By Hank Reineke
On the eve of the November 1963 release of TWICE TOLD
TALES, the British actor Sebastian Cabot would tell a reporter from the Copley
News Service, "They've been after me to do more of the horror pictures with
Vincent Price. I wouldn't mind that a
bit, though I must say I wouldn't want to do them exclusively." He intimated that he and his co-star had
discussed a possible future pairing in " light comedy" motion-picture. Alas, it was not to be; the two actors would
not work together again. Cabot, of
course, would soldier on and enjoy success as both a television personality and
a recognizable voice-over actor. Following
the passing of Boris Karloff in 1969, Vincent Price would reign as the big-screen''S uncontested "King of Horror". Cabot'S estimation of Price as an actor as "extremely adept at light-comedy" was incisive. Throughout his long and fabled career, Vincent Price;s on-screen
ghoulishness would nearly always be mitigated with a wry smile and twinkle in
the eye.
TWICE TOLD TALES is the second of two quickie vehicles
in which Price starred for Robert E. Kent's Admiral Pictures, Inc. (1962-1963). For their first pairing, DIARY OF A MADMAN
(released in March 1963 and distributed through United Artists), Kent mined the
imagination of the great French short-story writer Henri-René-Albert-Guy de
Maupassant. That film’s ballyhoo
proclaimed it “The Most Terrifying Motion Picture Ever Created!†It most
certainly wasn’t, but the film still managed to be a worthwhile psychological
thriller - though one that didn’t particularly resonate at the box-office. In what was obviously an attempt to
capitalize on the low-budget but big commercial success of Roger Corman’s Edgar
Allan Poe adaptations for A.I.P, Kent quickly changed course and ambitiously turned
to the short stories and novels of Nathanial Hawthorne for material.
Though a descendant of John Hathorne, the unrepentant
magistrate who presided over the fate of several innocents during Salem,
Massachusetts’s celebrated witch trials, Nathanial Hawthorne was a
romanticist: he was not prominently a
writer of mysteries or of fantastic fiction. Having said that, Hawthorne was not averse to penning a good ghost story
or two and his talent had won him the praise of contemporaries. One such fan was Edgar Allan Poe himself. In his review of Hawthorne’s two volume
collection of short stories TWICE TOLD TALES for Graham’s Magazine in May of
1842, Poe unabashedly pronounced the New Englander as “a man of truest genius…
As Americans, we feel proud of this book.â€
Of course Hollywood producers have always somehow
managed to take great creative liberties with the acknowledged classics. Stories of cigar-chomping producers passing
on tracts of classic literature so their stable of writers might “give ‘em a
polish†are legion. Though Roger
Corman’s series of Poe films both successfully and artistically mined the great
man’s work for their tortured characters, grim atmosphere and elements of plot,
Corman himself rarely offered filmgoers a straight-forward re-telling of any of
the doomed author’s fabled tales.
Producer-writer, Robert E. Kent seems to have taken a
similar, albeit far less successful, approach with his production of TWICE TOLD
TALES. Only segment two of this trilogy
film, “Rappaccini’s Daughter†closely resembles Hawthorne’s original story, and
even that diverges when at odds with cinematic expectations. In “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment,†a sinister
love-triangle between Dr. Carl Heidegger (the corpulent Sebastian Cabot), Alex
Medbourne (Price) and the recently revived but still exquisite corpse of Sylvia
Ward (Marie Blanchard) is re-engineered as to feature an original - if
salacious - back-story. This “Virgin
Spring†elixir-of-eternal-youth morality-fable plays out with little fidelity to
the original tale.
Such creative-license is stretched to the breaking
point with the film’s final episode, “The House of the Seven Gables.†This segment bears little resemblance to Hawthorne’s
celebrated novel, but it has borrowed elements from the better known – and far
more lavish – 1940 Universal film of the same title. The Universal film, perhaps not
coincidentally, also featured Vincent Price in a starring role, though this
tale, too, strayed far from Hawthorne’s original. Though I recall no physical blood-letting in
the Hawthorne novel, in TWICE TOLD TALES the sanguine red fluid pours freely– and
mostly unconvincingly, it must be said - from ceilings, walls, portraits, and
lockets. The Pyncheon’s family’s metaphorical
skeleton-in-the-closet becomes all too real in this rather uninspired
re-working.
Part of the film’s original marketing stratagem was the
offer of “FREE COFFEE in the lobby to settle your nerves!†One might suggest, with a measure of
cynicism, that such brew was a necessary component in helping to keep audiences
awake. TWICE TOLD TALES is, to be
generous, a very good ninety-minute film. The problem is that the filmmakers stretched this ninety-minute film to an
interminable two-hour running time.
This is a “sitting room†or “parlor†film; most of the
action (as it is) takes place in mildly claustrophobic confines of small home
settings with long stretches of unbroken dialogue. There are very few provocative set-pieces employed
over the course of three segments and the most ambitious of these, the deadly
and poisonous garden of Dr. Giacomo Rappaccini (Price), is only experienced in sun-soaked
broad daylight. This supposedly lethal
garden is both terribly over-lit and ill-disguised in its construction (the
seams of the faux-grass mats are clearly visible). As such, this potentially visual and cinematic
garden of death portends little of its intended menace. If only love-struck suitor Giovanni Guasconti
(Brett Halsey) could have encountered the beautiful but lethal Beatrice
Rappaccini (Joyce Taylor) in a blue-swathed moonlight setting, the garden’s mysterious
atmosphere would have been instantly heightened.
Kent’s too-wordy screenplay suffers occasional patches
of purple prose, but it’s serviceable. There are a couple of great moments: Cabot’s toast of the glass prior to his experimental drinking of a fluid
that may or may not kill him (“To eternal youth, or just eternity?â€). In “Rappaccini’s Daughter†we’re not sure, at
first, of who is a prisoner to whom. Is
it the estranged daughter to the father, or the father to the daughter? When all is made clear, we can better understand
the poisoned daughter’s bitter complaint, “The only difference from being dead
is that this house is bigger than a grave.â€
TWICE TOLD TALES is no classic, but it’s not unworthy
of one’s time. Vincent Price is, as
always, brilliant in all three of the villainous roles he inhabits. The supporting cast is mostly great as well,
and Kent, unashamedly, brings aboard several of the familiar players who earlier
worked with Corman on the Poe series. Director
Sidney Salkow was, sadly, no auteur. Though he had been directing and writing films – and bringing them in
under or on budget - for both
independent and major studios as early as 1936, it’s clear he was most
interested in producing a satisfying checkmark in the company’s profit ledger and
not terribly concerned with film-as-art. Though Salkow’s films are never less than
competent, they’re generally pedestrian and not particularly memorable. As helmsman, Salkow simply possessed none of
Corman’s visual-style or displayed any ability to stage an impressive production
on a shoestring budget.
To be fair, Corman had advantages. His gothic films were European in design: his settings were of torch-lit gloomy and
brooding castles, of misty streets of cobblestone and black twisted tree-limbs. Two of the TWICE TOLD TALES, on the other
hand, are set in the non-atmospheric repose of 19th-century small-town
America. With the small exception of a creepy
sequence in which a thunder and lightning-storm disturbs a tomb that had been
sealed for thirty-eight years (and sits, inexplicably, just to the rear of Dr.
Heidegger’s back-door), the dressing that surrounds TWICE TOLD TALES demonstrates little
of the macabre ingredients necessary for mounting a successful horror film.
This release from Kino-Lorber Studio Classics presents
TWICE TOLD TALES for the first time in the U.S. in a Blu-Ray edition. The film is presented in Technicolor and in its
original 1.66:1 ratio. Bonus features
include an optional commentary from film scholars Richard Harland Smith and
Perry Martin, as well as trailers for the title film as well as Corman’s TALES
OF TERROR and BLACK SABBATH. A brief
“Trailers from Hell†segment is also included, courtesy of Mick Garris.
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