The Raven (1963)

The Raven (1963)

Dir. Roger Corman

Written by Richard Matheson

Starring Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, Boris Karloff, Hazel Court, Olive Sturgess, Jack Nicholson

How in the world do you make a movie based on The Raven? Never mind that it’s just a hair over a thousand words long; it’s also one of the least narrative, least cinematic scenarios you could possibly imagine as the basis for a motion picture. Here is everything that happens in the entire poem (spoilers for The Raven): A sad guy sits in a chair, hears knocking, walks over to the door, finds no one there, walks over to the window, a bird flies in and sits on a statue above his door, and he yells at it a bit, while the bird responds by saying “nevermore” six times. The end. That’s it, that’s all that happens. Even trying to fill it out by, I dunno, flashing back to the backstory with Lenore --which would be just the worst-- you got maybe 15 minutes of screen time in there, and that’s if you reaaally drag it out. So it’s actually kind of ballsy that the movie starts burning through the poem from frame one. And not just by having some guy sitting around once upon a midnight dreary, but with an actual recitation. As Vincent Price (MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH) samples each syllable of Poe’s verse like a fine brandy, while some kind of psychedelic slideshow plays in the background, it’s almost bold enough to make you wonder, wow, are they really gonna go for it?

  

They make it all of three verses into the poem before abandoning it.

But to its credit, the film at least assumes we know the poem well enough that it’s a big laugh moment when a ‘stately Raven of the saintly days of yore’ does indeed interrupt Price’s melancholy musings to answer him... but doesn’t say what you expect it to. Instead, it’s a sassy talking animal sidekick. What the fuck is this, Dr. Dolittle?*

Fortunately, the talking bird is quickly transformed into a man -- of sorts, anyway. By which I mean both that the transformation is not complete (leaving him with bird wings and a tail) and that the object of its transformation --one Peter Lorre (THE COMEDY OF TERRORS)-- was by this point looking less like a human and more like a gloomy half-reassembled humpty-dumpty. Lennon may have been the Walrus,** I don’t know, but I can damn well tell you that Lorre is the Eggman.

            The “Raven,” it seems, is actually Dr. Bedlo, a surly alcoholic wizard who has been transformed into an animal by his powerful and sinister colleague Dr. Scarabus (Boris Karloff, THE RAVEN [1935]), with whom Price’s mild-mannered conjurer also has some bad blood due to Scarabus’s usurping of his proper place in a wizards’ society formerly headed by his fath… wait just a damned minute, what the fuck? Wizards society? **ejects disc, inspects label** It says THE RAVEN. Did they send me the wrong disc or something? Is this like that time my buddy watched THE GODFATHER on VHS and mistakenly put the second tape*** on first, and watched it all the way to the end before realizing that no, that opening scene without any titles where James Cann gets machine-gunned to death out of the blue was not some kind of arty, intentionally confusing way to throw the audience off-balance?

            But no, there is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. This adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s timeless rumination on madness and loss is a silly, slapstick comedy about feuding wizards, set specifically in the 16th century for absolutely no discernible reason. Granted, adapting The Raven into a movie was always an impossible task, but equal amounts of shame and respect to screenwriter Richard Matheson (THE COMEDY OF TERRORS,**** which also featured Price, Lorre, and Karloff) for just giving up and writing something totally unrelated and then having the balls to type “The Raven, based on the poem by Edgar Allan Poe” at the top. Of course, he and Roger Corman had been up to this sort of chicanery for some time already, having churned out four Poe adaptations in the three years since 1960’s THE HOUSE OF USHER,***** none of them likely to exactly overwhelm a viewer with their strict fidelity to the source material. But reciting the first three stanzas of a poem and then throwing the whole thing out the window and making up some malarky about wizards is pretty bold, even for the kind of director who would finish a film and then notice the sets hadn’t been torn down and Boris Karloff’s bus hadn’t arrived yet, and take that as inspiration to squeeze an entire second movie out of them (which Corman would do following this very film, resulting in THE TERROR just a few months later).

            Anyway, my point is you either laugh that off and enjoy THE RAVEN for what it is, or you start to notice what it isn’t and gradually descend into violent madness, culminating in you becoming a deranged gimmick slasher who uses a trained raven to peck out the eyes of your hapless victims while you babble at them about magic in Vincent Price’s voice. I obviously chose the former route, but if you settle on the latter, more power to you. In fact, I’d kind of like to see that movie.

            Say, remember how in TWIXT Val Kilmer plays a hack horror writer named Hall Baltimore who solves a vampiric mystery in his dreams with the help of Edgar Allan Poe? Well, I’m thinking sequel, baby.

            So! Yes. Right. Where was I? Oh yes, THE RAVEN. So, THE RAVEN is about as much of a horror movie as it is a David Lean epic, but as a comedy, it's pretty endearing. There’s not a tremendous amount of plot; basically, Dr. Beldo enlists Price’s Dr. Craven (anticipating the trend of naming horror characters after Wes Craven an impressive nine years before anyone would know who that was) to challenge his adversary Dr. Scarabus, an errand which Craven is reluctant to become engaged in until Bedlo reveals that while he was at Scarabus's castle, he noticed someone who looks an awful lot like Craven’s lost wife Lenore (Hazel Court, THE CURSE OF FRANKENSTEIN, MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH, looking amused, but mostly content to let her cleavage do the acting, which it manages admirably). Craven is skeptical, but agrees to go along, and they’re accompanied by Craven’s daughter (Olive Sturgess, The Bob Cummings Show) and Bedlo’s son (Jack Nicholson, MARS ATTACKS!) so that there are occasionally at least a few people under the age of 60 on-screen. Once they arrive at Scarabus’s garishly-decorated abode (the quartet of life-sized dragon statues which periodically belch fire is admittedly attention-grabbing, but a little gauche), it’s a simple matter of watching three old hams indulge their silliest inclinations as actors while we wait for a magic-wielding special effects show for a finale.

            It’s pretty fluffy stuff, of course, a scenario which barely remembers to coagulate into anything resembling a story, let alone insist on any serious stakes. But it matters very little when you have Price, Lorre, and Karloff, none of them with so much as a fleeting thought towards subtlety, working to entertain as diligently as they ever have in a trio of careers which were devoted nearly exclusively to that goal (Nicholson, of course, would become a ham at least as shameless as any of them, but he was still to young here to really cut loose******). It helps that they don’t step on each other’s toes; the three leads could all have been interchangeably cast in any of these roles, but each part is broadly archetypal enough to allow its respective performer plenty of room to make it distinct. Karloff embodies the nefarious matinee villain with impish glee, while Price, playing the good guy for once, brings a kind of bemused, unassuming sweetness which nicely complements Karloff’s primary-colored cartoon villainy. Lorre, depressed and struggling with weight and morphine and disappointment over his diminishing career prospects, adds just a shade of nuance to his belligerent, craven bum of a wizard, if only by virtue of looking tired and defeated even through his most bellicose scenes. Every syllable seems to demand an impossible effort that he’s just barely able to summon at the last minute. Which may be uncomfortably close to the truth; he was dead just a little over a year later. But he must have been having at least a little fun -- multiple sources claim he improvised a handful of the film’s funniest lines.

            The script offers some urbanely funny lines on its own, but Corman’s direction cultivates a languid hang-out vibe that leaves it awfully slack and leisurely for a comedy, despite some able slapstick. There are some legitimate chuckles in there, but it’s more ingratiating than hilarious. Probably not a great trade, but certainly an acceptable consolation prize, because with Karloff, Price, and Lorre nearly always on-screen, it’s never less than watchable. The impeccable cast is aided in that regard by an unusually opulent-looking production, featuring colorful, gaudy costumes, the impressively expansive sets which Corman would repurpose (albeit in far more spartan form) in THE TERROR, and an unexpectedly nifty special effects bonanza at the climax, showcasing a range of charmingly hand-crafted magic tricks which, while never remotely convincing, are so finely-tuned to play to the film and the actors’ sense of humor that they pack more punch than most 200 million dollar productions do today.

            The end result is a film which is very much not Poe, but very much is Roger Corman: chintzy and campy and a little lumpy, but also far too scrappy and imaginative and committed to entertaining to resist. Corman would later claim, “Overall I would say we had as good a spirit on THE RAVEN as any film I've ever worked on,” and although you always have to take Corman with a grain of salt (he’s always one hustle ahead of himself), here I’m inclined to not only believe him, but to feel confident that spirit is visible on-screen. Between Price, Karloff, Lorre, Corman and Matheson, this is about as pristine example as the medium has ever provided of a group of consummate pros working squarely in the center of their comfort zone and just fucking around having fun. Would this team ever rise to such heights again? Quoth the Raven “Neverm-- nah, I’m just fucking with you, even I’ve got too much dignity to end on that note. Which is, not coincidentally, the exact note the movie ends on. THE RAVEN is a movie made by people utterly without shame --you know, the kind of people who would adapt The Raven into an 86-minute comedy about wizards-- but if you’re willing to find that charming rather than mortifying, the film has quite a lot of charm indeed.

PS: I recently visited the Edgar Allan Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia, and noticed that they had an original poster for this movie prominently displayed in their reading room. It was, however, a poster for the film’s German release, under the title DER RABE, leaving one to the daunting task of trying to surmise how this confusing montage of magic spells and flying wizards would be interpreted by any visitor to the museum not familiar with the poem’s German title. 

* Please note my demure use of italics rather than caps for that title, to subtly suggest to you that I, as a gentleman of class and erudition, am referring to the series of 1920s children's novels by British author Hugh Lofting, and not the shrill and exhausting comedies of the same name starring Rex Harrison (1967) and Eddie Murphy (1998). 

** Just kidding, I think we all know who the walrus was #WalrusYes.

*** Only 90’s kids will remember!

**** Matheson, of course, accumulated a solid portfolio of screenplays over the years, but was best known for his horror novels and short stories, most notably the immortal I Am Legend.

***** Matheson wrote only three of those four; 1962’s THE PREMATURE BURIAL was a Ray Russell / Charles Beaumont script. Corman and Beaumont would get arguably even more lackadaisical about the source material the next year, when they put out an adaptation of Lovecraft’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward under the name THE HAUNTED PALACE and called it a Poe adaptation! Now that’s just confusing!

****** Although a sequence which finds him possessed and furiously driving a carriage does give a hint at what’s to come, what with his unhinged shouting and all. But mostly he seems a little self-conscious here, which is understandable given how miserable he is at the old-fashioned dialogue which plays to exactly none of his strengths.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2018 CHECKLIST!

Searching For Bloody Pictures

TAGLINE	The Macabre Masterpiece of Terror! There are lies, damned lies, and Roger Corman taglines.
TITLE ACCURACY	Spectacularly inaccurate, almost stunningly so
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	In only the meanest theoretical way.
SEQUEL?	None, though part of Corman’s “Poe cycle” which ran from 1960-1965 and included eight adaptations.
REMAKE?	No, although there is both a 1935 film of the same name and a dire 2012 version.
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Wizards? Poe Adaptations, I guess.
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None. Well, Jack Nicholson would go on to be kind a big deal eventually I guess.
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	All.
NUDITY?	None
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	None
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	Some Raven biting, and later a bat
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Zombie, actually, in a weird scene that is never referenced again
POSSESSION?	Breifly, yes
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	None
MADNESS?	No
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	Bird into Peter Lorre! And back again!
VOYEURISM?	None
MORAL OF THE STORY	If you’re going to lie about adapting one of literature’s greatest triumphs into a schlock b-movie, at least lie big.