We were first thinking of naming this article. EDGAR ALLAN POE MEETS ROGER CORMAN!, but figured at the last minute that Corman should get top billing, as he’s yet alive. Roger Corman is the semi-brilliant producer who started the cycle of Edgar Allan Poe-based films that came out in the 1960’s, films starring Vincent Price, mainly, but also featuring Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre, Lon Chaney, Jr., and even current sneering young superstar, Jack Nicholson. Roger Corman is best described as “The Monster Who Devoured Good Taste.” The Late Boris Karloff is said to have once remarked about Roger Corman’s “Poe films” which bear little or nothing at all in common with Poe’s stories; “Poor Poe! – the things they did to him when he wasn’t around to defend himself!”
Authentic or not, the Corman-Poe films were highly successful, and considered by many to be the charming best, produced by the controversial Corman, and inspired a rash of imitations, by such “high-brow” European film directors as Federico Fellini and Roger Vadim, who paid the sincerest form of flattery to Corman & (incidentally) Poe, by following religiously the formulas Cantankerous Corman developed with his warp-minded scriptwriter, Richard (“I Am Legend”) Matheson.
Here, then, is what inevitably happens when …
ROGER CORMAN meets EDGAR ALAN POE
There’s been a lot of talk over the past few years about Roger Corman, the aging boy wonder of the Grade-B film. Some critics hail him as a horror genre genius. Others blast him as an overrated hack. Most maintain an in-between position. With all the reams of Corman-copy rolling off the presses of late, Corman has at the very least secured for himself the title of Hollywood’s most overpublicized unsung producer.
It seems to me that Roger Corman is somewhat like his hero, old Edgar Allan Poe himself, in more ways than one – although admittedly on a considerably smaller scale. Poe was capable of mixing genius with mediocrity, tension with melodrama, originality with cliche; his worlds could flow or collide, often within the pages of the same short story or even in the same paragraph.
The same holds true with Corman in the film medium.
Roger (I can afford to be familiar with him since I’ve never met the man) can turn out an occasional film of brilliant quality, of haunting beauty, of honest tension, of chilling terror… but where you find pearls you might also find swine, and Corman’s churned out more than his share of sausage. Again, like Poe, he often mixes both, unintentionally I trust, within the same film.
Corman’s first effort was an independently produced and fortunately forgotten bomb entitled Monster From the Ocean Floor, starring a then-unknown actor (who managed to retain the status) named Stuart Wade and it was released in 1954. Shortly after this Corman went to work for the $ – oriented American – International Pictures which had just begun its initial operation and with whom he is still affiliated. Here Corman turned, and sometimes churned out! a vast number of features in different genres, including westerns (The Gunslinger, Apache Woman), crime capers ( Machine Gun Kelly. Thunder Over Hawaii). ancient spectacles (Atlas – one of his better films by the way), pulp adventure (The She Gods of Shark Reef and The Saga of The Viking Women And Their Journey To the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent – which is not even worth saying, no less seeing), and juvenile delinquent thriller efforts (Rock All Night, Sorority Girl But the horror film seemed to be Corman’s first love, and strongpoint, even from the beginning.
Between 1955 and 1959 Corman unleashed such fetching titles as Teenage Caveman, War of the Satellites, Bucket of Blood, The Wasp Woman, The Beast From Haunted Cave, Day the World Ended. It Conquered the World, The Beast With a Million Eyes, and many, many others. The quality of these early quickies varied greatly from film to film. It Conquered the World (1956) worked on a cheap and absurd premise and featured a monster from Venus that looked like a vegetable dealer’s nightmare – a giant carrot with a hideous face and telepathic powers. Yet the cutting on It Conquered the World was great–fast-paced and tense and at times little short of brilliant.
The Day the World Ended (1955) was a little nuclear parable about the last people on Earth (and a particularly obnoxious! bunch at that) that was entirely forgettable with the notable exception of one scene in which a contaminated character (Paul Dubov) is slowly changing from man to mutant. Spending his days foraging through the polluted wasteland outside the shelter, he returns to his human companions each night to sleep. One night he comes in and the hero (Richard Denning) asks him what he does out there. In the dark stillness of the bedroom, the semi-mutant, his face scarred by radiation, turns to our hero and sighs: “Wonderful things happen out there.” The cryptic reference to the primeval world outside the shelter achieves a truly chilling effect, and Cor. man carries it off remarkably well. Such moments, however, were all too rare in the early Corman productions.
More interesting were Corman’s Filmgroup Co. productions. Filmgroup was a spin-off from American – International and turned out three films – two horror-comedies (The Little Shop of Horrors and Creature From the Haunted Sea) and one end-of-the-world affair called The Last Woman On Earth.
With those minor successes under his belt. Roger Corman introduced himself (and vast audiences of thrilled monster fans) to Edgar Allan Poe…
ROGER CORMAN MEETS EDGAR ALLAN POE
Corman’s first attempt at capturing the world of Edgar Allan Poe on the screen was The House of Usher, a shortening of Poe’s original title The Fall of … etc. Most critics agree that The House of Usher was a pretty successful screen grafting of the original Poe material, being fairly faithful to the original and featuring some fine atmospheric sets with, of course, the perennial fog machines pumping madly away throughout the proceedings- as they would throughout most of Corman’s Poe adaptations (in fact I wonder if Vincent Price could find his way if he didn’t have an eerie fog to stealth through).
Price is well cast as Roderick Usher, a man tormented by the agonizing sensitivity of his own senses, – a theme explored in a variety of ways in a number of Poe’s works. “Have I not told you that what you call madness is but an over acuteness of the senses?” asks Poe in another story, The Tell-Tale Heart. and it is a question he must have asked himself more than once during his own tortured life. It was Poe’s over acuteness of the imagination, in fact, that drove him to alcohol, drugs, and despair, eventually stranding him in a personal hell haunted by terrifying demons of his own design. In his portrait of Roderick Usher, who suffers from fits of extreme catatonia resembling the death state, Poe describes a man perched at the outer edges of agonizing pleasure and unspeakable pain, the helpless victim of the assaults of both.
Price as Usher looks the ultimate portrait of self-contained suffering as he exhibits the pale but striking elegance of the damned. Sights and sounds and smells continuously attack his defenseless senses. Sights too vivid, too bright sear his sensitive eyes, burn his retina, blind the raw exposed nerves of his brain; sounds knife their way through the delicate membrane of his ears, smells choke his nostrils and bully his imagination; everything he perceives can turn on him in an instant! to strangle his shaky and dwindling! sanity.
THE HOUSE OF USHER (the story)
Philip Winthrop (MARK DAMON) arrives unannounced at the House of Usher to see his fiancée, Madeline (MYRNA FAHEY). That night at dinner, Roderick (VINCENT PRICE), last male in the long line of Ushers, makes it clear that Philip is to leave. Philip’s plan to marry Madeline is violently opposed by her brother who says that Madeline is dying and that they both suffer from the strange madness of the Usher family which he is determined shall die with them. Philip is aware of weird crackling noises each time the House shudders. Bristol (HARRY ELLERBE), the butler, explains it away as a fissure that has been in the wall of the House for years.
During the next few days mysterious attempts on Philip’s life animate the horror of the House, and when Madeline takes him to the family crypt, a coffin unexplainably crashes at their feet. Madeline faints and is carried to her room. Later, Philip finds her lying fully dressed across her bed. Apparently dead, she is placed in her coffin and moved to the chapel where Roderick insists on immediate burial.
The next morning Philip learns from Bristol that Madeline was subject to cataleptic fits and instantly realizes she has been buried alive. He confronts Roderick with this truth and Roderick accepts the accusation but explains that it was done for love of his sister and the compelling need to prevent the tainted, evil Usher blood from spreading to other generations. He assures Philip that Madeline is now dead.
That night Philip awakens, grief-stricken, and seeks Madeline’s coffin. In the crypt he finds bloodstains leading across the floor to a hidden passageway. Madeline, who has escaped from her coffin, is now completely insane and, possessed of superhuman strength, attacks Philip. He breaks her grasp but she eludes him and seeks her tormentor, Roderick.
A violent storm shakes the House, causing the fissure to split open. Philip helplessly watches the beamed ceiling fall upon the struggling Madeline and Roderick. Bristol drags Philip to safety and dashes back into the inferno to perish with the last of the Ushers. In seconds the house disappears in flames as its last remnants sink into the tarn.
The House of Usher is no more … and the place whereon it stood is as if … it had never been.
For Roderick Usher, life is a permanent bad trip, with death and worse – the catatonic state and the possibility of being buried alive – trailing him like a demon on a deadly assignment. Price plays the part of Usher with an admirable restraint so often missing from his later roles, when he began to caricature his own acting style. Elegantly tall and gaunt, with a shock of prematurely white hair, he looks like a man waging constant war against an agonizing migraine headache. Floyd Crosby’s incredibly rich and beautiful color photography emphasizes Price’s pale, phantom-like character, and visually the film is nothing short of a masterpiece, capturing the almost too intense vision of Usher himself, for this is the way we imagine that he must have seen the world – colors ultra-bright, shadows unbearably dark through his oversensitive eyes, through the enemy senses that seek, unwittingly, to destroy him. These elements make Corman’s first furtive entry into the strange world of Edgar Allan Poe a haunting one indeed.
Unfortunately, but not surprisingly, there are a large number of defects evident in this film. Foremost is the low budget Corman had to work with (he was employed by American International remember) and this studio-dictated poverty shows its lean face on a number of occasions.
The special effects, particularly during the climactic scene in which the House of Usher not only falls but burns into the bargain, leave much to be desired. The House itself and the surrounding scenery contain no suggestion of a larger world existing around it: in other words, it looks like a movie set, one fairly faithful to the period being depicted, but the artifice shines through to negative effect. A sense of an outer, “saner” world is important in establishing a contrast between the bizarre deathwish House of Usher and its haunted inhabitants and the overwhelming! Mundanity of the daylight planet in a dark corner of which the House is situated. The acting too (aside, of course, from the inimitable Vincent Price) is very awkward and “stagey” and often sounds more like an early rehearsal rather than a final take (though I don’t know if American-International is into making such subtle distinctions). Mark Damon, an innocuous Hollywood pretty boy, is woefully miscast as the suitor of Usher’s younger sister (played by Myrna Fahey, who is no great shakes as an actress herself). Damon was never dynamic enough to be either interesting or entertainingly terrible and he served as a blandly handsome presence in a number of films more minor than this one (an apprenticeship, by the way, which turned out to be his entire career). Jack Nicholson was doing occasional work for American International at the time and would have been a far better choice for the role. But despite these and other shortcomings, I still think that the House of Usher was a basically honest and at least partially successful attempt to translate the word images of Poe to the screen.
PIT AND THE PENDULUM (the story)
Francis Barnard (JOHN KERR) journeys to Spain to learn more of the death of his only sister, Elizabeth (BARBARA STEELE). He is met at the door of the Castle Medina by Catherine (LAURA ANDERS), sister of Nicholas Medina (VINCENT PRICE).
Nicholas appears and tells Francis that his sister died from a blood disease and leads him to the burial room where the casket is bricked in behind the wall. Francis senses something wrong despite Nicholas’ story of devotion to his sister, while Nicholas seems haunted by strange proceedings in Elizabeth’s room.
When Dr. Leon (ANTHONY CARBONE) a family friend and Elizabeth’s physician arrives, Francis questions him, learning that Elizabeth died of fright. Nicholas protests that he only wanted to spare Francis the details, then shows him the torture chamber where Nicholas’ father, Sebastian, practiced the cruelties of the Inquisition. Nicholas tells how Elizabeth seemed fascinated by the place, her mind gradually deteriorating until one night she was found inside the iron box in the chamber, frozen with terror and whispering “Sebastian” as she died.
Later, Catherine tells Francis of Nicholas’ childhood. He had been forbidden to enter the torture chamber, but had crept inside and secretly witnessed the death of his mother and uncle, for adultery, at the hands of his father.
That night, the household is awakened by the sound of the harpsichord, which only Elizabeth could play. Nicholas is found in the music room, numb with terror, clutching a ring supposedly buried with Elizabeth. Dr. Leon gives him a sedative and puts him to bed, then explains to Catherine and Francis that Nicholas is obsessed with the idea that Elizabeth has been buried alive, suffering the same fate that befell his mother.
At breakfast, Dr. Leon, Francis and Catherine hear sounds of destruction coming from Elizabeth’s room. They hurry upstairs and Nicholas, coming out of his room unlocks the door and collapses in the shambles they find. Francis finds a passage leading from Nicholas’ room to Elizabeth’s and accuses Nicholas of creating the mysterious occurrences himself. Nicholas is terrified at the idea of having unconsciously done these things, and Leon suggests that the only way to settle the matter is to exhume Elizabeth’s body. The casket reveals a tortured corpse-but not that of Elizabeth. Nicholas’ mind, at this point, is beginning to snap and he attempts suicide.
That night, Nicholas is awakened by a woman’s voice calling his name, and he follows the sound through the secret passage. The voice draws him to the burial room where the real Elizabeth rises from the casket and chases him to the torture chamber. Dr. Leon enters and chides her for not waiting for him. She merely laughs and gloats over what is revealed to be a joint plot with her lover, Dr. Leon, to drive Nicholas mad and get his money.
Nicholas, now completely insane, assumes his father’s identity and proceeds to dispose of his faithless wife and her lover as his father did. In the struggle, Dr. Leon falls to his death in the pendulum pit. Francis enters the chamber and Nicholas lashes him to the table and sets the razor-sharp pendulum in motion. Catherine and the butler, Maximillian (PATRICK WESTWOOD), set Francis free just in time, and in a struggle, Nicholas is pushed into the pit and dies. The evil Elizabeth is left to die, locked in an iron box, unbeknownst to the others.
Oddly enough, Corman’s second effort was a lot less successful and if the word is appropriate here, a lot less sincere. The Pit And the Pendulum suffered from a severe, even terminal case of the Schlocks. a common disease afflicting all too many of A-I’s projects and the film did a great disservice to Poe. Some of its symptoms included a less restrained performance by Price, an excessive and obsessive devotion to the great God Cliche, poor production values, and a script by Richard Matheson (normally a competent enough writer but really on the skids here) that elaborated Poe’s idea into almost total oblivion, substituting in its place a melodramatic melange of horror movie cliches. Yes, there is a pit and a pendulum in the film (they don’t let you forget it for more than five frames at a stretch) but beyond that any resemblance to Edgar Allan Poe is purely coincidental.
The pit and the pendulum device is endlessly exploited in a heavy. handed attempt to build up bogus suspense and the whole film is as plodding as the footsteps of the Frankenstein monster himself, Corman’s own limits and Grade-B tendencies, backed by A-I’s usual niggardly budget, worked together to turn this one into a real hack job. Performances are uninspired, with the notable and unforgettable exception of Barbara Steele (a dark-eyed beauty whose gloomy eroticism continues to haunt this minor madman’s dreams, but we won’t go into that here). Miss Steele is incapable. I believe (her eyes, her moody smile, her certain way of walking, of talking… I luff zo much za beauties from za crypt!) of giving anything but a great performance. Price does a lusty (if that’s the euphemism I’m groping for) performance, and while John Kerr is not quite as bad as Mark Damon, he can be as boring as the next guy (and you know how boring he can be). All in all, The Pit And the Pendulum can best be described as a mistake and I, for one, don’t want to pay it any more mind if that, indeed, is what I’ve been paying it thus far).
But stay tuned for the next installment in this thoroughly absorbing series of articles when we will take a closer look at Premature Burial, Tales of Terror, and The Raven, a trio of more Corman-Poe thrillers…