Vincent
Leonard Price Jr. (1911-1993) was an American actor who made over a hundred
feature films in a variety of genres, including historical drama, mystery, film
noir, and even comedy, but he is best known for his roles in horror films. A
graduate of Yale with a degree in art history, he later studied abroad in
London, where he kindled his love of theater and later performed onstage opposed
Helen Hayes in Victoria Regina. This
led to a five-play contract with Orson Welles Mercury Theatre. Eventually he
was put on contract at Universal as a character actor, playing romantic leads
and scoundrels in equal measure. But he never abandoned the stage, returning to
it every chance he got.
In fact,
it was during his performance in the 1941 play Angel Street (the American version of Gaslight) playing the cruel Jack Manningham, pushing his wife Helen
into madness, that he found his true calling playing villains. Speaking about
that role, Price told one interviewer “…I came out for my curtain call and the
audience just hissed. I knew I'd found my niche.” He secured a few more villain
roles and turns in minor horror movies. Later, in the early 1950s, Price would
become wildly successful in the genre, leading to some of his most memorable roles
and performances for the next twenty-odd years.
A world
traveler, art connoisseur, and gourmet chef, Price was famous for his warmth, sophistication,
and charm when he wasn’t chilling the blood or inducing shivers with his
saturnine features and distinctive velvet-smooth voice in the movies, on
television, or on the radio. He remains one of the most popular masters of
horror, thanks to largely to his ability to play sympathetic villains, or as he
put it, “I don't play monsters. I play men besieged by fate and out for
revenge.” The five movies listed below are testaments to that. If you only know
Price from the spooky voice-over in Michael Jackson’s pop hit “Thriller,” you
are missing out on an entire career of ghoulish performances that brought Price
to that liminal place in pop culture history in the first place. These movies
are, in my opinion, the Vincent Price-y-ist of all and cannot be missed if you
call yourself a fan.
That said,
picking the five best Vincent Price movies is an exercise in futility and will
be revised on a day-by-day basis, depending on my mood, the time of year, and
how much I’ve had to drink. I’m sure one of your favorites isn’t on this list,
but that’s not to say it wouldn’t be on mine tomorrow or the next day.
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| It's pretty clear who, or rather, what, the star of this movie was intended to be... |
5.
House of Wax (1953)
This
early classic 3-D movie was an incredible success, in part because of the new
Startling Technical process, but also because of Vincent Price’s deranged
curator of the Wax Museum whose life-like exhibits house a terrible secret.
This movie was a smash hit and put Price on the map as the go-to guy for urbane
madmen and melodramatic villains, which formed the bulk of his career and legacy.
House of Wax is ground zero for Price
fans.
Price
plays a sculptor, Henry Jarrod, who is revered for his wax figures depicting
famous figures from history. However, his business partner wants Jarrod sculpt
more sensationalistic displays, like Jack the Ripper, but Jarrod is an artist
and refuses to debase himself. The wax museum is then torched in the name of
commerce, along with Jarrod, who is doused in kerosene and left to perish in
the flames.
Only,
he doesn’t perish; instead, he shows back up some years later, with his hands
ruined, sporting two sculpting assistants, including a mute Charles Bronson,
and—surprise, surprise—a new house of horrors exhibit. The thing is, despite
his ruined hands, his wax dummies are better than ever. How on earth does he do
it?
I
think you know. We all know. It’s not much of a mystery, but that’s part of the
fun, watching the horror dawn on our hapless protagonists. The movie itself was
a remake of the 1933 Michael Curtiz potboiler Mystery of the Wax Museum, starring Lionel Atwill. House of Wax was originally intended as
a quick-turn around to capitalize on the nascent 3-D process, a strange alchemy
that included an engaging script and inspired direction by director André De
Toth, who had only one eye. Price later quipped, “It's almost my favorite
Hollywood story. Where else in the world would you hire a man with one eye to
direct a picture in 3-D?” Warner Brothers did not expect the reaction it got
from audiences who flocked to see it. The movie had the advantage of being a
horror movie, early in the 3-D craze, that was actually well shot, well
directed, and well-acted. Those elements would not all be present in the
majority of the subsequent 3-D movies of the 1950s.
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| A poster straight from the Age of Aquarius. Groovy! |
4. The Abominable Doctor Phibes (1971)
This cool throwback from
the shaggy-haired 1970s starred Price in a role that was so successful, he reprised for a sequel and attempted it a third time, in spirit, with the less
successful Theatre of Blood (1973).
The film opens as a murder mystery, with prominent doctors being killed in
weird and gruesome ways that end up being Biblical plagues. The evidence mounts
and the madman is revealed, with some grim and grisly goings on in between.
These fiendish murders
are orchestrated by a brilliant concert pianist, thought to be dead, in a story
that owes more than a little thanks to Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera (1909)
and in particular the various movies depicting the story, such as Lon
Chaney’s classic version from 1925. There’s even a scene where Dr. Phibes pulls his mask off, showing his creepy melty skull-face make-up as a taunt to one of his victims. This is
distinctive in that the movie is set in the 1920s to take advantage with the
craze in Egyptology that was sweeping Great Britain at the time.
Just a few years
later in the decade, we’d get a new kind of masked killer that was inarticulate
and very nearly sub-human, a force of nature, an unkillable thing. But playing
ghoulish, if not always sophisticated, murderers and fiends was something Price
excelled at for years. Dr. Phibes was one of his best, and certainly one of his
most famous turns in this vein. It’s also one of the last times such a
murderous maniac would have a shred of sympathy applied to him, as Price seemed
to be the only actor at the time who could walk that edge.
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| I love the figures in Price's face. |
3. Masque of the Red Death (1964)
From 1960 to 1964,
Roger Corman and Vincent Price produced seven (of a total of eight films) based
loosely—some would say, “merely suggested by”—the works of Edgar Allan Poe.
This is the seventh of Roger Corman’s low-budget AIP quickies based on the
eponymous short story with a nice chunk of “Hop-Frog” thrown in.
The Satanic Prince
Prospero is planning an elaborate annual revel at his castle, even as his subjects
are dying at the hands of the Red Death. He abducts a young woman from the
local village, and conscripts her father and lover into his service, essentially
sparing their lives from the Red Death. He has everyone else in the village killed.
No mercy.
Back at the castle,
Prince Prospero deals with the mundanity of his wastrel existence, providing
entertainment for his rich and idle guests, and attempting to seduce the young
woman, even as the two men from the village are being groomed to fight to the
death as an amusement for the revelry to come. Hop-Frog, the dwarf, plots a grim
party trick to get back at one of the nobles who struck Esmerelda, his dancing
partner that involves putting on an ape suit for the masquerade. Prospero wants
to indoctrinate the peasant girl into his Satanic cult, but Prospero’s mistress
sets up a plan to get rid of her so she can take her place.
Lots of ins and outs
and courtly intrigue keep this period story capering along, and while the
actual Poe material only shows up in the final act, the rest of the movie contains
some of Roger Corman’s best work to date; vivid and startling use of color, the
symbology of the Tarot, and a dream-like quality to much of the movie add to
the feelings of dread and horror. And then there’s Price in the mix, too,
playing Prospero as merciless and cruel, that sly smile now reading as sinister.
And yet, he seems to genuinely care about this peasant girl he rescued from the
ravages of the plague. You want to like him, and then he does something
terrible and you remember that oh, yes, he’s not redeemable, not at all.
Veteran screenwriter Charles
Beaumont delivered the first draft and R. Wright Campbell provided the second
pass; his version incorporated “Hop-Frog,” which turned out to be a great
addition. Like all of the movies in this series, the script plays fast and
loose with Poe in order to wring the most dramatic and salacious material out
of them, as these films were ostensibly aiming for some of the gothic
bodice-ripping market share held by Hammer’s horror films. Corman’s directing
is deft and interesting and he stretches his limited budget to the breaking
point. The resulting special effects are mostly just camera tricks, but they
aren’t a complete distraction and overall, the movie showcases Price’s screen
presence and charisma. He obviously loved the material and it shows in his
performances.
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| This is my favorite poster from Corman's Poe Cycle. They just don't make 'em like that anymore. |
2. House of Usher (1960)
In
1959, American International Pictures took a big risk. They’d been producing low-budget,
quick-turnaround double features of a decidedly lurid and exploitative nature,
and for nearly a decade, they were in the chips. But as that marketing strategy
began to wane, Roger Corman convinced them to try a different tactic: instead
of producing two black and white features, each shot in 10 days, let him make
one feature, in color, shot in a widescreen anamorphic process, in 15 days. They
rolled the dice, and Samuel Z. Arkoff crossed his fingers. Corman spent fifty
thousand bucks of his $300,000 budget to get Vincent Price, the most AIP had
ever paid an actor before, and it began a relationship that Corman liked to
downplay as a business transaction, but in reality, was a career high point for
both him and Price. The movie was the House of Usher and it saved AIP from
financial ruin.
Philip
Winthrop arrives at the doorstep of the House of Usher looking for his fiancée
Madeline Usher, to take her back to Boston to marry her. However, her brother,
Roderick, played by Price, objects to the marriage and forbids it and gives as
an excuse a family history lesson of all the horrible people in his family
tree. Philip ignores all of that poppycock and agrees to spirit Madeline away the
next day. Unfortunately, Madeline dies that night and Roderick and the servant
have her entombed—rather interred, in the family crypt beneath the house.
Phillip is about to leave when the butler mentions that Madeline suffered from catalepsy
and they open her coffin to find it empty. Madeline is loose in the catacombs, Roderick
has checked out, and Phillip is left to contend with all of that and more.
There
is a line in the movie that goes, ‘The house lives. The house breathes.’ Price went
to Roger Corman during the production and asked what the line meant. Corman
replied, “It means that we are able to make this picture.” Price said, “I
understand totally.” And that was that. Price embraced the dialogue and the
movie did something that was a rarity for an AIP release: it made money and
garnered critical acclaim.
House of Usher was also the beginning of a
collaboration with screenwriter Richard Matheson, who was writing scripts for Rod
Serling’s Twilight Zone (1959-1964)
during this same period. As such, this first script cleaves the closest to Poe’s
original story, adding only a romantic interest for Madeline as a point-of-view
character for the audience, thus allowing Roderick the chance to fill him (and
the viewers) in on the family’s history. The combination of Corman, at his most
creative and inventive, Price, at the top of his game, and Matheson, lean and
hungry, is what makes these movies a joy to watch and re-watch. Corman made
good use of his budget, wringing every dollar he could, and taking full advantage
of the Panavision process and color film stock to create vivid scenes that looked
like images from lucid nightmares. Production designer Dan Haller did a lot
with very little, reusing and re-combining old sets and equipment as needed.
You can’t tell and it doesn’t really matter, though, because all of the films
in Corman’s Poe Cycle hang together as an intriguing counter-balance to Hammer’s
horror movies. These movies were a showcase for Price and despite the lack of
budget and breakneck shooting schedule, they all really hold up thanks to his
memorable performances.
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| The actual pendulum weighed a ton. |
1.
The Pit and the Pendulum (1961)
This is the second
Poe adaptation directed by Roger Corman with a screenplay by Richard Matheson,
following the unexpected success of House
of Usher (1960), and while the first film was a critical smash (and
considered a high point in Corman’s career—talk about peaking early!) Price is
only one part of the small ensemble cast, albeit quite excellent. In The Pit and the Pendulum, we are treated
to a full range of macabre reactions from Price, hitting his stride with the
material and kicking off some of the best movies of his career.
The
actual Poe short story doesn’t appear until the end of the third act, at which
point the audience has been led by the nose through a story that is equal parts
fantastic and phantasmagorical. Englishman Francis Barnard, played by John Kerr,
arrives at the estate of his brother-in-law, Nicholas, played by Vincent Price,
to investigate the mysterious death of his sister Elizabeth, played with her
usual zest by Barbara Steele. When a vague explanation fails to explain her
death, Francis decides to investigate the peculiar goings on.
Nicholas and the household are convinced that his dead wife is haunting the house, but
Francis isn’t. As Nicholas descends further and further into madness, the family
doctor confides that she died of fright, like one does in these situations. The
truth is pretty gruesome, and it involves a flashback to the Patriarch of the
family Sebastian Medina, a torturer for the Spanish Inquisition, who tortured
and killed his wife and best friend for an adulterous affair.
I
will leave you to discover the rest, but suffice to say, Price’s metamorphosis
in this movie is a testament to his acting ability and most fun to watch. And
third act is a legitimate nail-biter, with lots going on, including chases
through dungeons and of course, the swinging axe-bladed pendulum, all supported
by an excellent score by Les Baxter.
Matheson
sometimes strayed far afield with his free-wheeling adaptations of Poe’s works,
but his scripts were always quite watchable and utilized as much of the style
and language that he could shoehorn in to fit the needs of a 90-minute movie.
Price, as always, lent a certain gravitas that elevated his performance and the
material. Watching these movies, it’s hard to reconcile the inventiveness and
care that went into them with the schlock and grind of Corman’s later movies.
Special Thanks to Joseph Fotinos for fact-checking and advice.
