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 Ipcress File

The Ipcress File (Sidney J. Furie, 1965) The first of the "alternate Bond" films that came out in the 1960's to take advantage of the "spy craze" of movies while also setting itself apart. 

It would be a bit more difficult for this one to do the latter, seeing as how the main producer is Harry Saltzman, one of the duo making the Bond films, and cribbing many of that series' essential crafts-people—Production Designer Ken Adam, Editor Peter Hunt, Composer John Barry, and Sound supervisor Norman Wanstall—to create this "kitchen-sink" version of Bond. Michael Caine stars as the unnamed protagonist in Len Deighton's novel, but dubbed "Harry Palmer" in the movie adaptations. Bespectacled and lower-class, he's a sergeant in the defense ministry doing surveillance work when his less-than-ordinate attitude makes him a suitable candidate for a particular job.

Deighton's novel was stripped to essentials and the movie-makers went to work.

The issue at hand that Palmer is investigating involves the abduction and brain-washing of critically needed scientists and so the movie starts with a pre-credit sequence that relies on a visual sleight-of-hand as the "minder" for one of these specialists, Radcliffe, after putting his charge on a train, rushes back to give him his left-behind camera only to find another man in his place—the scientist has been abducted. The next shot shows the "minder" dead and discarded in the train station.

This is just the sort of "teaser" that Harry Saltzman was known to come up with in the Bond series—notably the sequence where James Bond is stalked and killed by an assassin in From Russia With Love (only to find that "James Bond" is an imposter used in a training exercise in a Russian assassin camp). That sequence makes no sense—why provide a "James Bond" mask for the victim and how valid is such an exercise if the target is not the same man (and who would volunteer for such duty??). But it's a suspenseful start, visually, and whets the audience's expectations that things may become deceptive...if illogical. The Ipcress sequence does the same thing, while also doing the thing with few words of dialogue except the most perfunctory of pleasantries.

Palmer is assigned to replace the dead security agent to track down the source of the "brain-drain"—16 scientists have already been kidnapped. He is handed over from Col. Ross (Guy Doleman) to Major Dalby (Nigel Green), who will handle the internally sensitive operation. Along the way, Palmer will be tracking an Albanian named Grantby (Frank Gatliff), tangle with his bodyguard, launch a seemingly worthless raid on a hide-out, get framed for the murder of two observing CIA agents, sees a colleague get killed, and get a lot of stick about not filling out the proper forms. And he'll get a little too close to the operation behind it all when he himself gets abducted.  

It's a different sort of spy thriller, despite having some of the familiar trappings. Lines are drawn between class, with a clear difference between Palmer's stuffy superiors and the scruffy, cock-sure Palmer—"Insubordinate. Insolent. A trickster. Perhaps with criminal tendencies" reads his "B107" dossier. But, perhaps, that's a good thing, as whatever has been tried in the past doesn't seem to be working.

And it's different than anything the Bond-artisans had done for that series. Locations in Ipcress are grubby, not spotless vacation-spots. Adam's sets are not spacious cathedrals of class and chrome, but tight little spaces for warehousing. Hunt's editing has no punchy cuts but, instead, lets things play out naturally. And as for the music, where the James Bond Theme (arranged by Barry, it should legally be admitted) has momentum, Barry's cimbalom-threaded theme for Ipcress ambles and skulks.

But, it's Furie's direction that differentiates. Given his cast of actors, Furie concentrates on the mise-en-scéne, one of the most ostentatious examples of a directorial hand waving at the audience. Round about the time in the movie when Palmer begins working for Dalby, the world we see becomes filled with obstruction and obfuscation, the subject of the scene shadowed, obscured, crowded and sometimes isolated by foreground objects that get in our line of sight. 

What starts out as a conceit of literal "undercover" presentation almost becomes a running gag as Furie makes us look over, under, around and through all manner of windows, furniture, people, and buildings. A sidewalk fight scene (normally front and center in any action film) is obscured by its vantage point from the interior of a car—there's no one in it, so it's not some personal point of view of a character in the film. We begin to get accustomed to looking down through transoms and lampshades. At times, the gambit becomes laughable, as we start looking at scenes through desk in-boxes. And it's finally taken to the extreme when we're confronted by the close-up of a ringing telephone, which—when its hand-set is picked up and answered—reveals a government functionary behind it.

This is madness. But there is method to it, if an obvious, hardly secret one. It puts us in the frame of mind of Palmer, having to seek out the answer to the government's problem while having to contend with the obstructions of man—and by extension, bureaucracy—to find the particular answer of a tree hidden in plain sight by a frustratingly obscuring forest. For the remainder of the film, there will be the occasional image that has nothing in front of it, but it will be rare, and a bit of a shock.

It's a visual clue to what is going on in the plot, a wink to the audience. But, it also has a quality of the times, a "pop-art" sensibility—it is "the swingin' '60's", after all—that would inform most of the decade's spy-films, less than in the visual presentation/direction than in the art direction and set design of lesser entries in the genre.

The Ipcress File is definitely, defiantly, of the times, while setting itself apart. "Insubordinate. Insolent. A trickster."