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.

The Terror (1963)

The Terror (1963)

Dir by (deep breath) Roger Corman (only credited director), Francis Ford Coppola (!), Jack Hale, Monte Hellman, Jack Hill, Dennis Jakob, Jack Nicholson

Written by Leo Gordon, Jack Hill

Starring Jack Nicholson, Boris Karloff, Sandra Knight, Dick Miller, Sandra Neumann

First off --and as near as I can tell I am the first living person with the particular cross-section of personality flaws that would allow for the discovery of this fact-- the establishing shots of the imposing castle punctuated by lightning that begin THE TERROR are clearly the inspiration for the animated establishing shot of a isolated castle which was first used in Johnny Quest (which began production the next year), but subsequently became better known as the Laboratory of Dr. Weird, South Jersey Shore, in Aqua Teen Hunger Force, the show so powerful it once shut down the city of Boston.

Behold!

That might seem like an odd detail to begin on, but it’s actually the most appropriate starting point imaginable, because THE TERROR is all about Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. In fact, that’s how it came to exist in the first place. Having just completed THE RAVEN, Roger Corman decided to take advantage of the fact that the sets had not yet been torn down and he still had Boris Karloff’s phone number, to shoot two days of Karloff basically just doing stuff in an impressive (but increasingly sparsely decorated) castle set, figuring they’d fill in the rest of the plot later. Karloff was understandably reluctant, but was somehow convinced it would be an easy payday when he was promised $15,000 once the film had grossed $150,000. Apparently more of an optimist than his long history in the industry would lead one to imagine, Karloff somehow thought this was possible (it didn’t even come close). When three years passed and it became clear Karloff was never going to see that money, Corman then dangled the offer of finally collecting on that elusive $15,000 bonus… if Karloff would star in one more movie for him (which turned out to be 1968’s Peter Bogdanovich-directed TARGETS). And that’s how Roger Corman turned one castle set into two no-budget horror thrillers and three Boris Karloff projects (or at least, three films with Boris Karloff’s name on the poster). Don’t feel bad, Boris, there’s no shame in losing to the best.

Amazingly, despite all that, the movie isn’t a total disaster. It’s pretty narratively unfocused, of course, but it does have a story that, while a bit haphazardly plotted, is at least vaguely identifiable. Like some of the Italian movies of its era, it gets by on a kind of hazy dream logic, where nothing exactly makes complete sense in any kind of concrete, rational way, but the broad strokes of the drama are clear enough. It even builds to a kind of legitimately crazy twist which I gotta admit, I never saw coming (because it comes out of fucking nowhere and they apparently made it up in editing when they realized that the movie they had shot made no sense, but still).

So what is the story? Uh, that’s a little hard to pin down, exactly. But basically, it involves a Napoleonic soldier (Jack Nicholson! LITTLE SHOP OF HORROR) who nearly drowns in the ocean like a damned idiot while pursuing the silent ghostly apparition of a woman named Helene (Sandra Knight, BLOOD BATH, and newly married to Nicholson [they would divorce in 1968, the same year Karloff finally got paid]). It’s immediately obvious to everyone except Nicholson that Helene is a ghost, but this fucking moron cannot get that fact through his skull no matter how many times she disappears impossibly right in front of him or people tell him no, Helene’s been dead for years. So he goes to a nearby castle occupied by Baron Von Leppe (Boris Karloff, THE RAVEN, THE TERROR, TARGETS) and demands that he be allowed to stay there until he can find this mystery girl, despite the fact that the Baron and everybody else tell him directly that there is no girl there, and this is a private residence and not a fucking boarding house for horny soldiers trying to bang the local ghostly co-eds. (Incidentally, this is exactly why we have a Third Amendment in the US Constitution, so Jack Nicholson can’t just show up at your house and say he’s gonna hang out there while he tries to seal the deal with the ghost of a dead queen or whatever). Of course, this inevitably leads to a convoluted mystery about who Helene is and why she is haunting the place, and I mean really convoluted, because it involves witchcraft, hypnotism, possession, spousal infidelity, Dick Miller, murder, mistaken identity, and dissociative identity disorder (all that was a spoiler, I guess, but good luck trying to figure out how it all fits together. Heck, I just saw the movie, and even I could barely offer a theory about how exactly it's all supposed to work).

Nicholson is a complete, unmitigated disaster with the stilted old-fashioned dialogue, which handily defuses every single one of his strengths as an actor (and has there ever been a more thoroughly modern actor, less suited to antiquarian affectations, than Jack Nicholson?) but Karloff, even on set for a scant few days, acting with only the vaguest hint of a script while the sets were being dismantled around him, still puts in the effort. He has this little thing he does, where he mischievously arches one eyebrow, which I am just incapable of not falling for. It exemplifies exactly why he works here and Nicholson doesn’t; Nicholson is trying to play a character here, and there’s just nothing for him to work with. Karloff, on the other hand, is just trying to entertain. “Me, act? I just make faces,” said his THE RAVEN co-star Peter Lorre,* a cheeky but somewhat revealing insight into the style of acting employed by much of the generation which preceded Nicholson. Karloff, for his part, makes great faces, big and broad and theatrical but (mostly) without irony. He’s not mugging or indulging in any kind of arch camp (like his other RAVEN co-star, Vincent Price), he just figures that hey, the kids paid good money** to see this turkey, might as well give them the maximum possible acting by volume. Hell, they even managed to drag the 76-year-old actor (he was born in 1887) into a fight scene in chest-deep water, which honestly seems like it would qualify as elder abuse. I guarantee he had no idea what the hell he was doing, but he always knows to be entertaining, which is every bit what a movie like this requires.  

The movie itself is a little less lively than Karloff; there’s a little bit of action, a couple minor setpiece sequences, but mostly it finds a nice groove of spooky, dreamy ghost story, and parts of it actually look quite nice. There’s a sequence with a rotating multi-colored lantern that casts different colors on Dick Miller’s face which would be recycled for Karloff’s CURSE OF THE CRIMSON ALTAR and probably looks even better here. It’s uneventful and the acting is sometimes a little dodgy, but it looks suitably stately, and certainly not like a movie which was thrown together haphazardly in a matter of days just to get some extra value out of a corny castle set. Hell, there are a dozen major-budget movies which came out this year which don’t look half as good. It’s twice as coherent and five times prettier than SUICIDE SQUAD, for example. Not that it’s a visual feast or anything, it just makes the most of some nice-looking sets and locations, in classic Corman style doing as much as possible with as few resources as possible. The huge entrance hall he purloined from THE RAVEN has been stripped to almost nothing compared with its imposing opulence in that movie (you really miss the fire-breathing statues, which really tied the place together in my opinion) but just to make sure the space doesn’t look entirely drab, Corman or one of his dozen uncredited directors*** sprinkle the background liberally with brightly colored candlesticks arranged in geometric formations. It couldn’t have cost more than ten bucks, but exactly the sort of thing that separates a lazy, monotonous cheap movie from a watchable one.

            I’m not saying it’s a classic or anything, but if you’re a fan of this era of Corman schlock (it is often grouped with his Poe movies, even though it’s an outlier which, unlike THE RAVEN or THE HAUNTED PALACE doesn’t even pretend to be based on Poe) it’s got the vibe you want. And hey, that set from THE RAVEN does look fly as hell. There are certainly worse reasons to make a movie.

            * See Stephen Youngkin’s biography of Lorre, The Lost One: A Life of Peter Lorre

            ** Although you don’t have to, as in their haste to crank THE TERROR out they neglected to add copyright information to the credits. I highly recommend that you avail yourself of this very nice-looking youtube version instead of the VHS-quality one that Amazon Prime, with their usual shamelessness, is trying to hustle as content for their paid service, the charlatans.

*** The minute budget precluded Corman himself from directing certain segments as per union rules, requiring a rotating cast of novices he was mentoring including a very young Francis Coppola, Monte Hellman, and Jack Hill.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2017 CHECKLIST!

The Discreet Charm of the Killing Spree

TAGLINE	DRACULA…. FRANKENSTEIN… HOUSE OF WAX… PIT AND THE PENDULUM… and Now A New Classic Of Horror Comes To The Screen. If you’re gonna lie, lie big.
TITLE ACCURACY	Given its historical French setting, I genuinely thought this was going to be about either the Reign of Terror or the Great Fear. But it turns out to be about neither, and no one is ever terrified at any point (there is a ghost, but Nicholson is horny for her instead of terrified).
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No, which is impressive given that they could have passed it off as Poe without really losing any more credibility than they had already lost when they made THE RAVEN about dueling wizards.
SEQUEL?	Arguably part of Corman’s loose “Poe Cycle” of 1960-1965, though also arguably not.
REMAKE?	None
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Ghost/ Haunting
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	Nicholson and Francis Coppola, very early in his career
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	Karloff, Corman, Dick Miller.
NUDITY?	No
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	None
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	Hawk attack!
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	Yes
POSSESSION?	Some old lady, like, hypnotizes the ghost, I think?
CREEPY DOLLS?	None
EVIL CULT?	None, though the implication of witchcraft.
MADNESS?	Certainly!
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	No
VOYEURISM?	Dick Miller watches some villainous hypnotism through a window
MORAL OF THE STORY	It’s not necrophilia if she’s a ghost