BY HANK REINEKE
I turned age three one month prior to the January 1965
U.S. release of Roger Corman’s The Tomb
of Ligeia (American-International, 1964). The film had been first released in England in November 1964 - which was
only fair - since both The Tomb of Ligeia
and its predecessor The Masque of the Red
Death (also 1964) had been shot at Shepperton Studios and in the
neighboring English countryside. I’m guessing that I only became acquainted
with Corman’s octet of Poe adaptations when the films were televised on New
York City’s 4:30 Movie in the
mid-1970s.
I didn’t know quite what to make of the AIP Poe films at
first. These were horror films without
monsters and, at age fifteen, I had no particular interest in - or
understanding of - “psychological horror†pictures… I wanted rubber-suit
monsters sporting grotesque make-up appliances and causing small-town mayhem. I wasn’t yet old enough to understand the paralyzing
torment and terrors suffered by those with tortured souls. That is until I reached my mid-20s and
discovered, unhappily, I myself was afflicted with one.
The
Tomb of Ligeia was the eighth and last film that would
comprise Corman’s famed “Poe cycle,†a series (of sorts) that launched with the
moody House of Usher (1960). In his entertaining memoir, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and
Never Lost a Dime (Random House, 1990), the filmmaker shared with candor
that while he was pleased he had made “several very good-looking,
psychologically effective horror pictures†from 1960 through 1964, he admitted
that by cycle’s end, “I was repeating myself, taking ideas, images, themes, and
techniques from my earlier work.â€
I would say in defense there was no discernible slippage
of quality present in The Tomb of Ligeia. Both Robert Townes literate screenplay and
Corman’s direction are well crafted. In fact, I’ve long considered Corman’s House of Usher, The Premature Burial, The
Masque of the Red Death and The Tomb
of Ligeia as art-house horror films of a sort. The gold standard.
Or, perhaps, The Gold
Bug standard, if one is to remain true to the Poe terminologies. According to reports of January of 1964,
Poe’s The Gold Bug was actually scheduled
as A.I.P.’s immediate follow-up to The
Masque of the Red Death. In his biography
of Peter Lorre, author Stephen D. Youngkin suggests that previous Corman scribe
Charles B. Griffith (Bucket of Blood,
Little Shop of Horrors) had worked on
script for The Gold Bug, a romp that
was to re-team Price, Basil Rathbone and Lorre, recent stars of AIP’s The Comedy of Terrors (1963). Griffith’s version of The Gold Bug was reportedly sketched as a horror-comedy in the vein
of that earlier film. His script was -
presumably - scrubbed when Lorre passed away in March of 1964.
In any event, I now consider several films in the Poe
cycle among my favorite horror efforts. Thanks to 35mm revival screenings in the 1980s at New York City’s
repertory theaters and at retro all-night drive-in monster movie weekends, I’ve
been able to enjoy these classics in genuine Colorscope as originally designed. I’ve also had the wonderful opportunity to
enjoy a pair of relatively recent screenings of The Tomb of Ligeia in the company of two of the film’s high-profile
participants. In August of 2015 Roger
Corman and actress Elizabeth Shepherd (Lady
Rowena Trevanion) participated in a screening and Q & A at the
Anthology Film Archives on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. In 2019 I caught still another 35mm
screening, this time with Elizabeth Shepherd attending alone and sharing more expansive
memories of working with both Corman and her notable co-star and boogeyman
Vincent Price. So it’s impossible for me
to separate my admiration for The Tomb of
Ligeia from such personal memories.
One of the nicest aspects of this Kino Lorber Studio
Classics Blu-ray edition of The Tomb of
Ligeia is that if you weren’t geographically fortunate enough to attend any
of these retrospective 35mm screening events, you now have the opportunity to
listen to Corman and Shepherd share their on-the-set memories on two of this
package’s generous trio of audio commentaries. The third commentary is provided by film historian Tim Lucas who
provides all the nuts and bolts factoids we cinema history train spotters require. With three distinct voices sharing the
commentary tracks, there’s a lot of material and viewpoints and memories to
wade through.
As was so often the case, Corman’s cinematic adaptations
of Poe were not terribly faithful to the original source materials. Instead we are treated to more visual
reimagining’s of the gloomy author’s classic short stories. Corman and a team
of screenwriters (including Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont, both of Twilight Zone fame) had constructed new tales
only partly drawn from Poe’s characters and grotesque plot lines.
As Poe’s horrors were psychologically driven and introspective
in presentation, it was necessary for Corman and his team to inject more cinematic
visual tropes. This was accomplished by
introducing completely new scenarios and mixing in original and intriguing subplots. In Corman’s “serious†offerings of the Poe
cycle, the birthing author’s gloomy atmospheres, the dreary broodings on
mortality, the wearisome toll of mental anguish (and subsequent psychic breakdowns)
all remain faithful in tone to the spirit of his visions.
The screenplay of The
Tomb of Ligeia was scribed by the actor-writer Robert Towne. Towne already boasted a screenwriting credit
on The Last Man on Earth (1960) as
well as playing multiple on-screen roles in Corman’s Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961). Towne, who would go on to be feted with no
fewer than four Oscar nominations for his writing (most notably for Chinatwon), serves up a literate
screenplay that comes complete with the moody, erudite - and occasionally
archaic dialogue - that one comes to expect from this series. His work on the script stands alongside the
best Poe adaptations of Matheson and Beaumont.
The film version of The
Tomb of Ligeia concerns the curious and eccentric manner of which Vernon
Fell ((Vincent Price) conducts himself following the passing of his wife
Ligeia. Fell is obsessed, nay
terrorized, by the notion that his late wife is not quite dead in the usual sense of the word. He’s convinced that his wife’s disturbed
spirit – she was, after all, an unrepentant atheist who dabbled in spiritualism
– is now reincarnated in the form of a menacing black cat that prowls along the
premises of the dilapidated ruins of an abbey he calls home. The somber and haunted Fell finds new romance
with Lady Rowena (Shepherd), an already betrothed woman who happens upon his
property when she’s thrown from her horse during a spirited fox hunt. Rowena eventually marries Fell only to find
herself guarding against her new husband’s odd behaviors - and a malevolent black
cat who appears to willfully cause her torment.
Towne’s story takes many liberties with Poe’s original
short story, simply titled Ligeia, and
first published in Baltimore’s American
Museum periodical in September 1838. The most significant of these changes is that there’s no black cat
present in Poe’s version - and Rowena dies nine pages into the twelve-page tale. But since Poe tends to tell his tales as either
a detached narrator or in a “first person†internal dialogue of madness,
Corman’s cinematic vehicle needed a flesh and blood protagonist – even if the one
chosen for the film is adorned only in a coat of black fur – to make any menace
visually tangible. There’s a not too
subtle revelation of necrophilia and a more overt sequence of mesmerism
sprinkled in as well. It was obvious
that Towne, much like his predecessors, were mining a wide swath of Poe’s oeuvre
in a desire to enliven and expand the author’s short story for a film of
feature-length running time.
If The Raven (1963)
and the non-Poe interlude The Comedy of
Terrors allowed the filmmakers and talent to go completely off script with
a bit of black comedy, there’s very little light entertainment present in such
successors as Masque or Ligeia. Vincent Price might have made a career of playing offbeat horror
characters with tongue planted firmly in cheek, but when a role called for him
to play it straight, there was no actor better suited to interpret Poe’s sense
of madness and menace.
The implausible May-December romance between a clearly
aging Vincent Price and the young and seductive Shepherd was helped along with
a bit of make-up and camera magic, Corman admitting fitting Price with a dyed wig,
partly hiding his crow-feet eyes behind black lens spectacles and having
cinematographer Arthur Grant shoot the veteran actor with diffusion on close-ups
when deemed necessary. Actor Richard
Chamberlain, the handsome and more age-appropriate star of TV’s Dr. Kildare, was under originally
consideration – and Towne’s own choice - to play the role of Vernon Fell, but
AIP balked. Their reasoning was
sound. Vincent Price had proven to be both
a proven bankable film star and a long-standing favorite of horror film devotees.
It was the right decision. The reviews of The Tomb of Ligeia were almost uniformly positive upon the film’s
release, but Corman believed – not without reason – that the Poe cycle had nonetheless
run its course. Ever the savvy
businessmen, the producer/director offered Ligeia’
s small dip at the box-office as a sign it was time to move on to other
projects. By all accounts, Price too was
looking for different roles to tackle, though the actor wasn’t one to shut the
door on any new project should a good script come along - and healthy paycheck offered.
Interestingly, AIP was
thinking of mounting a ninth film in their Poe series, even if Roger Corman was
not interested in taking the reins of any new project. In July of 1968 AIP announced that two more
horror films were to be placed on their production schedule of 1968-1969: The
Oblong Box (featuring Price and Christopher Lee) was to commence shooting
in September 1968 and The Gold Bug
project - revamped and resurrected - was scheduled to start principal
photography in February of 1969.
In February, AIP announced that the company was planning
to inject no less than ten million U.S. dollars into the British film industry through
a seven picture deal they had worked out. One report at the time confirmed that one of those seven films was to be
The Gold Bug, “the classic macabrepiece,†which would sport a
budget of $500,000. But February came and went with no sign of movement with on
this particular Poe adaptation.
Still, by mid-summer of 1969, The Gold Bug continued to be touted as an upcoming AIP release that
would again feature Price in the lead role, but the film would simply not get
off the ground. British film historian
Denis Meikle suggested that Charles Beaumont had been commissioned to pen a fresh
screenplay for the Poe classic, but as the writer passed on in February 1967,
it’s not clear if his involvement went much beyond an early treatment or
sketched-out scenario. Hollywood papers
from July 1968 reported that science-fiction and television writer Jerry Sohl
(whose recent credits included scripts AIP’s Die, Monster, Die and The
Crimson Cult) had been brought aboard to write the screenplay, or perhaps
to “punch up†Beaumont’s draft.
Alas, the project would never materialize. The closest Vincent Price fans would get to hear
his ghoulish-intoned take on the Poe classic would come several years later
when, in 1975, a New York City-based record company released the 53 minute, 50
second spoken-word LP Edgar Allan Poe -
The Gold Bug: Read by Vincent Price (Caedmon Records, TC1449). It was, as they say, better than nothing, and
made for eerie late-night listening in its own right. So The
Tomb of Ligeia was the last film of the Corman/AIP cycle and, arguably,
most certainly among the best.
This Kino Lorber Studio Classics Blu-ray edition of The Tomb of Ligeia is presented here in
a 1920x1080p with an aspect ratio of 2.35:1 and DTS sound and an attractive slipcase
cover. The film looks very good
considering its age, though the print is not pristine: there are occasional
flashes of white emulsion scratches present throughout. Aside from the aforementioned trio of essential-listening
audio commentary tracks, this edition also offers the original theatrical
trailer of the film in the setting of director Joe Dante’s always informative “Trailers
from Hell†segment.
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