The Pit and the Pendulum
(1961, Roger Corman; from The Vincent Price Collection, Shout! Factory disk set)
From Brian De Palma’s horror-movie homage to the real thing: The Pit and the Pendulum*, a prime entry in the Vincent Price/Roger Corman series of collaborations based on Edgar Allan Poe stories and themes. In addition to being the films that really put Price on the map, these are often cited as the best examples of how Corman’s low-budget, streamlined-process filmmaking could turn out gorgeous and even groundbreaking results: he knows where to put the money (scripts by Richard Matheson and other top talents, a couple of eye-popping setpieces) and where it can be saved (very limited sets and little-to-no location shooting, public domain stories, costumes and props recycled from other films). The only other key thing he needed was a troupe of actors who knew how to commit 100% no matter what the premise. Price can be accused of hammy overacting, but that’s what works for these scripts, and no one did it better.
As with the other Poe films by Corman, the script takes its title and one act (the final section) from the short story and fills out a full-length movie by inventing story elements that are Poe-esque. Here, John Kerr travels from England to the castle of his brother-in-law in 16th-century Spain to investigate the reported death of his sister (Barbara Steele) six months earlier. There he meets the tightly-wound Price, his sister’s widower; Price’s younger sister (Luana Anders); and the family physician (Antony Carbone). Kerr pushes and pries for details, eventually getting the story out of the Spaniards: rather than the “rare blood disease” cover story the household has been telling, Steele had been going crazy — becoming obsessed with the castle’s collection of Inquisition-era torture devices — and eventually locked herself in an iron maiden, literally (per her husband’s reluctant retelling and Carbone’s confirmation) dying of fright. Furthermore, as Anders reveals to Kerr (who doesn’t buy this whole story but sticks around to investigate), there’s a whole back-story to poor Price’s jumpiness; when he was a child living in the same castle, he happened to witness the death of his mother and her lover at the vengeful hands of his inquisitor father (also played by Price). Therefore the latter-day Price is a nervous wreck, terrified by his own house and the memories that live there. The screw is turned another notch when Kerr demands to see his sister’s remains; as he and Carbone disinter Steele’s corpse, Price protests that it was Steele’s worst fear to be sealed in a casket alive . . . . of course, in her absence, this fear has been transferred to her doting husband, and when her (his!) nightmare scenario is confirmed, it’s time for Price to go over the edge. (Which, needless to say, is what we as the audience have been waiting for.)
Plenty of critics (many contemporary to the film; fewer but still some today) accuse Price of scenery-chewing here, but whatever you may say about Price and his acting style, it’s undeniable that he can convey internal states using his face and eyes and with his body and carriage. Here he gets to play a completely corrupted evil guy, a kind and even likable good guy, and finally that same good guy driven utterly insane, and you can tell that last just from his childlike expression of confusion:
Note that all of this has very little connection to the source story. The original is tied to the Spanish Inquisition, but anachronistically takes place a couple hundred years after its heyday, while the film is more realistically set during it. Poe’s story is primarily a first-person account of torture, with a bizarre and inexplicable device (a room with a descending blade, a bottomless pit, and walls that can both push inward and become red-hot) and unseen torturers with unknowable motivations; it creates pure terror in the reader, nothing more or less. The film takes the Spanish setting and the idea of a descending, swinging razor blade (centered in a pit), but then has to build the rest of the story around it. Matheson chooses Gothic themes that are very common to Poe’s work: premature burial, grief over the death of a beloved woman, generations doomed to repeat tragedies, and inevitable descent into madness. There’s no supernatural theme in this one; the horrors of the torture implements in the mansion and the Inquisition in general seem to hang over everything, but there’s no literal ghost or spirit. All told, other than a very credulous reliance on nose-on-the-face Freudianism (apparently a common Corman trope), this plot is relatively “realistic” — for a Price horror role, anyway. (All eight Corman “Poe movies” similarly spin out loosely from their source material; some are better efforts than others, but they all use the talents of either Matheson or another Twilight Zone stalwart, Charles Beaumont, with only one exception — and that one (The Tomb of Ligeia) was written by Robert Towne!)
Reminds me of:
Anthology television shows from the same decade like The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits, many episodes of which also are set-bound and tend to use simple/recycled props and set dressing. This works particularly well for the small screen; it forces the viewer to pay attention to the story and acting, not to spectacle. As with Corman, Rod Serling and the other producers of these shows knew where to spend their money; Twilight Zone for example shot most of their episodes on film even as they worked around many standing sets and other less expensive locations, creating a high-quality look that stands up today despite the fact that there are few custom setpieces. And speaking of these shows, it’s easy to look at the mysteriously slashed portrait of Steele and think of Serling’s 1970’s horror anthology Night Gallery.
The movie opens with an abstract scene of swirling oil colors, now somewhat of a 1960’s cliché given the heavy use of similar effects in later “groovy” visuals, often coupled with psychedelic music. But it’s easy to imagine that in 1961 this opening was an excellent lead-in for the weird, non-specific dream landscape of the film including Kerr arriving on a desolate and unpopulated landscape, staring out at the mansion perched on the edge of a cliff. (Non-objective color fields aren’t completely out of use, either — P. T. Anderson uses color fields by the artist Jeremy Blake to open and set off sections of Punch-Drunk Love, for example.)
Speaking of color — of course this and the other Corman Poe movies have riotously rich color in many scenes (I’m looking forward to watching The Masque of the Red Death in particular on that score) . . . but here we also have the flashback sequence, which is shot black-and-white and then processed into a rich blue and/or red (and filtered, and distorted). This is nothing new as an emotional elevation technique but I’m reminded most recently of Youth of the Beast and the black-and-white-to-color games that Suzuki plays there.
But then — the guilt!
Horror film experts have so much experience with these films and can cite myriad ways that this and other Corman movies influenced later productions, especially Italian giallo films and British gothics from Hammer Films. I am so far behind that I’ll never catch up — horror is just not my main bag. That said, this is just the first Vincent Price movie I’m watching out of the two Shout! Factory box sets I’ve got (plus The Fly, plus Shout! has announced an upcoming third Price box), not to mention the rest of the Val Lewton box . . . this all amounts to a mere fraction of the genre but it’ll keep me busy for a while.
Pitch:
Stephen King has cited the first big shock scare in Pit as “the most important moment in the post-1960 horror film,” which is a darn-near impeccable recommendation for anyone interested in horror history. For me, it’s my first time to really watch actress Barbara Steele in action after years of reading reverent tributes to her in my “weird movie” books, and she’s as amazing as advertised. Her first moment of reversal — where her true nature is revealed — is chilling, and played far more naturalistically than Price (as good as he is here).
* The actual title of the film is unclear; all of the promotional materials for the film call it The Pit and the Pendulum, but the on-screen title card (which many reference sources, IMDb included, take as the correct name for a work)
leaves off the “The” — Pit and the Pendulum.
leaves off the “The” — Pit and the Pendulum.
No comments:
Post a Comment