The Masque of the Red Death (1964)

The Masque of the Red Death (Roger Corman, 1964) After a series of successful Poe adaptations—some veering into comedy—AIP Studios took a big leap in budget with a project director Roger Corman had long wanted to do since making his first adaptation House of Usher: Poe's "The Masque of the Red Death." Budget and lack of a satisfactory script is what was delaying the project. Plus, Corman was afraid his film would look too much like Bergman's The Seventh Seal (released in 1957), so production kept getting delayed.

 

In terms of financing, that couldn't have been more fortuitous: AIP had made a deal with a British production company to co-produce films and studio heads Samuel Arkoff and James Nicholson made the suggestion to Corman that he might leave the California lots and move production there. Also, England had the Eady Levy, which was a tax on box office receipts that would be rebated to British productions with certain stipulations, meaning that 85% of any film applying for funds would have to be filmed in England, with an emphasis on providing work for British actors and crew (it's one of the reasons Stanley Kubrick moved to England to make Lolita...and stayed there).

But, there were other benefits besides financial. Corman could avail himself of British actors, utilizing Patrick Magee (again...as Magee had appeared in AIP's Dementia 13, written and directed by a young Francis Ford Coppola), Nigel Green, and a 17 year old actress named Jane Asher (who was just getting involved with some musician or other). For cinematography, he graduated from Floyd Crosby to a young up-and-comer named Nicholas Roeg. And he was able to utilize British sets, like the castle that had been built for the recently-filmed Becket.

An old woman gathering fire-wood approaches a figure in red: The figure tells her "Go to your village. The day of their deliverance is at hand." And, indeed, the flower he gives her contains the red death and by the time Prince Prospero (Vincent Price) goes to the village, the woman is already dead and the contagion is spreading. He arrests two defiant men, Ludovico (Green) and Gino (David Weston) and well as the girl who is the one's daughter and other's betrothed, Francesca (Asher). With the three secured, he orders the village burned to prevent the spread of the disease, while he invites the local noblemen to his castle for safe quarantine and salacious partying. "Act according to your nature" is his only request.

Prospero is a Satanist, a sensualist, and cruel master, and for him, the Christian Francesca, is both challenge and prize as he intends to turn her to his way of seeing things by any means necessary—but with her, he finds himself showing a bit of restraint. Sure, he'll make her choose between father and fiance over who should die by Prospero's hand, but, for him, that's uncommon restraint. He's a bad guy. A very bad guy, as fulsomely and charmingly as Price plays him, content to let everything in the city he lords over dies, while him and his lordly pals party all the while. Not exactly a stretch from reality.

Meanwhile, Prospero's mistress, Juliana (Hazel Court), seeing the interest her lord is paying to his new pet, decides she's going to go over his head and appeals to Satan just to ensure her interests don't get overlooked. Such an act even impresses Prospero, but, as they all learn (but for a mere handful of worthy), whatever one does in life, Death will end it. It's merely a question of...when.

Corman had looked commissioned many scripts for Masque, from Barboura Morris (an AIP company player, she'd starred in A Bucket of Blood), and even Robert Towne, who'd written The Last Woman on Earth for Corman, and who would become Hollywood's ultimate script-doctor, the Oscar-winning author of Chinatown and a director in his own right. None satisfied him, until Charles Beaumont, a short-story author and (along with Richard Matheson) one of the "go-to" writers for "The Twilight Zone," came up with the Satanist angle and the majority of the script, but by 1964, he was suffering from Pick's disease, and started farming out jobs to associates—he would be dead from something akin to Alzheimer's at the age of 39. R. Wright Campbell finished the screenplay, using ideas from other Poe works.

There are a lot of contemporary critics who consider The Masque of the Red Death the best of Corman's Poe adaptations, running neck-and-strangled-neck with the year's other Poe/Corman film The Tomb of Ligeia (which was written by Towne), and the film does seem to go beyond the series' formula for strengths and weaknesses, with a depth to it that other of the films lacked, and the dialogue is a little less plummy and the ideas a little more dangerous. The acting, also, has none of the weak spots the other Poe films had, as there doesn't seem to be any callowness in any of the leads—some of the extras seem to be struggling a bit, however.

Corman made Tomb of Ligeia in England, but he wasn't happy there. As he was used to working fast and filming quickly, he was frustrated with the speed of British crews and their insistence on tea breaks. Most of the Poe films were done in three weeks; The Masque of the Red Death took five.

And, yes, Corman was right to worry about comparisons with The Seventh Seal, with manifestations of the world's deadliest diseases walking the Earth (but using tarot cards, not chess-matches, to determine fates), but the multi-colored hues of the plagues' costumes have a tendency to throw one off a bit, reminding one of color-coded CDC threat-levels.

The color-coded plagues:

L-R: Tuberculosis, Yellow Fever, Scurvy, "The Red Death" (Anthrax), Cholera, Porphyria, and Bubonic Plague 

(Covid is probably last in line)

 

The Pit and the Pendulum (1961)

The Pit and the Pendulum (Roger Corman, 1961) The year 1547. Francis Barnard (John Kerr) arrives at the Medina stronghold on the coast of Spain from England to inquire into his sister Elizabeth's recent demise. Not so recent to Barnard's shock—she has been dead for three months and he's only recently been informed. "Something in the blood" is the vague cause and that makes him even more suspicious. Perhaps if Catherine Medina (Luana Anders) wasn't so circumspect, and Elizabeth's husband Don Nicholas Medina (Vincent Price) wasn't so...peculiarly and demonstrably aggrieved. No matter. Barnard vows not to leave the place until he "knows exactly what has happened here." Despite Medina's overwrought emotions, Barnard cannot be convinced that something suspicious hasn't happened to his sister.

A post-dinner visit by Dr. Leon (Antony Carbone) reveals to Barnard that it wasn't some blood disease, but that Elizabeth "died of fright"—a shock to her heart. Nicholas Medina, you see, is the son of Don Sebastian Medina, "one of the Inquisition's most infamous, degraded..." torturers, it seems. And the Medina castle is just as he left it, with a basement torture chamber reeking of the evil "malignant atmosphere of the castle...the barbaric miasma that permeates these walls." Elizabeth was drawn to it, fascinated by it.

In blue-tinted flashbacks, Nicholas tells of the initial happy weeks of marriage between himself and Elizabeth (Barbara Steele), until her moods began to change and he would find her periodically wandering through the basement torture chamber, until one day she was found inside an "iron maiden", quite dead. But, Nicholas may not be entirely trusted, as he himself suffers from a wracked guilt, having witnessed the death of his uncle and mother at the hands of his father, accusing them of infidelity. Dr. Leon adds that although Nicholas' mother may have been tortured, there was speculation that she was entombed alive by his wicked father. That idea has become an obsession with Nicholas, only now it seems to repeat itself as everyone in the castle starts to hear nocturnal harpsichord playing—as Elizabeth once had—possessing the Don to think his late wife's spirit haunts the castle. And him.

Something, indeed, strange is going on, as everyone has heard the playing with Elizabeth's ruby ring found near the keys and Barnard's presence and truculent insistence to get to the truth only inspires more tragedy. He can't leave well enough alone, going so far as to insist that Elizabeth herself may have been prematurely buried—which seems to be born out when they break through her walled-in sarcophagus and find the moldering skeleton of Elizabeth seemingly trying to scratch through her coffin-lid. This drives Nicholas right over the babbling edge.

Although ostensibly the hero of the story, Barnard is, for the story's purposes, more of a useful idiot. It is only appropriate, then, that he should be the potential victim for the setting and device of the title. With Nicholas' mind snapped by Elizabeth's presence, he seems possessed of his torturer-father's mad spirit and straps his nosy antagonist to a slab in the deepest reaches of the castle and starts the elaborate process of lowering a razor-sharp pendulum ever lower to eviscerate his unwanted guest.

However convoluted the way is to get him down there, the sequence in the pit is a genuine nail-biter, with the heavy blade moving alarmingly fast in its swings looking to nearly slam into the camera as it passes near along with a vicious cross-cut editing employed that seems to build with every oscillation of the stroke until the thing threatens to shred Barnard's shirt as it relentlessly moves on its path to disembowel him. In fact, Barnard is such an unsympathetic character that one wouldn't be surprised if he actually does get sliced in two before the end credits.

The script is far more elaborate than the previous effort, House of Usher, had been with less psychic imaginings and more genuine evil informing its plot, with healthy doses of the previous film's curses and cracked psyches and obsession with premature burial. Yes, the cast is still limited...to six major players this time (up from Usher's four) with Price and "Britain's first lady of horror," Barbara Steele, at the start of her film career fresh from Mario Bava's Black Sunday, as the leads (even though Steele has barely six minutes of screen-time, her presence rather haunts the film). Price is allowed to go fully over the top of this one as he fairly jabbers his way into madness thinking himself the reincarnation of his dead father.

But, the movie has less to do with any supernatural evil than it does with the malignancies of evil perpetrated by real flesh-and-blood human beings who just happen to have a mean streak and no compunction to curtail it. In a way, people get the comeuppance they deserve not by spirits but by their own actions There's a genuine plot being perpetrated and those actions only unleash a monster rather than the planned consequences intended. And the final cruelty Matheson has devised is one even Poe might have blanched at—complete and utter uncaring apathy—with a surprise twist in the final shot.

Oh, it's entertaining, alright. And although Price may be going a bit overboard thespianing his way into lip-curling madness, he's fun to watch. But, the skill-level has gained a few notches with much more moody cinematography than the previous Poe film and a third act that's a corker including a line that has seared into my movie-memory forever: "Maximillian, we must break into the torture chamber! Quickly!"

 

You can say that again.

The Pit and the Pendulum was the first AIP Poe film to use 

(and re-use!) these groovy psychedelic graphics

House of Usher (1960)

House of Usher (aka The Fall of the House of Usher) (Roger Corman, 1960) Roger Corman was getting tired of the usual grind at American International Pictures—get enough budget-money to make two black-and-white movies that they could get into drive-in's or the bottom of double-bills and use that money to make one good color film (in Cinemascope...or something like it) that might attract some talent...and box office.

To his horror, he got what he wanted. And something else besides—he got an expanded shooting schedule of 15 days, "a luxury" for AIP. As other studios were making films based on the works of Edgar Allen Poe (which was in the public domain), they chose a good "bottle-story" "The Fall of the House of Usher" and secured the talents of fantasy/horror novelist Richard Matheson to come up with a screen-story based on elements of Poe. Script in hand, Corman then spent 1/3 of the film's $300,000 budget on its star Vincent Price, who lost weight for the role, dyed his hair an almost white-blonde and even shaved off his signature mustache for the part. Then to create the proper atmosphere, Corman sent a crew into the Hollywood Hills to photograph what was left of a recent wild-fire and, hearing of a local fire department burning a derelict barn, sent out a couple cameramen to get dramatic shots. That location footage would all save time and money in the special effects department. And, thriftily, be reused in later Corman films.

Phillip Winthrop (Mark Damon) rides on horseback trough the misty New England deadlands where sits the House of Usher to see his fiancee Madeline (Myrna Fahey), who parted from him at the request of her brother and only relative, Roderick (Price). Like many of the Corman Poe heroes, his audience is instantly refused, but he persists, and gaining interest, an odd request is made by the butler Bristol (Harry Ellerbe)...to remove his boots.

There's a reason, beyond preserving the carpeting. When meeting the reluctant Roderick, Winthrop's raised voice sends him into a paroxysm of agony. Roderick, you see, (and he implies Madeline) is suffering from "a morbid acuteness of the senses," due to their family history. "Mine," he explains "is the worst for having existed the longer, but both of us are afflicted with it. Any sort of food more exotic then the most pallid mash is unendurable to my taste buds. Any sort of garment other then the softest, is agony to my flesh. My eyes are tormented by all but the faintest illumination. Odors assail me constantly, and as I've said, sounds of any degree whatsoever inspire me with terror." Brother and sister, he says are like "two pale drops of fire guttering in a vast consuming darkness."

But, it goes beyond that. Roderick believes the Usher line is thoroughly cursed, so much so that the very house is crumbling as if by the weight of a generational evil—the front tower itself has a large crack in it, the land around it dead. "This house. The pall of evil which fills it is no illusion. For hundreds of years, foul thoughts and foul deeds have been committed within its walls. The house itself is evil now." To Winthrop, these are the ravings (although quiet) of a madman, and he informs Roderick that he intends to take Madeline away and marry her—which, if the house is cursed and is going to crumble, would it be a good thing, no?

But, Roderick will have none of it. "You cannot take my sister out of this house. If she were to bear children, the Usher evil would spread - malignant, cancerous." He warns Winthrop to leave the house forever, forget Madeline, and spare himself a terrible fate. Which, of course, Winthrop has no intention of doing. He entreats Madeline to leave with him, but, in the night, she dies and Roderick has her buried in the family crypt, her coffin chained.

Roderick can't be reasoned with, but Winthrop learns from the butler Bristol, that Madeline has, in the past, suffered from cataleptic fits, leading Winthrop to fear the worst—to persuade him to leave, Roderick has taken advantage of her seizure to pretend that she is dead and has prematurely entombed her. And, at that point, there's a lot of running around and a lot of activity that, if we were staying true to Roderick's infirmities, would have paralyzed him.

Considering AIP's previous output, House of Usher looks positively sumptuous. And if most of the players are a little stiff—stiffer than Madeline becomes—Price more than compensates for it with a theatrical performance that stops short of chewing the "pallid mash" of the scenery, but luxuriates in Matheson's funereally purple prose. He's the center of the story, anyway, so his hefty chunk of the film's budget is money well-spent—if you're putting it all up there on the screen. And Corman's compositions take full advantage of the widescreen format, filling the screen with detail, despite the limitations of the budget. Those extra five days of filming he got were well worth it.

And the Poe preoccupation with premature burial (which would obsess the Corman-Poe adaptations, as well) lends just enough horror to the story that it doesn't resort to "monster-fare" as one of the producers who grudgingly approved the budget complained. The movie made over a million dollars in its initial run, more than justifying the risks taken and launching a string of nicely written, morbid dramas for many years to come.

Toby Dammit or: Never Bet the Devil Your Head

Toby Dammit: Or Never Bet the Devil Your Head (Federico Fellini, 1968) Fellini's adaptation of the obscure Edgar Allen Poe story of a rake whose egotism gets the better of him has been making the rounds this year at the film festival circuit and receiving the attention and the acclaim it is due.

Made as part of a European Poe omnibus (and released in the U.S. by AIP, who'd been producing their own Poe adaptations), under the title Spirits of the Dead aka Histoires Extraordinaires or Tre Passi Nel Delirio, it is Fellini's 30 minute masterwork that the film is best remembered for. The other adaptations were Roger Vadim's heavy-breathing "Metzengerstein" starring Jane and Peter Fonda as incestuous cousines, and Louis Malle's dull S & M piece "William Wilson," despite starring both Brigitte Bardot and Alain Delon.

But, the best of them—by a head—was Federico Fellini's contemporary take on Poe's story of a rake who makes one wager too many.

As the Fellini piece was the Grand Finale, I wouldn't be surprised if folks walked out of it before his segment. If they did, they missed a chilling masterpiece. 
Fellini transposes the premise to a Hellish 1960's Italy where international film-star Toby Dammit (Terence Stamp), in a perpetual state of drunkenness, is whisked off a plane to a television interview, and then feted at a party filled with high-rollers and press to celebrate the start of production of a religious-themed Western.*

Fellini spends much of the time satirizing the fawning excesses of the film industry and the predatory/co-dependent nature of the Press, and proves he certainly knows how to throw a party. Dammit keeps drinking and sinking into a deeper funk when he's seduced by an Italian "hostess" (to the accompaniment of Ray Charles' cover of "Ruby") and turns philosophical when a reporter asks him if there is a devil, which Fellini turns into a simple, unsettling Vision.** 

The evening ends when Dammit's handlers take him off-leash, giving him the disposal of a sports-car. There follows a nightmarish "Mr. Toad's Wild Ride" through the narrow Rome streets (which clearly influenced the "Durango '95" sequence of Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange).

The high-octane combinations cannot end well. But Fellini steers it back to Poe for an appropriate, ambiguously grisly finish. Clocking in at 37 minutes, Toby Dammit is a compact mini-movie, but is filled with imagination and good ideas. Were it not for Nights of Cabiria, this Fellini vision of Rome as Hell would be my fave Fellini.

* Peter O'Toole was supposed to star, and dropped out. Earlier in the decade he'd played all of the Angels in John Huston's "The Bible," produced by Dino DeLaurentiis. Perhaps it was a little too "on the nose."

** You watch things, you learn things.  Fellini's version of the Devil might have been inspired by fellow Italian Mario Bava, who in 1966, had featured a devilish little blond girl in Kill, Baby, Kill. Fellini's image is more powerful, but...