by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Next up on TCM’s schedule was 1963’s The Haunted Palace — which was an outlier in the Corman/Price/Poe cycle
because it was not in fact based on a work by Edgar Allan Poe! This time around
Corman decided to tap into the works of another legendary U.S.-born master of
fantasy short stories, Howard Phillips Lovecraft, who like Poe only wrote one
full-length novel, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, which formed the basis of this film. Lovecraft’s
rather blah title wasn’t exactly calculated to draw in moviegoers, so American
International decided to take the title off a poem — not even a short story! — by Poe, and to add
insult to injury (a phrase Poe actually coined!) they misspelled his middle
name “Allen” on the credits. The Haunted Palace was scripted by Charles Beaumont with uncredited
“additional dialogue” by Francis Ford Coppola, who was then working as Corman’s
assistant and doing odd jobs (including re-editing and shooting new footage for
Soviet-bloc science-fiction films to make them more in line with American
audiences’ genre expectations;
when I saw Coppola at the 1970 San Francisco Film Festival he recalled that in
one of those movies, the original Soviet version had shown a spaceship landing
on an alien planet and being greeted by one of the locals waving a flag of
peace; in the U.S. version that changed to two monsters fighting each other)
while learning the director biz. Though he was married briefly, Lovecraft was
probably asexual (or pretty close to it) and he virtually excluded any romantic
or sexual aspects from his fiction; his central male characters are virtually
always either neurasthenic young men beset by family traumas (like Lovecraft
himself, whose parents didn’t die when he was young the way Poe’s did — more on
that later — but did go insane) or ancient professors with access to hidden
lore.
Charles Beaumont changed Charles Dexter Ward (Vincent Price) from a
young, unattached weakling to a married man who towards the end of the 19th
century receives word that he has inherited a palace that his ancestor Joseph
Curwen (also played by Vincent Price, in a prologue set either just before or
during the American Revolution that shows him being lynched as a witch) had
brought over, stone by stone, from Europe (like Charles Foster Kane) and
reassembled in the fictitious New England town of Arkham (an important part of
Lovecraft’s “Cthulhu Mythos,” which forms part of this story — including the
undersea god Cthulhu him/her/itself, a few lesser beings with Hebrew-sounding
names, and the Necronomicon, a
book of magical spells and incantations Lovecraft made up … and in the late
1970’s an anonymous author or team of authors made themselves a ton of money
publishing a work of their own that purported to be Lovecraft’s Necronomicon), where he spent much of his time conjuring up
something or other until the villagers (acting very much like the posses in the
Frankenstein movies) put a stop
to it by tying him to a tree and setting him on fire. Alas, Curwen’s spirit
survived as a ghost and has been waiting over 100 years for one of his descendants
to return to the Haunted Palace, so Curwen can take control of his body and use
it to continue and finish his magical experiments — and when he does this he
has the help of two other people who are also reincarnations of his former
assistants, his servant Simon (Lon Chaney, Jr. in one of his better late roles)
and townsperson Peter Smith (Elisha Cook, Jr. — the presence of these two
solidly professional supporting actors in the cast raises the acting level of
this one at least somewhat above that of Pit and the Pendulum). One quirky thing this movie has in common with Pit
and the Pendulum, even though both the
source writers and the screenwriters are different, is that Price is playing a
character under the influence of one of his ancestors, which gives Price a
chance to play real emotional conflict instead of the campy one-note villainy
he usually did in the 1960’s — there are a few sequences in Pit and
the Pendulum where he even seems
traumatized and broken the way he did in the greatest performance he ever gave,
as a stage actor playing Oscar Wilde in a one-man show called Diversions
and Delights in 1977 (the first half came
from Wilde’s actual lectures and showed him cracking wise, but the second half
came mainly from De Profundis and
showed him wracked with torment over his relationship with Lord Alfred Douglas,
his imprisonment and subsequent disgrace — as far as I know no one ever
recorded or filmed Diversions and Delights and therefore it remains the great lost Vincent Price performance,
remembered only by those of us lucky enough to have seen it live), even though
the material either of Pit and the Pendulum or The Haunted Palace doesn’t have anywhere near the emotional heft of
Wilde’s writings (or his real-life story) or Price’s incredible performance as
him.
Otherwise, The Haunted Palace
is a pretty mediocre movie, technically well done but suffering from the usual
problems with filming Lovecraft — including his annoying habit of saying his
monsters were indescribably horrible instead of actually trying to describe
them (but then Mary Shelley never actually described what Frankenstein’s
monster looked like — though that didn’t stop Jack P. Pierce from coming up
with an incredible makeup that has become part of the world’s cultural heritage
of terror) and his relative disinterest in action scenes (though he did write quite a good one in “The Shadow Over
Innsmouth,” which if not necessarily the “best” of Lovecraft’s stories
certainly seems to me like the one that would have the most potential as a movie
— and, oddly, one that has not to
my knowledge been attempted on screen). The monsters in this movie are
irredeemably tacky; there’s one being kept by one of the townspeople whom
Ward-as-Curwen wants to kill for revenge on his ancestor, who was one of the
people who lynched him, but we don’t get much of a glimpse of him and the
glimpse we do get makes him look
about as scary as a homeless burn victim, while the final one who gets summoned
in Curwen’s final ritual before he’s sent back from whatever Lovecraftian
spirit world he came from and Ward gets back in control of his own body is so
amorphous he looks like someone decided to change the color of Casper the
Friendly Ghost from white to green. Vincent Price delivers the goods
performance-wise but the role was clearly nothing special for him — it was one
of those scripts that wasn’t good enough to challenge him to act but wasn’t bad
enough for him to camp it up, either — and Debra Paget as his wife was
essentially just there, an
afterthought to a story by a writer who generally had no use for women at all,
either personally or in his fiction, though I liked the authority of Frank
Maxwell as the modern-day incarnation of the man who led the lynch mob against
Curwen way back when. And after the appealing modernisms of Les Baxter’s score
for Pit and the Pendulum, Ronald
Stein’s score for The Haunted Palace
was even more disappointing than it would have been if we hadn’t seen the
earlier film first, all gloom and doom and horror-film music cliché. Floyd Crosby
was the cinematographer again, and as he had in Pit and the Pendulum he lit everything cleanly but with almost no sense
of atmosphere; and Daniel Haller got credit with the set designs — not
surprisingly, since the serviceable old-dark-house sets he’d created for House
of Usher and Pit and the Pendulum were clearly getting recycled. We even get the same glass painting of a castle on a cliff overlooking
the ocean, and the same stock shot of the waves crashing on the rocks at
Monterey matted into it!
