BY HANK REINEKE
As a promotional vehicle, the trailer for director Roger
Corman’s The Raven was clearly deceptive
in its construction. Cinemagoers were
promised that AIP’s newest Poe film would offer three of the “Screen’s Titans
of Terror,†the trailer flashing short, moody scenes of torch-lit chambers,
menacing stares, and the odd clutching hand. Intertitle cards and a voice-over narration
promised “A tempest of thrilling horror,†The
Raven to allow brave moviegoers to go “Careening through the darkest of
dangers into the ominous mystery of a master magician’s evil castle… witnessing
the mysterious powers of black magic.â€
On the eve of the film’s release, the newspaper promotionals
– entirely gleaned from the studio’s own duplicitous pressbook - promised much
of the same, “a thrilling mixture of the most powerful terror ingredients ever
assembled.†There was a reason for the
filmmakers to cautiously hold the actual cards they were playing close to their
chests. Producers James H. Nicholson and
Samuel Z. Arkoff were aware that through their series of Edgar Allan Poe
pictures they were holding a true tiger by the tail. It was certainly helpful to the notoriously
frugal producers that Poe’s work had long fallen into public domain status and was
therefore royalty-free in use. The box
office returns on the first of their four Poe films were pleasing, and
expectations were high that The Raven
would do as well if not better.
So it was only mildly surprising when, in March 1963, the
producers announced that no fewer than ten more Poe pictures would be slated
for production by AIP. The next one
planned, The Masque of the Red Death,
was announced to begin shooting in April of ’63… although a springtime shooting
wouldn’t actually commence as proclaimed. Other titles announced were to include, The Haunted Palace, Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Gold Bug, A Descent
into the Maelstrom, Ligeia, The Thousand and Second Tale of Scheherazade, The
Angel of the Odd, The Four Beast in One, and The City by the Sea. It was an ambitious plan, but with the
exception of Masque (with a delayed
November ’63 start) only four of the other projected titles would actually see
production.
Such breakneck speed mining of Poe’s Gothic horror materials
might be considered market over-saturation by contemporary standards, but upon
its release in January of 1963, The Raven
was the fifth Poe film released by AIP in a span of two years. In September of
1962, Samuel Z. Arkoff sat down for an interesting chinwag with Stanley
Eichelbaum, the theater and film critic of the San Francisco Examiner. That
interview touched briefly on AIP’s shoe-string beginnings: the days when such efforts
as The Day the World Ended, The Phantom from 10,000 Leagues, and I Was a Teenage Age Werewolf – not to
mention the sixty or so films featuring Hot Rods and monsters in “Indian-rubberâ€
masks - were knocked out quickly and cheaply by the indie.
It was true that AIP had certainly come a long way since
its incorporation in 1955. And while the
producers continued to hold tight to the company’s purse strings, Arkoff
acknowledged that they were presently allowing for budgets as high as $500,000
a picture on many of their recent color Panavision releases. This was a notable mention since such budgets
were five times the amount AIP had put up to fund their teen-market pictures of
the late 1950s.
The Poe films were bringing in more than a teenager
audience into the cinemas, and the producers recognized the trend. Since monster and horror films had played such
an important role in the AIP’s success, it was surprising to hear Arkoff sum up
part of the audience who loved macabre cinematic fare in less than charitable
terms. “The horror crowd falls into
three groups,†he told Eichelbaum, “the young people; the adult morons; and the
intelligent adults. It’s pretty difficult to cater to all of them in one
movie. But that’s what we try to do.â€
The company had certainly achieved an enviable level of
success since incorporation. As their
production budgets grew more generous, Arkoff and Nicholson were able to bring
into the fold some horror picture veterans who still held sway with fans of the
genre. Since the first Poe film House of Usher (1960), the producers
managed to secure the talents of such luminaries as Boris Karloff, Basil
Rathbone, Peter Lorre, Barbara Steele, Vincent Price, Ray Milland and Hazel
Court, with Lon Chaney Jr. waiting in the wings for his second act.
In his usual blunt manner, Arkoff partly attributed the
actors’ willingness to work with AIP on the series due to the fact, “Actors
like Poe. He has snob appeal.†That may have been a consideration of the
talent conscripted, but it’s also true that it was a welcome payday for these
(mostly) aging and typecast thespians. Many gathered had heydays dating back to Hollywood of the 1930s and 40s. It’s also true that due to the “Monster Boomâ€
of the late 1950s and early 1960s, these actors were thought highly and fondly of
by a generation who knew them primarily through Shock package TV screenings and such horror-film fan magazines as Famous Monsters of Filmland, Shock Monsters,
and Fantastic Monsters of the Films.
Of course, should anyone have misgivings that Arkoff was more
interested in the bottom line than in art, such suspicion would soon be
confirmed. The producer was, of course,
certainly correct in his assessment that “picture-making has to be a business.â€
He insisted that the business of filmmaking was simply “not a cheap individual
art, like painting or sculpting.†Fair
enough. But Arkoff, then a forty-three
year old former lawyer, went further, suggesting he didn’t care whether a film
was good or bad following release. He
was only interested if it clicked at the box office. He also wasn’t concerned if the films
produced by AIP would stand the test of time or be held in high regard in the
distant future. “We can’t let a movie
sit on a vine for thirty years waiting for recognition. If we can’t get a return, where will we get
the money for the next one?â€
Co-producer James H. Nicholson was somewhat more prosaic
in assessing the popularity of the horror pictures that AIP churned out with
regularity over the past seven years. He
offered the move-going public’s dimming fascination with horror films was
curiously reignited following World War II. Choosing to take the historical long-view, Nicholson offered there had always been a market for scary stories,
noting “Greek myths were horror subjects†in style and content. When questioned by a UPI correspondent if the
1960s horror film craze was just that – a passing fad – the producer insisted mythological
stories were as popular in 1964 as they had been during ancient times. “There are only three emotions,†Nicholson opined. “Deep sorrow, laughter and just plain
thrills, and our movies are filled with the last.â€
The
Raven was to feature a mix of the second and third emotions of
Nicholson’s suggested triad. There was some
concern that the Poe films were in need of a re-freshening in vision. The task
of bringing something new and exciting to the screen fell almost completely on
screenwriter Richard Matheson. Roger
Corman, set to direct his fifth Poe opus, admitted the “formula was starting to
get stretched,†suggesting it was Matheson’s idea to turn the film into an
outright comedy with spooky trappings. The director mused since Poe’s psychological stories shared so many
similarities in tone that it was difficult –if not impossible - to adapt them
for use in motion pictures. They two had
already experimented with gallows humor in The
Black Cat, the second segment of their recent Tales of Terror trilogy.
In the six-and-a-half supplement Richard Matheson: Storyteller included with the set (and ported
over from the Midnight Movies DVD of 2003), the writer offers that in the case
of The Raven he was of the mind that
it was “ludicrous†to try to adapt Poe’s famous eighteen-verse poem to the screen. He actually felt “obliged†to sketch-out his
screenplay as an outright comedy. Interestingly,
though Matheson would pen four of AIP’s Poe films, the noted science-fiction
and Twilight Zone scribe was not
necessarily a scholar of Poe’s work.
This confession might be a surprise to admirers of Matheson’s
work on the Poe films, but he recalled his pre-AIP immersion into Poe’s works -
like many of us – were primarily through
the assigned reading of a couple of the author’s poems in high school. As a sci-fi writer, Matheson was a bit more intrigued
by one of Poe’s occasional forays into science-fiction composition: The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall.
First published by the Southern Literary
Messenger in June 1835, Poe’s satirical short sci-fi story document’s the
title character’s trip to the moon in a balloon “entirely manufactured of dirty
newspapers.â€
Matheson’s first draft for The Raven was principally imagined as another vehicle for Vincent
Price, the only actor initially contracted to star. It was only after AIP signed Boris Karloff
and Peter Lorre (the latter having appeared in the second segment of the third
Poe-cycle film Tales of Terror) that
Matheson chose to tweak the script so that it would it play to the strengths –
and reputations – of both veteran players. In Corman’s reminiscence, there were a few problems on set due to their bringing
Karloff and Lorre together.
Karloff was a “classically trained†actor who studiously
memorized his lines as scripted. He came
on set prepared to deliver dialogue exactly as written – the writer’s dream. The often flush-faced Lorre, on the other
hand, came on set with only a “vague idea†(as per Corman) of what was expected
from him. He was notoriously
improvisational in his method – some of the ad hoc liberties taken with script
dialogue were clearly inspired by his fondness for the bottle.
Karloff, seventy-eight years of age and not in the best
of health, wasn’t particularly enamored of Lorre’s on-set riffing, his
annoyance with the actor causing Vincent Price to intervene and lighten the
mood as mediator. Matheson was
appreciative that the legendary Karloff delivered his lines “exactly as I wrote
them,†something he could not say about the mischievous Mr. Lorre. Though he never really interacted with the
Karloff, Matheson recalls the uneasiness he felt watching the aged actor
descend bravely, if a bit unsteadily, down the massive stone staircase constructed
for the film. Matheson certainly thought highly of Price with whom he had
earlier worked, describing him as “without exception, the nicest man I ever met
in Hollywood.â€
If audiences were treated to something they hadn’t
expected when the lights came down on The
Raven, it wasn’t that they weren’t entertained over the film’s eighty-six
minutes. I won’t give away any plot
spoilers here (in the unlikely event that anyone reading this far has never seen
the film), but the story is a relatively simple one. Matheson’s original story explores the
tangled relationships of three sorcerers: the grieving-over-the-loss-of-his-wife Dr. Erasmus Craven (Price), the
comical Dr. Adolphus Bedlo (Lorre) and the sinister Dr. Scarabus
(Karloff). There’s also a fluffy subplot
involving the elder’s disapproval of a budding romantic relationship between
Bedlo’s son Rexford (a very young Jack Nicholson) and Craven’s daughter Estelle
(Olive Sturgess). The ghost of Price’s
late wife Lenore (the only character name mentioned in the original Poe poem)
is played to perfection by the ever lovely Hazel Court.
The Raven is
actually a very fun film and it scored at the box-office, reportedly making almost
four times its reported budget of $350,000. One of the reasons the film looked like more money had gone into it was due
to Daniel Haller’s elaborate sets. Always interested in keeping costs down, the sets were older constructions
from the four previous Poe adaptations re-purposed for the fifth. The ever budget-conscious Roger Corman’s keen
eye behind the camera could always be depended on to make it all look fresh. The film was also shot in a mere three weeks.
But with an empty shooting-schedule on one weekend of production, Corman choose
to make use of Boris Karloff’s availability - and the existing sets - by
shooting random scenes to be inserted into an as of yet unscripted film for
which he’d build a story around sooner or later. Well, sooner. The resulting film, The Terror, was released in the summer
of ’63, a mere half-year following the release of The Raven. God Bless Roger
Corman, the true King of the B’s.
This Kino Lorber Studio Classics Blu ray edition of The Raven is presented here in a
1920x1080p with an aspect ratio of 2.35:1 and dts sound and an attractive
slipcase cover. Aside from the
aforementioned Matheson segment, the set also includes the eight-minute
featurette Corman’ s Comedy of Poe: an
Interview with Producer/Director Roger Corman and an audio commentary track
by film historian David Del Valle. The
release rounds out with a “Trailers from Hall†segment courtesy of horror-centric
writer-director Mick Garris, the film’s original theatrical trailer as well as
an additional eight titles from Kino’s Vincent Price catalog.
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