by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night TCM’s Hallowe’en feature was the final night of
their “Star of the Month” tribute to Vincent Price — obviously they selected him because it was October (you
wouldn’t do a Star of the Month on Price in April!), which featured three of
the six films he made for producer-director Roger Corman’s Alta Vista company,
releasing through American International, in the early 1960’s at least
nominally based on stories by Edgar Allan Poe. After those ended TCM went on to
broadcast Price’s deliberately (as opposed to unwittingly) campy 1970’s vehicle
The Abominable Dr. Phibes, Twice-Told
Tales (an omnibus of three short
adaptations of stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne — including “The House of Seven
Gables,” which Price had already filmed at Universal in 1940!), The Tome
of Ligeia (the last of the Price-Corman-Poe
series), The Conqueror Worm
(a.k.a. Witchfinder General, a
non-Poe story given a Poe-derived title for its U.S. release to fit it into the
series — and that wasn’t the first time that happened to a Vincent Price movie,
as you shall see below) and something called Theatre of Blood. First up was a 1961 film called Pit and
the Pendulum — Corman and his writer,
Richard Matheson, deleted the first definite article from Poe’s title, just as
they’d taken off “Fall of the” from the name of their previous Price-plays-Poe
film, The House of Usher. The
House of Usher had been an enormous hit, so
Corman reunited the key talents from it — himself, Matheson, cinematographer
Floyd Crosby (Academy Award winner for the 1931 Murnau-Flaherty Tabu and father of rock musician David Crosby), art
directors Ben Carré and Daniel Haller, and of course Vincent Price as star.
One
problem facing filmmakers doing films at least nominally based on Poe is that
his stories are so short; he only wrote one novel, The Narrative of
A. Gordon Pym (and even that is basically
two disconnected halves arbitrarily joined together that comes to a thudding
non-ending much like The Blair Witch Project — the first half is a magnificent tale of the title
character ending up on a ship commanded by an obsessed captain; though there
isn’t a white whale in it it’s surprisingly close to Moby Dick, which wouldn’t be written for another two decades;
the second half is a relatively dull story of an exploration in the Antarctic),
and the rest of his tales are brief and to-the-point, often written for
magazines Poe edited himself. So the problem making a Poe movie is frequently
what to add to flesh out Poe’s
magnificent anecdotes to the length of a feature film — and Matheson may have
been the wrong writer for that assignment because, while he had an excellent
reputation for science fiction, like Poe he was a short-story specialist rather
than a novel writer. Poe’s story (I’m relying on memory since I haven’t read it
in decades) was a simple tale about the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition in
which the protagonist is trapped in one of the Inquisition’s torture chambers,
strapped to the titular device — a stone table above which swings a pendulum
with a blade on the end of it that will slice him to ribbons once it descends
to the level of his body, which it approaches with excruciating and terrifying
slowness — and rescued in the nick of time by rebels fighting the authority of
the Church. (Poe wrote his story at a time when one of the principal targets of
American racists and other hatemongers was the Roman Catholic Church, and
credulous Americans ate up tales of the horrors of the Inquisition and
attributed similar behavior to the Catholics of their time.)
Matheson’s gloss
turned the protagonist into Francis Barnard (John Kerr), a 16th
century Englishman whose sister married a Spanish grandee, Nicholas Medina
(Vincent Price), then suddenly died mysteriously. Francis has come to the
Medina manse (a huge castle
represented by a glass painting, built on a seashore “played” by Monterey via a
stock shot of waves crashing on rocks that Corman used again and again and again). Nicholas, like most of Price’s characters in these
films, is on the thin edge of sanity; he’s obsessed with the idea that his dead
wife is still haunting their house — at one point he even hears harpsichord
music, and so do the rest of the characters, the gimmick of course being that
his late wife was an excellent harpsichordist but no one currently alive in the
household knows how to play at all — and as Francis questions him about the
death in a rough manner that verges on the inquisitorial itself, Nicholas’s
stories keep changing. He claims to have witnessed his father Sebastian (long
since dead but shown in flashback scenes and, natch, also played by Vincent
Price) use the fully equipped torture chamber in their basement to torture his
wife (Nicholas’s mother) to death after he caught her having an adulterous
affair. Midway through the film there’s a reversal in which it’s revealed that
Elizabeth (the magnificent Barbara Steele, fresh from her horror debut in Mario
Bava’s Black Sunday), Nicholas’
late wife and Francis’s sister, also
was having an affair with Dr. Charles Leon (Antony Carbone), Nicholas’ best friend
and the man who pronounced Elizabeth dead, and the two of them (it’s hinted at
one point that Elizabeth is still alive, having been hidden all this time by
Dr. Leon in a chamber hidden inside the walls of the Medina castle) plotted to
drive Nicholas crazy and get him to kill himself so they could be together.
Yet
it’s also possible that Elizabeth really is dead and the woman Dr. Leon is in love with is
Nicholas’ sister — whom Francis,
natch, has fallen in love with as well — and Dr. Leon takes a well-timed plunge
off the castle battlements or balcony or something, leaving Nicholas to form
the delusion that Francis is the doctor, that his sister is his late wife, and
he’s going to have to punish them by torturing both of them to death, locking
her in an iron maiden (from which she’s rescued with a surprising lack of
long-term damage) and strapping him to the table and starting the pendulum. One
thing I hadn’t realized before watching all these Vincent Price movies was
that, though when Charles and I had seen his 1946 film Dragonwyck I’d downplayed its status as a horror item and
regarded it more as a Gothic romance in the manner of Rebecca and Gaslight, Dragonwyck seems to
have had more of a long-term influence on Price’s career than I’d thought: many
of his subsequent films, including at least two on TCM’s program last night,
cast him as a nobleman of dubious sanity with a murderous secret in his past,
and when Price’s wife in Dragonwyck
tracks him down to his secret room in the family manse and he says, “I don’t have an altar to Satan in
here,” I joked, “Just you wait, Vincent; that will come!” Pit and the
Pendulum even copies the bit from Dragonwyck in which Price hears what appears to be the ghost of
his dead wife playing music (at a time when recorded music didn’t exist —
though I couldn’t help but joke during the harpsichord scene in Pit
and the Pendulum, “Oh, that’s our player
harpsichord, playing a roll Elizabeth made while she was still alive.”
Pit
and the Pendulum is actually an effective
horror piece, though it showed off limits in Corman’s approach that would
become more obvious in the later two films — there are lots of vertiginous
camera movements, a nice shock cut when the principals knock down the castle
wall behind which Elizabeth’s body is interred and duly find her (or at least a) skeleton, and effective suspense editing in the
final torture scene (along with some really creative use of silent film-style
tinting and toning in the flashback scenes in the torture chamber) but
surprisingly little use of atmospheric lighting. The color is clear, bright and
shows off virtually all the visible spectrum (a far cry from the dirty greens
and browns that dominate all too many color films today) but the shadowy
semi-darkness invented by German filmmakers in the Weimar era and copied for
Universal’s horror classics and also in film noir isn’t seen here. Pit and the Pendulum also suffers from John Kerr’s weakness and
woodenness in the juvenile lead — at times one gets the impression that Vincent
Price and Barbara Steele are the only people in this film who can actually act — and I couldn’t help but
wonder why, when he had the young Jack Nicholson under contract, Corman went to
the on-their-way-down freelance pool and cast Kerr instead; the role of Francis
needed Nicholson’s manic intensity and got Kerr’s blandness instead. One
surprisingly good thing about Pit and the Pendulum is the background music by Les Baxter — yes, that Les Baxter, who did pseudo-“exotica”
middle-of-the-road instrumentals that were appallingly banal, and who stuck a
score onto the American release of Mario Bava’s Black Sunday that wasn’t much (and, when I saw the film, made me
wish I could see the original Italian-language version with subtitles to hear
what the film’s Italian composer had done), but who sometimes reached for
considerably finer things: Yma Sumac’s star-making album Voice of the
Xtabay (an amazing set of arrangements by
Baxter showcasing Sumac’s five-octave range and, to my mind, creating a
skilful, inventive pastiche of folk melodies into a “classical” piece rivaling
Joseph Canteloube’s Chants d’Auvergne), The Passions (an
attempt to do Xtabay over again
and almost as inventive musically even though stuck with a less interesting
singer, Bas Sheva), and this score, strongly in the manner of Stravinsky (and
briefly quoting some of the most famous passages from The Rite of
Spring and The Firebird) and far more interesting than the moody sludge that
usually got stuck onto cheap horror films in 1961.
