#WTW: The Pit and the Pendulum

(Boo! It's #WhatThomWatched #24....)

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.

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#WTW: The Day the Earth Stood Still

(Cries of faint praise! here's #WhatThomWatched #20)

The Day the Earth Stood Still

(1951, Robert Wise; Fox disk)

For genre- and old-movie fans, The Day the Earth Stood Still is an unassailable 1950’s landmark; for millennials, one imagines that it’s almost completely unknown (despite a bombed 2008 update with — whoa — Keanu Reeves as Klaatu). And then for some of us gen-xers, too young to have seen it anywhere other than on the UHF late show, it’s mostly remembered as the lead-off to the Rocky Horror Picture Show; in its three opening lines, “Science Fiction Double Feature” and those disembodied lips neatly summarize the entire plot: “Michael Rennie was ill . . . . but he told us where we stand.” (Well, “Michael Rennie was shot accidentally by a nervous United States serviceman as a metaphor for the state of anxiety and paranoia that gripped the world during the Cold War” might have been more accurate, but it wouldn’t have scanned.)

Yes, this is the one where a seamless space saucer plunks down on a ballpark near the White House and a placid, affable, well-spoken alien comes out, accompanied by an all-powerful bodyguard, the robot Gort. They have a message for mankind, in response to its recent unlocking of atomic power. Washington’s finest play it cool and don’t overreact much — it’s just one bullet that puts alien Klaatu in Walter Reade hospital when he tries to pull the hostess gift he brought for Earth out of his pocket. (He’s fine, of course; he walks out of his room to try and find someone more reasonable to talk to, and eventually hooks up with Earth’s most famous scientist, the Einstein stand-in Professor Barnhardt.)

Day stands as perhaps the most famous example of high-minded, socially conscious science fiction of the 1950s. Along with the pure pulp, dimestore-rack thrills of  Not of This Earth or It Conquered the World (and many others) came several of these films — When Worlds Collide, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and the superb Forbidden Planet among them — but Day was one of the first. It’s also lovely, with gorgeous technical work and seamless special effects, truly exemplary of the time, and with a historic double-theremin soundtrack by Bernard Herrmann. It gets many details right, whether by design or chance; the unknown-in-the-States Rennie creates an alien with an aloof dignity which wouldn’t have worked with a bigger star; it’s hard to imagine Spencer Tracy working in the role, for instance, as great an actor as he was. He’s just too recognizable. Similarly, the metal behemoth Gort is as smooth and impenetrable as the spaceship; other than a before-the-fact resemblance to the 1970’s Battlestar Galactica Cylons with the visor and red light/death ray, it’s completely unknown and its motives are unreadable.

But, still . . . . there are tropes. Maybe inevitably so; it’s a source of the tropes, after all. It’s the classic aliens-as-guardians-of-the-universe story, with an edge of menace — get it right, Earth, or you’ll be sorry. There’s a curious little boy who befriends the alien and figures out the truth before anyone else; there’s the protective mother who ends up protecting the mission; there’s a scientist as an ally against the fearful man on the street. The actual beats must have been recognizable even in 1951, especially to the core audience of Astounding Stories pulp readers: emissary from the stars, triggered by our development of the bomb; a perfect, implacable weapon-slash-protector-slash-healer (really, is there anything Gort can’t do? it’s probably also the perfect can opener a la Padgett’s “The Proud Robot.”*) And yet — the military/government is well-meaning (it’s a jealous man mistaking Klaatu for a romantic rival who causes the trouble; weapons and fighting are taken off the table quickly (even a fatal gunshot is, in the end, harmless). The “demonstration of power to the entire world” concept is standard but the non-lethal form it takes here is not. For a movie with a flying saucer and a giant tank-splodin’ robot, there’s a notable lack of luridness.

And there’s no suspense for viewers in that we know Klaatu is a good person; the tension only centers on whether or not he can complete his mission in time by keeping his few allies on his side. What must his home civilization be like, based on the sparse clues in the film? He sees no point in joining in the boarding house residents’ card game (he just stops short of saying “We don’t play games”), and he’s amused by a music box (implying again that it’s pointless). He’s more interested in little Bobby, seeming to sense that the child’s natural curiosity is a better fit for his message of non-aggression than any of the adults. The implication is that the extraterrestrials aren’t much different than us but have solved several inevitable societal issues: their bodies are similar, but advances in medicine including eliminating cancer have extended their lifespan**; they apparently have our same warlike tendency but their automated justice system tamps it down (as with Padgett’s “Two-Handed Engine.”*) They don’t seem to be welcoming Earth into an interplanetary treaty of some kind — it’s not as if they will continue to gift their technology and advances beyond some tokens. Their mastery of power/electricity/endothermic reactions would indicate that they could solve all of Earth’s power issues wholesale. A “use of power” anxiety in the 1950’s is the U.S. version of a Godzilla movie for Japan; both are reactions to the bomb. An alien force which explicitly nullifies weapons (guns and tanks vanish, but the power shutdown would indicate the ability to stop a bomb blast too) specifically forces the United States to consider what its foreign powers and policies would be in the absence of sticks — would our carrots alone be enough to “lead the world”?

Reminds me of:

Lots of movies recall shots in Day. Time Bandits similarly opens with a series of dissolves from deep space into Earth (and Gilliam’s film reverses this at its end). Montages of the general populace listening to radio news broadcasts are reminiscent of any number of films, most recently for me Thieves Like Us — though there are clever innovations of this here, as when Rennie walks alone on deserted streets and the sound is completely given over to the broadcast as he sees person after person listening to radios through various windows. There are television news montages as well; the use of playback monitors in shots with broadcasters again mirrors many films, with Manchurian Candidate coming to mind. Klaatu helps Professor Barnhardt with the math problem left on his blackboard — is this a common wish-fulfillment dream for a would-be intellectual, as in the opening scene of Rushmore?

The very simple and effective double-exposure techniques remind me of Jean Cocteau’s work from just before, in La belle et la bête or Orphée. Director Wise himself used equally beautiful and simple effects in The Haunting a couple years later, creating utter dread with a simple reversed black/white shot; here, tracking light points and light burns create spaceships and nullify weapons. The Gort effects work in a similar way; the idea of solid metal flexing fluidly like rubber seems pretty obvious now (it is made of rubber) but must have been uncanny then — I’m reminded of Padgett’s “The Twonky”* where the lead’s new hi-fi console unexpectedly starts walking around the apartment on its plastic legs, which suddenly can bend and flex.

I also liked the simple circular design of Klaatu’s ship, and the computer interface which is both gestural and voice-based — shades of the Doctor’s TARDIS interior. Speaking of the ship, the pivotal Gort/Klaatu scene reverses the “mad scientist animates corpse/robot/monster on a slab” trope from Frankenstein, Metropolis, The Rocky Horror Picture Show and the like, with the “monster” reviving the “doctor/scientist” figure. In many ways, that reversal encapsulates the entire film’s approach — it’s a kind of anti-horror film.

But then — the guilt!

There are so, so, so many classics of science fiction that I’ve never seen: When Worlds Collide. Destination Moon. Conquest of Space. DVD Savant fave Invaders from Mars. I could take a year and just focus on these and others from the 1950’s and 1960’s.

I don’t particularly feel guilty about skipping the Keanu remake.

Pitch:

The actors aren’t really in Washington D.C., but there’s plenty of great second-unit location shooting and rear-projection that puts the actors on my home turf. Bobby and Klaatu’s visit to the Lincoln Memorial is one of my favorite scenes — surely we are expected to compare the giant stone Lincoln to Klaatu’s Gort — another kind of peacekeeper? “These are great words,” Klaatu comments as he reads the Gettysburg Address. “He must have been a great man.”

* Lewis Padgett is a pseudonym for the unbelievably great husband-and-wife science fiction team of Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, who published from 1941 until Kuttner’s death in 1958. I adore the stories mentioned and many, many more. I could have shoehorned in an allusion to “Mimsy Were the Borogoves” too, but I didn’t want to push it. All these stories are in The Best of Henry Kuttner — the same edition I loved almost 40 years ago is out of print in hardcover but it’s currently on Kindle for three bucks. 

** I don’t usually wink at unintentional ironies in otherwise great movies, but the scene where the doctors discuss Klaatu’s health — they think he’s 35, but he’s 70 with a life expectancy of 130 — is funny; just as the one is saying “So how does he explain that?” they are both lighting cigarettes.

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