by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2013 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The third film in the sequence, The Masque of the Red
Death, proved to be the best of the three
by a considerable margin. Part of the reason is Edgar Allan Poe himself;
whereas most of his stories were carefully crafted by a master writer who knew
exactly what effect he wanted to induce in his audience and how he wanted to do
it (we know this because Poe wrote an essay called “The Philosophy of
Composition” in which he spelled out in depth exactly how he came to write his
poem “The Raven” — when the auteur
movie critics in France compared Alfred Hitchcock to Poe they were absolutely
right, but in a way quite the opposite from what they meant; they had visions
of Poe and Hitchcock as haunted artists putting their personal dreams and
nightmare visions before the public, and in fact both Poe and Hitchcock were
careful craftsmen who dispassionately created stories that they knew would
unsettle audiences and consciously shaped their work to get a rise out of
people), “The Masque of the Red Death” was one of the few times Poe got
unabashedly personal in his writing. The “Red Death” — an epidemic that is
sweeping the region around Catania, Italy in the Middle Ages — is not plague
(as a lot of people reading and commenting on the story have assumed) but
tuberculosis, a real-life scourge of Poe’s time (as plague was not) and one
which had already cost him his parents long before he wrote the story, and to
which he would lose his wife afterwards. The giveaway is the passage early in
the story in which, writing about the Red Death, Poe tells us, “Blood was its
avatar and its seal” — and given that in Poe’s time (the 1830’s and 1840’s) the
way you usually found out you had tuberculosis was that you started coughing up
blood, the connection was obviously emotionally important to Poe himself and
instantly recognizable to his original readers. The Masque of the Red
Death is a much better movie than Pit
and the Pendulum or The Haunted
Palace not only because it’s a stronger
story (Corman and his writers, Charles Beaumont and R. Wright Campbell, fleshed
out the original tale by incorporating another Poe story, “Hop-Frog”) but
because Corman shot the film in England. He did that so he could grab a tax
subsidy from the British government by declaring his film a British production,
and with the savings from the subsidy he was able to bankroll a longer
production period (five weeks instead of three), get access to better studio
facilities and sets (he borrowed a lot of the sets from the recently completed
big-budget period film Becket,
starring Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole from the early-1960’s “A”-list), and,
most importantly, he had access to the amazing British talent pool of
first-rate actors, with the result that The Masque of the Red Death is that rarity: a Corman film that is brilliantly
and vividly acted throughout instead of containing one or two standout
performances in the midst of a bunch of people who come off as rank amateurs.
The
Masque of the Red Death had been the story
Corman originally planned as the follow-up to House of Usher, but he temporarily abandoned the project because he
thought the story — Death in corporeal form roaming around a disease-ravaged
countryside and giving a corrupt nobleman and his equally decadent friends
their comeuppance — would come off too much like Ingmar Bergman’s The
Seventh Seal. Though Death in Corman’s film
is dressed in red instead of black, and deals Tarot cards instead of playing
chess, the parallel is nonetheless quite obvious. The Masque of the
Red Death also has going for it a script
that allows Vincent Price to play no-holds-barred villainy, while at the same
time it’s literate enough that instead of camping it up (Price’s fallback
strategy when he got an absolutely dreadful, unmotivated role and had to figure
out some way of making an
entertaining movie out of it), he plays the principal villain, Prince Prospero,
with a sort of off-handed, demented charm that makes him more chilling (just as
the accounts of Adolf Hitler from his secretary, Traudl Junge, and others who
knew him that focus on what a nice guy and easygoing boss he was when he wasn’t
doing things like starting World War II and ordering the Holocaust just make
him that much more frightening). The plot deals with Prospero’s attempt to
avoid the Red Death by locking himself and his equally decadent 1-percent
friends in his castle and having them party away until the epidemic passes: a
surprising bit of anti-rich social comment coming from Poe, a Virginia native
who believed in the aristocratic system and was such a passionate defender of
slavery it put off Northerners like Nathaniel Hawthorne who otherwise liked
him. The story was also written at the time when scientists were just beginning
to start thinking that those weird little creatures they’d been watching in
microscopes for a century might actually have the power to cause human disease,
and that no amount of locking yourself in a castle was going to protect you
against an infection that could be carried through the air.
The
Masque of the Red Death works as a sheer
horror film — notably in the chilling sequence in which the dwarf Hop-Toad (in
Poe’s story he’s called “Hop-Frog” and he’s not only a little person but a
hunchback as well, though neither Corman nor little-person actor Skip Martin
were willing to go that far) has the secondary villain don a gorilla suit and
then sets him on fire because the bad guy insulted Hop-Toad’s dwarf ballerina
girlfriend Esmeralda (actually played by a child, Verina Greenlaw — an
interesting reversal of 20th Century-Fox’s practice in the 1930’s of
having little people serve as stand-ins and stunt doubles for Shirley Temple,
which gave rise to the rumor that Temple was a little adult instead of a normal
child) — but also as social comment and as religious parable: the main conflict
is over Prospero’s abduction of innocent young Christian version Francesca
(Jane Asher) with the intent of seducing (or raping) and ruining her, and the
jealous hissy-fits of his previous girlfriend Juliana (Hazel Court), who agrees
to brand herself with an upside-down cross and go through all the prescribed
rituals of offering her soul to Satan to keep Prospero from dumping her in
favor of the good little Christian he wants to destroy. (That’s one of the key
changes Beaumont and Campbell made to the story; in Poe’s original Prospero was
just a cruel, arrogant and clueless medieval landowner, not an out-and-out
worshiper of Satan.) One imdb.com reviewer called Jane Asher “wooden,” but I
found her quite good, subtly projecting her virginal innocence and fear that that’s
going to be taken away from her, and also her quandary when, twice during the
film, Prospero offers her the chance of choosing between her father and her
lover, one of whom Prospero will kill and the other he will spare — her choice.
Hazel Court was also powerful, and indeed so was the entire cast — I’m not sure
what makes these British actors
so reliably great, but I’ve never had the sense watching a British movie (even
one I didn’t like) that they should have let go any of the cast members and
replaced them with people who could act — and I’ve had that experience with
American films all too often!
