
1962, United States.Starring Ray Milland, Hazel Court, Richard Ney, Heather Angel, Alan Napier, John Dierkes, Dick Miller. Directed by Roger Corman. Available on DVD (Amazon).
After the runaway success of House of Usher and Pit and the Pendulum, Corman was growing dissatisfied with his AIP contract. He had proven to be a profitable director, and now he was a critically acclaimed director as well. His two films had more or less single-handedly lifted the reputation of AIP out of the realm of the drive-in circuit and established them as a genuine studio that made genuine movies with genuine class. Corman's two Poe films also lifted the flagging reputation of horror, which since its heyday at Universal during the 1930s had sunk lower and lower until it was basically considered schlock, then almost replaced entirely by science-fiction and Communist paranoia films. Hammer's Dracula and Frankenstein movies had gone a long way to revitalizing the horror genre, but Corman's Poe films undoubtedly contributed a great deal to solidifying the resuscitation, at broad but especially in the United States where theater owners were proud to see that yep, we could make 'em just as good here as they could over there. So while Corman was basically getting along with AIP head honchos Sam Arkoff and John Nicholson, he thought that maybe in light of his more or less revolutionizing the way he, the studio, and horror films were regarded in America, he might be entitled to a better contract. AIP politely disagreed with him, and so Corman took himself and his idea for the third Poe film elsewhere. Because Vincent Price was under contract to AIP, he couldn't cast Price in the lead role, and so he set about looking for a new actor to fulfill the spotlight in his production of The Premature Burial. Corman eventually came up with Ray Milland. Milland was blissfully ignorant of the fact that one day in the future AIP was going to graft his head to Rosie Grier, and so he agreed to take on the Poe-perfect role of a man obsessed with the belief that he will be buried alive, as was his cataleptic father. Because Richard Matheson was also under contract to AIP, Corman turned to screenwriters Charles Beaumont (7 Faces of Dr. Lao) and Ray Russell (X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes).
The essence of the films, however, came with Corman. Like the previous two films, The Premature Burial would come steeped in the signature atmosphere of the Poe films: billowing fog tumbling across eerie landscapes, tormented souls, a psychedelically-tinted nightmare sequence, creepy old houses, brooding characters, and as is obvious from the title, a thing or two about being buried alive. The day Corman was to begin principal photography, he was pleased to see Arkoff (or maybe Nicholson, or maybe both of them) show up on the set to wish him good luck despite the differences they'd had over Corman's new contract. Differences, hell! It turned out that AIP had just purchased the studio for which Roger Corman was making the picture, so it was going to be an AIP film after all. Granted it was too late to recast the lead, but Milland was still thought of as an Academy Award winning actor, and not as "the white guy from The Thing with Two Heads," so his casting in the lead was something to crow about, even if the part, like all other leads in the Poe films, was tailor-made for Vincent Price. Milland plays Guy Carrell, an upstanding and intelligent member of the gentry who has a small quirk in the form of a near crippling fear of being buried alive. Now no one wants to be buried alive, except maybe show-off escape artists and people competing for fifty bucks and a burger on the latest reality show, but Guy's fear of being entombed while still among the living goes way beyond the usual healthy fear of having dirt piled on top of you. So obsessed is he with the concept that it threatens to ruin his newly minted marriage to Emily Gault, who is played by Hammer Studios veteran Hazel Court (The Curse of Frankenstein, and she would appear later in two more Corman AIP Poe films, The Raven and The Masque of the Red Death) - and if you know Hazel Court, then you don't want to derail anything involving her in your bedchamber. Guy shuns his wife and friends in favor of building the most elaborate tomb ever devised. I'm not exactly certain what Guy's occupation is, but it must have something to do with being an architectural, engineering, and mechanical genius, because the failsafe tomb he constructs for himself is a marvel. If I set out to build my own premature-burial-proof tomb, it would probably end up looking like a couple of pieces of plywood nailed together with a hole cut in the back so I can crawl out if I should happen to find myself mistaken for a corpse. Buy Guy's tomb is utterly lavish. In fact, it's seems even nicer than his home. It's comes stocked complete with a break-away coffin so that should one wake up and find oneself in such a pine box, one need only tap the side to have the whole thing spring open or fall to pieces. A variety of levers sound various alarms to let everyone know he's been mistakenly buried, just in case the half dozen or so escape hatches don't open. And should that happen and he has to wait for someone to her the bells, he can while away the hours reclining in plush overstuffed chairs, drinking brandy, and flipping through the tomb's selection of reading material. And should these ten thousand redundant escape plans all fail, he's also stocked the tomb with poison, so that when he's finished all his sausages and books, he can just kill himself rather than be bored. I've seen fewer failsafe devices on the nation's nuclear arsenal! Not that I've seen the nation's nuclear arsenal, but I can't imagine it's as well thought-out as Guy's crypt.
You'd think that would be the end of it, but various things keep happening to keep Guy preoccupied with being buried alive. Additionally, his wife and the local quack think that if he's ever going to make any progress in combating his phobia, he needs to, among other things, ditch the tomb. You'd think that since the tomb has brought him an unparalleled peace of mind, they'd just let it be. I mean, it is a nice crypt, after all, so why not keep it around? Even if he isn't buried alive, it'll be a swell place to just be buried regular and dead. This being a Corman Poe picture, it's no great leap to figure out that someone is plotting to use Guy's fear of premature burial to drive him mad and thus achieve some small sort of financial or property gain that hardly merits such a lavishly complex and psychologically difficult scheme. Some people would just whack him on the head with a candelabra and blame it on Colonel Mustard, but these people always have to construct intricate "drive them mad" intrigues that are as complicated as Guy's crypt. Like the previous two Poe films, The Premature Burial has a tendency to get bogged down beneath the weight of its own exposition-heavy plot. Unlike the previous two films, however, it doesn't have Vincent Price on hand to liven up the material. Milland gives it the ol' college try, but he seems lost with this type of material. Where as Price would have had no problem taking the script and making it work for him, Milland's portrayal comes across as excessively whiny at times and dreadfully dull at others. Still, at least Milland put effort into the role and manages a few strong scenes, which is more than could be said for the shameful display put on by Jason Robards when, some years later, he too found himself filling in for Vincent Price in a Poe film, that one being Gordon Hessler's Murders in the Rue Morgue. If nothing else, The Premature Burial proves that it wasn't just fan bias toward Vincent Price that kept Milland and the movie from earning a more cherished spot. Price was more than a fan favorite: he was an integral ingredient in making the films successful. Without him, it wasn't just that "things just aren't same." His absence from the Poe films very nearly causes them to cease being Poe films. Exactly why Price is so indispensable to Corman's Poe pictures is a little difficult to explain, but if you see them, well then you just understand. Part of it, naturally, has to do with the fact that Price was a marvel at turning a bad script into a good movie, and while the script for The Premature Burial isn't bad per se, it is perhaps something much worse: dull. Corman pours on the atmosphere - there is more fog here than in the previous two films combined, and believe me those films had a lot of fog in them - but Ray Milland simply doesn't have Price's knack for making you want to listen to him talk even during the slow spells. He never manages to invest the character with any sort of spark, and as such no real sympathy for him or his story ever develops in the viewer. It's a perfectly serviceable performance, and Milland has nothing to be ashamed of (unlike you, Jason Robards!), but, well -- just watch the end, when Guy emerges from his inevitable getting buried alive scene and has thus gone completely bonkers and launches into a gleefully mad bout of revenge. Milland is OK, but you just can't help thinking how great the whole scene would have been if Price was given a chance to do it. The rest of the cast performs with the usual competency one has come to expect by this point from both AIP and Hammer films, though some of the characters seem to be involved in subplots that never really go anywhere or get fully explained (why was Guy out there helping steal a corpse in the beginning of the film anyway?). Besides Hazel Court, who gets more of a chance to act here than she did in Curse of Frankenstein (and has one of the best scenes in the movie, during which she explains to Guy that he's already dead, and his obsession with being buried alive has, in a way, already buried him alive), familiar faces like Alan Napier (Alfred the butler from the old Batman television series) and Dick Miller (The Terror, Truck Turner, Gremlins, and about ten million other movies) are on hand to round out the cast with their solid character acting. Unfortunately, the script tends to let the performers down, and almost all the characters are either undeveloped, underdeveloped, or just plain unlikable. Without Price around to liven things up, the weakness screams at you like one of those screaming skulls. You know the ones. The ones that scream. I don't know enough to know how closely the movie clings to the original 1844 story, but by all accounts, it sticks to the source material pretty tightly. Poe himself was possessed of a very similar fear of being buried alive, which is why it figures so frequently into his stories and thus so frequently into the Poe movies. Still, after seeing a buried alive plot in both of the previous films, one can't help but hope for something a little different the third time out. Instead, we get the "total package" buried alive movie, one in which interment of the living isn't just a part of the plot, but the entire plot. And speaking of plots, did I miss the part where they tell us exactly why shadowy characters are attempting to drive poor Guy insane? Plus, you'd think that after the guy has gone on and on about catalepsy for the whole movie, when he actually does lapse into a cataleptic state, they'd do more than just shrug and go, "Well, looks like he's dead. Let's get to burying'"
The lack of freshness combined with some gaping lack of explanations keep The Premature Burial situated firmly around or maybe, if I'm feeling good, slightly above the mediocre mark. Plus, it's just not scary. Even with the gnarled old trees and fog, there are never any chills, and certainly nothing on par with the rampaging sister Usher in House of Usher or any number of scenes in Pit and the Pendulum. As such, Premature Burial remained for a long time the ignored entry into Corman's cycle, more or less skipped over as people hastened to get from Pit and the Pendulum on to Tales of Terror, Masque of the Red Death and The Raven, when everything was back as it should be and Vincent Price was once again stalking across the screen in period costumes. Premature Burial feels like a misfire - not a dreadful misfire, or an entirely unwatchable one, but a misfire never the less. The pieces -- Corman, Poe, Price, Matheson, and musical composer Les Baxter -- clicked so perfectly in the first two films that it becomes obvious something is amiss in The Premature Burial. The film does have its moments -- chief among them Milland's exquisitely enthusiastic tour of his "buried alive-proof tomb" -- but the whole thing never fully gels. It was obvious that there just shouldn't be any tinkering with the formula, so AIP made sure everything was back in place for the fourth film, the anthology Tales of Terror. Labels: Director: Roger Corman, Horror: Poe, Netflix Diary, Studio: AIP, Year: 1962 posted by Keith at 11:30 PM | 0 Comments Friday, September 10, 2004The Pit and the Pendulum
1961, United States.Starring Vincent Price, Barbara Steele, John Kerr, Luana Anders, Antony Carbone, Patrick Westwood, Lynette Bernay, Larry Turner, Mary Menzies, Charles Victor. Directed by Roger Corman. Available on DVD (Amazon).
In 1960, American International Pictures - well-known for being a low-budget film production house possessed of some genuine talent - released The Fall of the House of Usher. It was something entirely new for the company: a color picture, released by itself instead of as part of a black and white double-feature package as was standard operating procedure for AIP. Director Roger Corman, one of the studio's most valuable assets, had pushed for AIP to extend their usual shooting schedule (from ten days to fifteen!) and shoot the film in color. AIP was wary, but Corman had proven his ability to deliver profitable results for the company over and over, so after hearing his pitch, they were willing to give the benefit of the doubt to his risky venture. With Corman as director, Vincent Price as the star, and Egdar Allan Poe as the source material, it seemed like it would be a decent enough success. House of Usher was more than just a hit; it was a smash, and critics and fans alike suddenly had to reassess the way they thought about Roger Corman, Vincent Price, and AIP. It was a grand accomplishment of American horror, full of imagination and wit and ambiance. It's arguably one the best American horror films ever made, and certainly one of the top five or six gothic horrors from the period, ranking alongside the very best from Hammer, Mario Bava, or Antonio Margheriti's own Edgar Allan Poe film, 1964's Castle of Blood. It certainly convinced AIP to invest more time and money (relatively speaking) in Roger Corman and a second entry into the gothic horror film drawing from the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. Corman's initial idea for a second film was to do Masque of the Red Death, but the then recent release of Ingmar Berman's Seventh Seal bore several very similar images to what Corman was planning for Masque. Considering the reputation Seventh Seal was building for itself as one of the great films of all time, Corman felt it prudent under the circumstances to shelve the idea for Masque for a while and go on to film one of Poe's most famous short stories, The Pit and the Pendulum. There was just one small problem: the story was really short.
That's why they call them short stories, after all, and no matter how you sliced it up, there wasn't enough material in the original story to account for a feature length film. But never fear! Corman and Matheson decided to employ the approach that would work for this and plenty of other subsequent Poe adaptations (especially those directed by Gordon Hessler after Corman's departure from the world of direction). They wrapped Poe's story up inside a story of their own design, written to the best of their ability to feel like Poe material. In the case of Hessler's later films, as we shall see, this didn't work too terribly well. For Pit and Pendulum, however, Matheson and Corman hit one out of the park, or at least got a triple. If it's not a home run, it's only because it bears a number of similarities to House of Usher, those these similarities are there primarily because they're ever-present in the works of Poe. Price, playing Don Medina, once again stars as the tortured head of a family cocooned within the walls of a crumbling estate that he believes to be the architectural embodiment of evil itself. In the case of Usher, it was because so many of the relatives who lived in the palace were evil. In Pit and the Pendulum, the sole reason for the lurking sense of dread is Don Medina's father, a former Grand Inquisitor who used the palace basement as his torture and interrogation chamber. When young Barnard (Johnathan Kerr) receives a vague letter from Medina informing him that Barnard's sister - Medina's wife - has died, Barnard sets out for Medina's crumbling villa to uncover the details of his sister's untimely passing. Though frustrated initially, he eventually learns that Medina believes his wife was literally terrified to death by something she saw in the house, and presumably, something inside the off-limits torture chamber. Medina is also haunted by the belief that his wife was actually alive when they interred her in her tomb, something the local doctor swears cannot possibly be true. Barnard is slow to buy into Medina's "scared to death" explanation, and with no small amount of due reason. Medina, either out of grief, encroaching madness, or dishonesty is consistently aloof and vague in his explanation of things, and though he eventually lets Barnard see the taboo torture chamber, he absolutely refuses to open a sealed door that leads to what Medina pegs as a device of unspeakable cruelty and evil. And as one might surmise, strange and inexplicable spooky goings-on start plaguing the household, so much so that Medina becomes convinced that his dead wife, angry at having been entombed alive, has returned from the grave to seek unholy revenge.
To satisfy Medina's terror and Barnard's demand for some sane story of his sister's passing, they decide to open the tomb. Things, as you would guess, only get worse from there, driving Medina to the point of insanity, then right over the edge of the cliff. The action culminates in the titular pit as Medina, his mind shattered, begins to believe he is his own Inquisitor father, and that it's high time he got some use out of the old torture implements. It won't be much of a surprise to fans of Corman's Poe films to discover that there is a dastardly conspiracy behind the ghostly occurrences. Despite the obvious similarity to House of Usher -- the evil palace, the wretched ancestors, the premature burial of someone's sister, and Price as a man at the edge of his sanity -- Pit and the Pendulum doesn't feel like a rehash as much as it does feel like a variation on a theme. Indeed, most of the Poe films would involve, in one way or another, the concept of premature burial and the torment of a man by specters from beyond the grave. But Matheson's script manages to make it all feel, if not completely different, then at least looked at from a different angle. Different enough so that the movie still feels fresh. In many ways, in fact, Pit and the Pendulum emerges as an even better film than its predecessor. There is something even more clinging, eerie, and nightmarish about the atmosphere. If Roderick Usher's house was the very picture of decaying elegance, then Don Medina's cliffside palace takes it to the next level. A sense of dread lurks in every corner. The set decoration is, as with House of Usher, extremely detailed and quite gorgeous. Corman departs from the previous film, and from the Hammer films that inspired him, by setting his tale not in the Victorian era, but instead much earlier. During the 1600s, I believe (Hammer's Twins of Evil would later place itself during the same era, though in a much different setting). The costumes, like the sets, are superb. And like the first film, the ultimate success or failure of the movie rests on the shoulders of Vincent Price. They prove most capable shoulders. Where the character of Roderick Usher was quiet, soft-spoke, and sinister, Don Medina doesn't suffer from Usher's peculiar sensitivity to loud noises, and so Price is allowed a little more freedom in his depiction of the main character. Price was an actor who was able to gauge more or less perfectly just how far over the top he has to play a character to make it successful. Medina allows him to push things a little further than the previous film, but his performance is infused with an amazing degree of pathos. Medina lacks any of the sinister tendencies of Roderick Usher, and so our sympathies are completely with him as we watch him struggle first with the fear that he buried his wife alive, and later that she is haunting him as revenge. Price's performance is nothing short of brilliant, and his inevitable breakdown (it is a horror film, after all) is wrenching because he's such a decent guy. Countering Price's noteworthy turn is his co-star, the relatively inexperienced Jonathan Kerr. Kerr's delivery is stiff and at times awkward, and I believe he sets some sort of record for use of the word, "sir" in a single film. I don't know if I'd go quite as far as calling it a bad performance, but compared to the rest of the cast, he's the obvious weak link. And speaking of the rest of the cast, now would be a good time to mention that Pit and the Pendulum marks the America film debut of Italian horror queen Barbara Steele. Steele first came to horror prominence with her career-defining role in Mario Bava's Black Sunday, and she quickly became one of the icons of the horror genre. She appears here, in flashbacks and during the finale, to torment Price's Don Medino with her beyond-the-grave beauty. Truth be told, it's rather a limited role, similar in scope to later horror icon teaming like Price-Lee in Hessler's Poe films, but then any Barbara Steele is good Barbara Steele as far as I'm concerned.
As with House of Usher, the cast is relatively restricted, though Corman does allow himself one or two more extra characters for a grand total of six -- seven if you count the carriage driver from the beginning of the film who has no lines. With such a small cast, each actor counts, even in a relatively small role, and with the aforementioned exception, everyone is up to the task. In addition, they're given gorgeously spooky sets to inhabit, and the script affords some real chills that I found to be much scarier than anything in the previous film. Of particular note is the scene in which they open the tomb of Medina's wife to find her corpse contorted into a hideous shrieking pose. It's quite a striking and terrifying image that relies less on being gross and more on playing to our basic fears, for though we may not obsess about it like Edgar Allan Poe or the characters in these movies, I doubt really that anyone takes too much comfort in the thought of being buried alive. The scene in the tomb capitalizes perfectly on our dread. Whispering voices add to the chills, and when the pit and pendulum torture chamber is finally revealed, it is a marvelous sight the likes of which wouldn't really be topped until some of the wonderfully phantasmagoric scenes in Masque of the Red Death. The revelation of what exactly is going on isn't a complete surprise for us looking back, now that so many films with a similar twist have been made, but it's still decent if not a little underdeveloped in the motivation category. Whether or not Pit and the Pendulum is a better film than House of Usher is a moot question. What is important is that it's not a disappointment. It maintains the lofty standards set by the first film and proved the success - both artistically and financially - was no fluke. That Corman showed he could do it again at the same level and with the same results at the box office and from critics practically guaranteed that he would be making Poe films for AIP for as long as they could get away with it. Labels: Director: Roger Corman, Horror: Poe, Netflix Diary, Stars: Vincent Price, Studio: AIP, Year: 1961 posted by Keith at 11:23 PM | 0 Comments Thursday, September 02, 2004The Fall of the House of Usher
1960, USA. Starring Vincent Price, Mark Damon, Myrna Fahey, Harry Ellerby. Directed by Roger Corman. Available on DVD from Amazon.
So this is the one that started it all, so to speak, so long as you consider "it all" to be the first cycle of films based, sometimes extremely loosely, on the works of Edgar Allen Poe, and directed by low-budget legend Roger Corman. Prior to this film, Corman had made a name for himself slapping together drive-in quickies while Price had become a beloved horror film icon working with William Castle. Film production company AIP had specialized primarily in black-and-white genre pictures, made two at a time with ten-day shooting schedules. Everyone came together for this historic meeting of elements that remains, to this day, one of the best examples of American-made gothic horror films. Corman's Poe films for American International Pictures became to the United States what Hammer films were in England: low budget, wonderfully acted, gorgeously designed horror films dripping with atmosphere and literary tradition. It was Corman's first picture in scope, and one of AIP's first color films to be sold as an individual movie rather than as part of a package. It also had an extended shooting schedule - a whopping fifteen days as opposed to ten. For this initial venturing forth into the murky waters of Poe's imagination, Corman stuck fairly closely to the original story - something they'd not always do. By the time Gordon Hessler inherited the role of house Poe director from Corman, the movies were Poe adaptations in title alone. But here we get a pretty close adherence to the source material as we meet young Philip Winthrop, played by genre film regular Mark Damon (Mario Bava's Black Sabbath), not to be confused with Mark Harmon (Summer School, not directed by Mario Bava), a Boston gentleman who is paying a visit to his most beloved Madeline Usher (Myrna Fahey), who has herself returned from Boston to her ancestral home in Nightmaresville, USA, or some other similar New England locale. Philip's plans to sweep Madeline off her feet and into the welcome arms of marriage are stymied by Madeline's elder brother, played with delicious menace and sympathy by Vincent Price, who also sports a head full of blond hair. But the shocks don't end with the locks.
It seems Price is convinced that his sister is possessed of that ol' Usher madness that has caused so many of the ancestors to go on to lucrative careers as swindlers, murderers, rapists, adulterers, slavers, and any number of other unsavory pursuits. Price's Roderick Usher is himself something of an eccentric. He has hypersensitive eyesight and hearing, can only bear the touch of the softest materials, and plays the lute on a regular basis. He's also committed to eradicating the evil curse of the Usher family by seeing that neither he nor his sister ever get a chance to have children. Roderick considers this the least he can do to atone for the madness and suffering the Ushers have inflicted on the world. Philip thinks the guy is a loony, especially when Roderick begins speaking of how the very house itself has absorbed the madness and become a living creature of pure evil. The conflict, then, arises between Roderick and his desire to quell the Usher name and Philip and his desire to marry Madeline, then go forth and propagate. From time to time, the house itself does seem to exert a certain will, hurling about bits of flaming charcoal and letting drop the occasional big, gaudy chandelier as the stonework of the house cracks and threatens to collapse. When Madeline seems to die of heart failure, Philip discovers that Roderick's determination to keep her cloistered in the house can take on sinister proportions. The Fall of the House of Usher represents so many things to the genre of horror. For starters, it is really the beginning of both Roger Corman and Vincent Price being taken with a greater degree of seriousness than anyone had ever invested in them before. People in the industry knew that Corman could be depended on to do a job and do it competently. In fact, find fault with the man and his body of work where you will, but the fact remains that was Corman was able to do is nothing short of a cinematic miracle. With budgets far smaller than average, and shooting schedules that would make even the sturdiest director weep, Corman managed to make movies. Not great movies, most of the time, but entertaining ones that delivered the goods. I mean, the man could make a film in three days, from writing the script to doing the filming. And while a movie like The Terror may not be a classic, it certainly doesn't feel like a three-day movie. Corman also had a wonderful eye for selecting and fostering new talent, which is why the list of his assistants and actors includes the likes of Francis Ford Coppola, Ron Howard, James Cameron, Peter Fonda, Johnathan Demme, and Peter Bogdanovich, among others. Coppola in particular would come into play later in the Poe cycle as a script doctor and dialog director for The Haunted Palace.
So all this was known about Roger Corman. By 1960, however, he was growing weary of the black and white quickies and wanted to do something a little more complex. He must have looked to the east and seen what hammer had done the previous couple of years with Curse of Frankenstein, Horror of Dracula, and The Mummy (all made with very low budgets as well) and thought to himself, heck, if they can do it, why can't I? The further success in Italy of Mario Bava's Black Sunday was all Corman needed to convince him that the time was ripe for the Americans to enter the Gothic horror game, and heck, what better author upon which to base one's stuff than America's own homegrown master of the macabre, Edgar Allen Poe? So he pitched AIP the idea for The House of Usher, and they went along with it. Afforded a whole five more days than usual to shoot the film, plus a chance to work in color and scope, Corman proved that he wasn't just a reliable workman director; when given the chance, he was also a reliable artistic director. It brought newfound respect to AIP in general and Corman in particular, who needed a does of respectability after directing films like The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Journey to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent. Likewise, Vincent Price was recognized as a horror movie stalwart with proven marquee value, but few people had ever really taken him seriously as an actor even as they saluted his ability to make even the worst material enjoyable. In particular, his role in 1944's Laura was proof of the untapped dramatic ability in the man, but for all his power in that role, short-term memory meant that he was primarily known as the hammy millionaire dancing around with his impossibly complex skeleton marionettes in House on Haunted Hill. But Roger Corman believed that there was more to Price, and so cast him as the brooding, tortured, and quite possibly insane Roderick Usher. Price was more than up to the challenge and turns in a spectacular, moving performance as the melancholy heir to the Usher curse. The script by Richard Matheson doesn't allow Roderick to become the easy-to-hate hand-wringing villain of the piece. Though we're appalled at some of the things he does, Price and the script invest in the character an air of intelligence and sensitivity that makes him impossible to hate even when he's going about the business of entombing people while they're still alive. It's obvious that, mad or not, he sincerely believes that the purpose of his life is to end the Usher curse, and Price's agonized performance make him less of a villain than he is a fallen hero. Not to mention that Price looks positively exquisite in the role. He appears initially in a long, fitted red robe that makes him look almost like some sort of deranged Catholic cardinal. It's no real surprise, looking back, that Matheson's script is so clever with the characters. He was fresh from writing for The Twilight Zone and went on to pen three more of Corman's fine Poe adaptations: 1961's Pit and the Pendulum, 1962's Tales of Terror, and the comedic send-up The Raven in 1963. In addition, he wrote the script for another Gothic black comedy with Vincent Price, 1964's Comedy of Terrors, wrote the novel I Am Legend which served as the basis for George Romero's Night of the Living Dead, The Omega Man starring Charlton Heston, and Last Man on Earth with Vincent Price. He'd later go on to provide another AIP-Corman/Hammer link by writing the script for one of Hammer's very best films, 1968's The Devil Rides Out. Hammer also had plans to film their own version of Matheson's I Am Legend, a tantalizing project which, unfortunately, never came to pass.
His script here is, like just about all the Poe films in both this and the later Hessler cycle, heavy on dialog, which means in order to keep moving forward, the film has to be equally heavy on atmosphere and strong performances. In terms of atmosphere, Corman and cinematographer Floyd Crosby hit one out of the park. The opening shot -- the only exterior location in the entire film -- is of Philip riding through a mist-choked dead forest. Roger Corman had heard about the fire in the Hollywood Hills and sent a film crew up there to shoot the scene. The result is an overpowering eeriness, really one of the finest moments of atmosphere in any Gothic horror film as our hero is dwarfed amid this haunting landscape of skeletal trees, mist, and barren, lifeless earth with the menacing gray-black hulk of the house looming above it all. It sets the tone perfectly for the film, and Corman maintains this hypnotic sense of decay and something just beyond the shadows. The film becomes such a mood piece, such a visual banquet, that one scarcely notices that there's precious little action and a lot of talking. When the scares do come, they're usually quick and melodramatic. A startling entrance, a sudden death, the collapsing of a railing. The film draws its frightfulness not so much from the shock as it does from the overarching sense of dread that permeates every corner of the house. Whether there is some evil force lurking within its walls, or whether that evil force is simply Roderick's madness, is inconsequential. Corman makes sure you can feel that something is out there. That isn't to say, however, that the film is not without its shocks. Madeline's entombment is particularly harrowing, as is the finale in which she and her brother struggle to come to grips with the madness that engulfs them as the entire house catches fire and rumbles thunderously to the boggy ground. The score by AIP's resident composer and exotica pioneer, Les Baxter, further enhances the mood with its creepy blend of orchestral bombast, haunting soft spots, and occasional use of "the tortured howls of the damned." Corman's philosophy for the Poe films was that they shouldn't necessarily reflect the familiar or the real world, that Poe was a psychological writer and so any films based on his work would have to inhabit a different world from the one we see everyday. Thus the limited number of exteriors and locations. Apart from the initial scene, the entirety of The House of Usher takes place within the house. The scope photography creates an odd sensation of wide-open claustrophobia, if that makes any sense at all. In the commentary for the DVD, Corman states that he didn't really think it was worth shooting in scope for a film set almost entirely indoors. What was the point? Well, it works out for the best. The house, which the script turns into a character, becomes this sprawling beast, immense and overshadowing and threatening to swallow up the human characters lost in its decaying opulence. Crosby's cinematography meshes perfectly with the production design by Daniel Haller, which follows in Hammer's footsteps by draping every inch of the set with gorgeous, vibrant props. His greatest achievement is that nothing looks like a prop. It all has an aged, lived-in appearance, which not only makes things more believable but also works in thematically with the notion that this is a house and a family whose existence, sanity, and very foundations are crumbling. Exactly what is going on in the house is never fully realized. We're certainly led to think that Roderick might be right, that there is some malevolent supernatural force at work. But we're just as likely to believe that he's simply insane. Kindly at times, intelligent, and caring, but thoroughly mad to the point of committing unspeakable atrocities against himself and his sister to keep the Usher name from venturing forth to commit even greater atrocities against mankind. While Corman's Poe films are, production-wise, on par with Hammer's, the one thing that makes them different is that Hammer had a policy that stated no matter what sort of devilry took place in the film, good had to obviously triumph over evil by the end credits. The Poe films were never so forgiving to the forces of good, and often the "winner" is unclear, if indeed there is any winner at all. Subverting expectations was the fact that evil - or madness - was just as likely to conquer all as was good - perhaps even more so. With the mood of the film firmly established, the rest of the weight of such a dialog-heavy film falls on the cast. It's a small cast, which undoubtedly allowed Corman to move fast and cheap while maintaining a high standard. Aside from a dream sequence in which some infamous Usher ancestors menace Philip, there are only four humans in the film: Philip, Roderick, Madeline, and the butler Bristol (Harry Ellerbe). Myrna Fahey's Madeline spends much of her time doing what the women in these films so often do, which is hugging the hero and collapsing on the bed. Her big scene doesn't come until the very end when the Usher madness begins to run rampant through the house. She's quite terrifying. Most of the film's lines come from Price and Damon, and since Damon is the hero of the film, that means he is essentially more boring than Price and confined to the "Good God, man! You can't be serious!" and "Good God, man! Are you mad?" before he finally gets to stagger around a burning set in the end. He's as serviceable a hero as any Gothic horror film hero who isn't played by Peter Cushing. Damon just can't stack up next to Price, but that's not really a fair comparison since Price is really turning in one of the most elegant, emotional and non-hammy performances in his career. As said, the only supporting hero who could have ever hoped to match him would have been Cushing and, well, even with his impressive skills he would have been a little old to pull off the role of a romantic twenty-something.
Our remaining supporting character is Bristol the butler, a man who seems much saner than Roderick but also seems to believe the same things as his more flamboyantly mad employer. Bristol's character, like all the Ushers, is cloaked in mystery. He's only partially explored, and his more tempered belief in the Usher curse and in the sentient evil of the house helps us understand and have more compassion for Roderick. All of the characters deliver Matheson's eloquent, perhaps overwrought at times, Victorian prose, and everyone takes yet another page from the book of Hammer by checking any sense of tongue-in-cheek camp at the door. Price, in particular, has some "creature of unspeakable horror" type of gloom and doom dialog that might have undone the whole film if it had been delivered with any hint of irony or anything but the greatest sense of sincerity and gravity. No matter how outrageous the claims may be, no matter how melodramatic the language, you never once fail to believe it. Price makes you believe it. It's easy to see how, if indeed the supernatural force is just a figment of his twisted imagination, he could have convinced his sister and butler to believe in it as fervently as he does. House of Usher was a deserved hit, and critics and fans alike suddenly had to reassess the way they thought about Roger Corman, Vincent Price, and AIP. It is a grand accomplishment of American horror, full of imagination and wit and ambiance. It's arguably one the best horror films ever made, and certainly one of the top five or six Gothic horrors from the period, ranking alongside the very best from Hammer, Mario Bava, or Antonio Margheriti's own Edgar Allen Poe film, 1964's Castle of Blood. It certainly convinced AIP to invest more time and money (relatively speaking) in Roger Corman, resulting in several more Gothic horror films drawing from the stories of Edgar Allen Poe. All of Corman's Poe films are good, and a few are, quite frankly, absolutely brilliant. Masque of the Red Death and Haunted Palace run neck and neck with House of Usher, and together the three represent the paramount of American Gothic horror, not to mention showing how elegant and sumptuous a film can look even with a meager budget and blink-of-an-eye shooting schedule. The Pit and the Pendulum and The Tomb of Ligeia don't trail too far behind, for that matter. For anyone who appreciates the history of horror, House of Usher is a treat. It creaks and creeps with menace and is crawling with intellectual angst and doom. It is a poetic, delicately crafted masterpiece of the macabre that fuels itself with atmosphere and an inspired performance from Vincent Price. Reality fades away completely as the movie pulls you in the way the plot pulls the characters into the downward spiral of insanity. In an age of disposable films, especially horror films, that have nothing to over beyond an action-packed visceral punch that abandons you as soon as the credits roll, House of Usher is something to treasure: a literate, patient, poetic horror film that will stay with you long after you've finished watching it. Labels: Director: Roger Corman, Horror: Poe, Stars: Vincent Price, Studio: AIP, Year: 1960 posted by Keith at 12:45 PM | 0 Comments Wednesday, July 21, 2004Spirits of the Dead
1968, France/Italy. Starring Jane Fonda, Peter Fonda, Alain Delon, Brigitte Bardot, Terence Stamp. Directed by Roger Vadim, Louis Malle, and Federico Fellini. Available on DVD from Amazon. Uh-oh, it's Roger Vadim again. Man alive that cat sure is popping up a lot around here these days, isn't he? Brigitte Bardot has been showing up a lot lately as well, though frankly, I have no problem with either one of them paying me a visit more frequently. Anyway, looking ahead I think this might be all the Vadim and Bardot we're going to hit for a while, and at least here they're neither working together (Vadim had since moved on to his next project, which was Jane Fonda, also present in this movie) nor commanding the proceedings in this trilogy of Edgar Allen Poe adaptations as conceived by three of Europe's maverick directors. Well, two directors and Roger Vadim. Frankly, the man was lucky to ever get lumped into the French New Wave. Sounds like a pretty good idea, and as you know anytime someone begins a write up with "sounds like a pretty good idea," it's usually the case that it wasn't. Or that if it was a good idea, which I reckon this was, it's not as good a realization of that idea, which this isn't. Most people recommend that you dismiss the first two stories entirely and pretend that only the third exists, but we're in this for the long haul and will kick things off where they begin, with Roger Vadim's "Metzengerstein." Anyone claiming that Spirits of the Dead isn't a good movie is probably only just saying that because Vadim's contribution to the anthology is so sloppy and unengaging. It's certainly not the way you'd want to start a film. As was par for the man, Vadim casts his current sexy main squeeze in the lead, which just happened at the time to be Jane Fonda. The duo were fresh off Barbarella, and this story was originally envisioned as a feature film follow-up to that piece of sci-fi pop art. How they could have every stretched this thing out to a full running time is beyond me, though it's not as if Vadim wasn't a pro at stretching out thin-to-nonexistent plots and pasting them together with eye-popping, mind blowing costume and set design. And for the record, those of you who don't know just how indescribably hot Jane Fonda was in the 1960s really should check out Barbarella. Actually, I guess she's not exactly un-hot now, if that's a word (and I don't think it is). She just tends to take herself too seriously these days, and that's always a bit unattractive to me.
Here she plays the Countess Metzengerstein, heir to a vast fortune she squanders by throwing lavish orgies and torturing the underlings. Actually, they're really rather dull and lifeless orgies. You know, orgies always seem like a good idea until you try and hammer out the logistics of the whole thing. As for me, I'd be too worried about people knocking stuff over. Anyway, she delights in hurling barbs over the fence at her more modest cousin, played by none other than Jane's brother, Peter. Eventually, she becomes sexually obsessed with him - kind of, well, you know, but then this is Roger Vadim we're talking about, and it was the sixties - until he rebuffs her advances. I mean, heck, Henry was probably already pretty steamed at the both of them for being a coupla hippies. As revenge, the mad Ms. Metzengerstein burns down his stables, and he in turn dies in the fire trying to save his horses. Or so it would seem. A big black stallion bursts through the flames and gallops to safety, but there is no record of such a horse in the stable. Metzengerstein becomes convinced that the horse is the reincarnation of her beloved cousin, and her obsession with the horse crosses into madness and, frankly, borders on bestiality. Despite all the weird stuff thrown into the mix, this is a decidedly dull and uninspired way to kick off the film. The costuming, usually one of Vadim's only strong points, is relatively without shock or beauty. Jane dons some navel-exposing Little Lord Fauntleroy type outfits, but everything else looks like it's on loan from the local community theater. The cinematography is listless, and Vadim's usually striking composition of scenes is non-existent. In addition, everything is shot in soft-focus "Playboy-o-vision." The English speaking actors are dubbed into French in the currently available version, which means the only way we can judge their performances is through body language, most of which consists of them staring half-stoned at the camera. The tone of the film is all wrong too, at least in my opinion. A tale of mystery and the bizarre, as this is meant to be, should have some sense of menace and the macabre, some sort of tension. There is none of that here, and the film instead unfolds like a languid, ethereal, and intensely boring dream. Fairy tales and Cocteau Twins songs conjure up more darkness and dread than this supposed Edgar Allen Poe tale. There are some nice crumbling castles and decaying seaside scenery, but Vadim doesn't seem to understand how to take thematic advantage of it or relate it to the decaying morality and mental state of his central Nero/Caligula-like figure (though I must say I bet Jane Fonda's figure is better than Nero or Caligula's). When you fail to match even someone as hit-or-miss with similar atmosphere as, say, France's Jean Rollin, you know you're way off the mark. It's like Vadim wasn't even trying here. The hilariously silly ending was repeated in Vadim's 1973 film Don Juan (Or if Don Juan Were a Woman), which we covered right up there at the very beginning of this journal.
This story has actually been deleted from some prints, not because it was so provocative, but mostly because it was such an awful way to start the film. While I tend to think a film should be left intact regardless of how bad it may be, there's not much arguing that this first story is indeed pretty damn shoddy. Things pick up, but only just, for the second story in the trilogy. Luis Malle directs "William Wilson." Malle is probably most infamous for flirting with child pornography when he introduced the world to Brooke Shields in his 1978 film Pretty Baby. Before that, he was a member of the French New Wave, which helped get him this gig. He's pretty far off his game for this outing, though, turning in an entry that manages to be less ponderous and a little more tense and eerie than Vadim's meandering hunk of nonsense, but it still just doesn't play out the way it should, perhaps because the story itself has been done so many times and this one offers nothing new. French heartthrob Alain Delon stars as the titular Wilson, whom we meet as he stumbles into a confessional and claims to have killed a man. Through a series of flashbacks, we learn the history of Wilson, who in every regard is a grade-a prick. As a young boy attending a military school where his classmate was no doubt Damien from The Omen II, he encounters a boy with the same name as he who seems dedicated to countering everything he does. He encounters this double, who even grows to look exactly like him, throughout various points in his life until, ultimately, they face one another in a fencing duel. There's very little to surprise here. The man fighting his doppleganger, and by killing it killing himself, is nothing new, and Malle's approach is so straight-forward and by the books that the story, while decent for a single viewing, has nothing more to offer. Like Vadim, Malle seems to almost be phoning it in just to collect his paycheck. The primary difference is that the performers, native French speakers, are better and the story is, as I said, OK at least for the first go-round. Brigitte Bardot shows up briefly in a gambling scene. All in all, the segment isn't bad. Direction is nice, acting is good, and it moves at a fair clip. There are also a few effective moments, chiefly the scene of a young Wilson lowering a new student into a barrel full of rats and a later scene in which Wilson, now a medical student, seeks to practice his dissection technique on a living subject. So OK, it's not bad. It's just not that interesting.
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