I.
Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston on January 19, 1809, and died in Baltimore on October 7, 1849. A short life and a far from happy one. It could be said that Poe wrote his own epitaph in a letter about short-story writing: “The ludicrous is heightened into the grotesque; the fearful colored into the horrible; the witty exaggerated into the burlesque; the singular wrought out into the strange and the mystical.”
After his father, John Poe, left the family and his mother, Jane, died in 1811, Edgar Poe was informally adopted by John Allan, a Richmond merchant. He spent some little time at the University of Virginia until his gambling debts and a falling out with John Allan forced a move to Boston. Army service followed (1827–29). Expelled from West Point Military Academy, he became an impecunious writer and editor in New York City. By 1835, he was back in Richmond and soon married to his thirteen-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm. Poe attempted suicide after his wife’s death in 1847, and he died under still-disputed circumstances two years later.
Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe by Daniel Hoffman (1973) is a mighty fine life-and-works volume. Anyway, I love the title. Peter Haining’s The Edgar Allan Poe Scrapbook (1977) is just that, containing “Articles, essays, letters, illustrations, photographs, and memorabilia about the legendary American genius.” But Peter Ackroyd’s excellent 2008 Poe: A Life Cut Short will be more readily available.
There have been umpteen novels written about the Poe phenomenon, most notably The Lighthouse at the End of the World by Stephen Marlowe (1995), Nevermore by Howard Schechter (1999), and The Poe Shadow by Matthew Pearl (2006). Sam Moscowitz edited an anthology entitled The Man Who Called Himself Poe (1969) with Poe-related short stories by such horror fiction experts as H. P. Lovecraft and Robert Bloch. In 1897, Jules Verne wrote a sequel to Poe’s sadly unfinished 1838 novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, entitled Le Sphinx des Glaces (The Sphinx of the Ice-Fields). Both stories were published by Arco, London, in 1960 as The Mystery of Arthur Gordon Pym.
Poe has been called the father of detective fiction, science fiction, horror fiction, and the modern short story itself. As if all that wasn’t enough, Poe’s rich vein of stories and poems has been mined by successive generations of film makers. As Rose London explains in Cinema of Mystery, her invaluable monograph on Poe-related movies:
D. W. Griffith took Poe himself as the subject of a one-reel film in 1909 [Edgar Allan Poe]. Herbert Yost played Poe and Griffith’s actress wife played Virginia Clemm. Always in love with the melodrama of history, Griffiths chose to treat Poe’s most famous poem “The Raven” as a matter of fact. [It] was successful enough for the American Éclair Company to make The Raven in 1912, another two-reel film about Poe, which featured some of his most famous tales. (11)
These “famous tales” included “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Black Cat,” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.”
The Black Cat reappeared as one of those new-fangled talking pictures in 1934. It was directed for Universal by Edgar G. Ulmer, starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi. The poster was suitably unrestrained: “It’s Tremonstrous! Frankenstein Karloff plus Dracula Lugosi plus Edgar Allan Poe!” Minus Edgar Allan Poe is more like it. The titular black cat—a supernatural reincarnation of female into feline—was seen so briefly that the film was released in Britain as The House of Doom.
The Karloff-Lugosi-Poe triumvirate were reunited a year later, in The Raven, this time directed by Louis Friedlander (who later turned himself into Lew Landers). Lugosi played plastic surgeon Richard Vollin, who keeps a torture-chamber “shrine” to Poe in his suitably gothic mansion, where he does nasty nip-tuck things to escaped convict Edmond Bateman. Mad? Well, Karloff does get a bit cheesed off at the whole idea. “Poe, you are avenged!” cries Lugosi at one point—I’m still not sure why. But The Raven is a classic of its cinematic kind.
Lugosi had been the stand alone star of Robert Florey’s florid 1932 The Murders in the Rue Morgue, “inspired” by Poe’s seminal mystery short story of the same title but not much of the same plot. As Dr. Mirakle, Lugosi trains his pet orangutan—or man wearing a mangy gorilla suit—to help force some unwelcome attentions upon the heroine (played by Sidney Fox). C. Auguste Dupin, the original Great Detective, was here reduced to the status of a lovelorn medical student.
Although Universal Studios finally ran their Frankenstein, Dracula, and Wolf Man franchises into the ground, Poe never suffered the posthumous indignity of an Abbott and Costello Meet the Raven.
The Loves of Edgar Allan Poe, directed by Harry Lachman in 1942, was a stodgy biopic featuring John Shepperd (perhaps even less known as Shepperd Strudwick) as the central character. Fletcher Markle’s The Man with a Cloak (1951) has a great deal more to recommend it. Joseph Cotten ably underplays the cloaked man who solves a mystery in nineteenth-century New York City. He answers only to the name of “Dupin” and is forever quoting poetry. It was based on a short story by John Dickson Carr.
Jules Dassin made an Oscar-winning short film version of The Tell-Tale Heart for MGM in 1941. The Phantom of the Rue Morgue (1954) was a gimmicky 3D remake that featured Karl Malden in much the same role as Bela Lugosi. And that was just about that, until director/producer/writer/actor/mini-mogul Roger Corman turned his quick-fire attention to Edgar Allan Poe in the early 1960s.
Roger William Corman was born in Detroit, Michigan, on April 5, 1926. The family moved to California in 1940. Roger and his younger brother Eugene (“Gene”) Harold both took part in school plays at Beverly Hills High School. Roger studied engineering at Stanford University from 1943 until 1944, when he enrolled for officer training in the U.S. Navy. He graduated from Stanford under the GI Bill in 1947 with an industrial engineering degree. Less than a year later, however, the movie-struck Corman became a messenger boy at Twentieth Century Fox Studios, and he was soon promoted to story analyst. More life-story stuff may be found in Corman’s own How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime and Roger Corman: An Unauthorized Biography of the Godfather of Indie Filmmaking by Beverly Gray. The latter volume was reprinted by Thunder’s Mouth Press in 2004 with the new and equally appropriate subtitle of Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers.
The important thing from our present point of view is that Corman sold a film script entitled The House Under the Sea to Allied Artists for $3,500. It was filmed as Highway Dragnet (shades of the then-popular radio/TV series) in 1954, starring Richard Conte and Joan Bennett. Nathan Juran directed, with Corman credited as both cowriter and coproducer. Forming his own production company, he made The Monster from the Ocean Floor (directed by Wyatt Ordung) that very same year. Leonard Maltin has dubbed it “20,000 yawns under the sea” in his authoritative Movie & Video Guide.
It wasn’t long before the canny Corman brokered a $60,000 deal with the Lippert Releasing Company to direct his first feature film, a motor-racing melodrama entitled The Fast and the Furious (also 1954). He actually codirected along with its star John Ireland and editor Edward Sansom, but it was the proverbial foot in the door. (F & F was lucratively remade in 2001, followed by four sequels and counting.)
Corman signed a three-picture deal with American Releasing Corporation, which—as American International Pictures—would be his directorial home for the next fourteen very hectic years. James H. Nicholson, father of Jack, the eventual movie star, was president, and savvy entertainment lawyer Samuel Z. Arkoff was vice-president. Arkoff told the whole mad AIP story in Flying Through Hollywood By the Seat of My Pants: From the Man Who Brought You I Was a Teenage Werewolf and Muscle Beach Party with cowriter Richard Trubo.
Suffice it to say here that Corman went on to direct such classic AIP drive-in fodder as Apache Woman (1955), Carnival Rock (1957), Machine Gun Kelly (1958), and Ski Troop Attack (1960). But he scored best with science fiction/horror films Not of This Earth and Attack of the Crab Monsters (both 1956). A Bucket of Blood (1959) and The Little Shop of Horrors (1960) showed his penchant for quirky humor. Twenty-odd yea
rs later, Little Shop was turned into an off-Broadway musical and a second movie.
For over fifty years and still counting, Corman has been in some way involved with approximately two hundred motion pictures. The Films of Roger Corman: Brilliance on a Budget by Ed Naha is a well-illustrated and informative coffee-table book. Mark Whitehead’s Pocket Essential Roger Corman (2003) is totally bereft of illustrations, but it scores much more highly on the critical front.
Back in 1959, however, most of that still lay in the future. Corman was starting to chafe at the AIP bit.
“While I was mulling over my status as a filmmaker, AIP asked me to do two horror films for $200,000,” he told Ed Naha.
I started to think that perhaps they had been selling their double bills a bit too long. Although the profits were still good, they weren’t as big as they once were. I was also getting very restless with this format, partially because of the financial restrictions and partially because I simply wanted to make bigger pictures.
I proposed that we make one picture, in color, on a fifteen-day schedule. It would take AIP to the next logical plateau. After a certain amount of discussion, they agreed. We decided to tackle Poe and settled on “The Fall of the House of Usher” as a premise for the film. Sam didn’t seem too pleased about the choice. “There’s no monster in this movie,” he announced.
I didn’t want to lose the project so I did a bit of quick thinking. “The house,” I said, “The house is the monster.” I suppose he bought that line because we made the film.
Jim Nicholson and I then came up with having Vincent Price star in the film. We had been discussing various actors when we suddenly realized that we both had the same first choice—Price. (28)
Vincent Price was an inspired choice to play the melancholy Roderick Usher, who deliberately buries his sister alive to end the tainted family line. A veteran of nearly fifty films by that time, most of his best recent work had been in the horror genre, e.g., House of Wax (1953), The Fly (1958), and The House on Haunted Hill (1959). Price lent critical respectability and financial security to this daring new AIP production, released in 1960. Iain F. McAsh’s Heroes of the Movies: Vincent Price will give you a good overview of his career.
House of Usher (to use its marquee-friendly American title) cost only $270,000 to make and it earned AIP over $1,000,000 in rentals alone. Corman was fortunate in what would become his regular production team: Floyd Crosby (Cinematography); Les Baxter (Music), Pat Dinga (Special Effects), and Daniel Haller (Set Design). Richard Matheson (author of The Shrinking Man, and I Am Legend) wrote a “young-love type” screenplay that still remained faithful to the dark spirit of Poe. Mark Damon and Myrna Fahey were convincing as Philip Winthrop and Madeline Usher, while Harry Ellerbe stole every scene in which he appeared as old family retainer Bristol.
In his The Modern Horror Film: 50 Contemporary Classics, John McCarty wrote that:
House of Usher remains one of the best gothic horror films America has ever made—and is therefore a bona fide modern classic. For all its imitativeness of the Hammer style and formula, it stands very nicely on its own as a genuinely striking, moody, eerie (Madeline’s premature burial and all that follows thereafter, a protracted sequence that evokes Val Lewton’s 1943 Isle of the Dead, are particularly effective), well-written and performed (especially by Price) no nonsense Gothic horror film. (57)
II.
There was no time for an American tie-in book edition of Usher. But the London-based paperback firm of Digit Books rushed out volume R461, The Fall of the House of Usher (and Other Stories) in early 1961 to coincide with the movie’s British release. The cover design was courtesy of Anglo Amalgamated Film Distributors Ltd. It must be said that, apart from the title story and a few other classics, the contents were a bit second or third rank: “William Wilson,” “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,” “The Domain of Arnheim,” “Landor’s Cottage,” “The Elk,” “The Island of the Fay,” “The Sphinx,” “The Man of the Crowd,” “Shadow,” “Silence,” “The Colloquy of Monos and Una,” “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion,” “The Assignation,” “Ligeia,” “Eleanora,” and “Berenice.”
Digit Books were published between 1956 and 1966 by Brown, Watson Limited, founded in 1944 by Bernard and Sadie Babani. Their list was heavily slanted towards popular fiction—particularly crime, war, science fiction, and cheaply obtained film tie-in editions. The Terror of the Tongs (R560, 1962) is a convenient example, “based on” the screenplay by Jimmy Sangster for the Hammer film starring Christopher Lee.
The Everyman’s Library edition of Tales of Mystery and Imagination contains forty-six significant Poe short stories. Digit produced four collections from this canon, beginning with The Gold Bug (D350, 1960). Besides the title story, it held “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” “The Purloined Letter,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” and “The Premature Burial.” An artist named only Osborne painted a vivid and faithful representation of “The Gold Bug.”
Meanwhile, Pan Books had issued their own eleven-story selection from Tales of Mystery and Imagination (G321, 1960), as a tie-in with an Usher film clip on its back cover.
AIP lost no time in following up The Fall of the House of Usher with The Pit and the Pendulum (1961). There is almost no plot to Poe’s original story. It’s an after-the-fact account from a prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition who is consigned to a pit with closing-in walls, menaced by a razor-sharp pendulum, and the ending just sort of . . . ends. But no one could accuse the Corman film version of lacking a suitably tortuous plot. Price overplays a sixteenth-century Castilian nobleman named Nicholas Medina who is driven to homicidal madness by his apparently dead wife, Elizabeth (Barbara Steele at her most freaky).
Time magazine singled out the film for being cleverly “Edgar Allan poetic” and, according to Howard Thompson of The New York Times, “Richard Matheson’s ironic plot is compact and as logical as the choice of the small cast.” Pit took almost $2,000,000 in rental earnings.
This time, AIP had made a deal with Lancer Books, Inc., an enterprising major-minor/minor-major New York paperback publishing house founded by Irwin Stein and Walter Zacharius in 1961. Among other goodly things, Lancer introduced Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian to a world wide readership. It also published The Man from O.R.G.Y. spy series by Ted Mark—but nobody’s perfect. The firm unfortunately folded in 1973. Stein became a “book packager,” and Zacharius founded Kennington Books.
The Pit and the Pendulum novelization (Lancer 71-303, 1961) bore the copyright Alta Vista Productions, a wholly owned subsidiary of AIP. It was written by Elsie Lee (1912–1987) under her “Lee Sheridan” pseudonym. Sheridan was her actual surname; she also wrote as Elsie Cromwell, Norman Daniels, and Jane Gordon. Elsie Lee’s Book of Simple Gourmet Cookery from Arbor House in 1971 was a culinary bestseller.
Most movie/TV tie-in novelizations are no better than they could be, given the source material and the kind of Old Pro who is usually contracted for such writing by numbers hackwork. “We don’t want it good, we want it Thursday. Last Thursday.” Having said that, however, the high quality Lancer adaptations are now much appreciated collector’s items.
The year is given as 1546. Francis Barnard, a young Englishman, arrives at Castle Medina to enquire after his dead sister—with dire consequences. He is understandably concerned as the now far-gone Don Medina operates his infernal clockwork device: “Still he wavered above me and still the door resisted in the protesting scream of torn wood—and still the pendulum blade swung back and forth, back and forth—slicing my shirt to ribbons that tore away, were lifted and scattered like snow-flakes as the blade reached its peak and, with a metallic shudder, reversed itself” (140).
Lee’s first-person narrative style—following the original work—effectively ruled out the cinematic surprise ending, but she did both Poe and Richard Matheson proud.
The Pit and the Pendulum compilation from Digit (R565, 1962) was another neat little souvenir package with “The Gold Bug,” “Thou Art the Man,” “Loss of Breath,” “Bon-Bon,” “The Devil in the Belfry,” “The Black Cat,” and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.” The cover design was once again courtesy of Anglo Amalgamated Film Distributors Ltd. Pan reprinted their Tales of Mystery and Imagination volume, with a front-cover mention of the new Corman/Poe/AIP film.
III.
Corman’s next film, released in 1962, was based on The Intruder, a controversial 1959 novel by Charles Beaumont about desegregation in the American Deep South that had engaged his social conscience. William Shatner turned in a career-best performance as the rabble-rousing bigot Adam Cramer, but—while the film won widespread critical praise—it bombed at the box office. A convoluted financial dispute with AIP led Corman to place his follow-up Poe movie, The Premature Burial, with Pathé Laboratories (who did a lot of print work for AIP and wanted to move into film production).
Vincent Price was unavailable, being under contract to AIP, and Corman toyed with the idea of replacing him with Christopher Lee. In the end, however, he signed up the Oscar-winning actor Ray Milland in the role of overage medical student Guy Carrell. He also acquired the writing services of Charles Beaumont and Ray Russell (1924–1999), the novelist and former executive editor of Playboy magazine. Russell said,
We were shocked. Unlike the stories that formed the basis of the two earlier Poe films, this story was really not a story at all, more like a formal essay on the disadvantages and general undesirability of being buried alive. And so we had to build the whole structure from the ground up—plot, characters, and dialogue—while retaining the essential elements of Poe’s piece, namely, the obsessive terror of premature burial.
Beaumont and Russell’s screenplay was faithfully novelized for Lancer Books (71-313, 1962: as Premature Burial) by some writer calling him- or herself Max Hallan Danne. I can find nothing of a biographical nature anywhere about this author, who might have been using a personal pseudonym or one supplied to him/her by Lancer (who published nothing else under this strange tripartite byline). Both the screenplay and novelization include elements of Poe’s “Berenice” and whole passages from the original title non-story.
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