The Masque of the Red Death

THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH

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UK, 1964

Director: Roger Corman

Production: Alta Vista/Anglo Amalgamated; Pathécolor, Panavision; running time: 84 minutes. Released August 1964.

Producer: George Willoughby; screenplay: Charles Beaumont and R. Wright Campbell, from the story by Edgar Allan Poe; photography: Nicolas Roeg; editor: Anne Chegwidden; sound: Richard Bied, Len Abbott; art director: Robert Jones; music: David Lee.

Cast: Vincent Price (Prince Prospero ); Hazel Court (Juliana ); Jane Asher (Francesca ); David Weston (Gino ); Patrick Magee (Alfredo ); Nigel Green (Ludovico ); Skip Martin (Hop Toad ); John Westbrook (Man in Red ); Gay Brown (Senora Escobar ); Julian Burton (Senor Veronese ); Doreen Dawn (Anna-Marie ); Paul Whitsun-Jones (Scarlatti ); Jean Lodge (Scarlatti's Wife ); Verina Greenlaw (Esmerelda ); Brian Hewlett (Lampredi ); Harvey Hall (Clistor ).

Publications

Script:

Beaumont, Charles, and R. Wright Campbell, The Masque of the Red Death, in Avant-Scène du Cinéma (Paris), 15 May 1980.

Books:

Will, David, and others, Roger Corman: The Millenic Vision, Edinburgh, 1970.

McCarthy, Todd, and Charles Flynn, King of the Bs, New York, 1975.

Turoni, Giuseppe, Roger Corman, Florence, 1976.

Marcus, Fred H., Short Story/Short Film, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1977.

McAsh, Iain, F., The Films of Vincent Price, London, 1977.

de Franco, J. Philip, The Movie World of Roger Corman, New York, 1979.

Hillier, Jim, and Aaron Lipstadt, Roger Corman's New World, London, 1981.

Naha, Ed, The Films of Roger Corman, New York, 1982.

McAsh, Iain F., Vincent Price: A Biography, Farncombe, Surrey, 1982.

Bourgoin, Stephane, Roger Corman, Paris, 1983.

McGee, Mark Thomas, Fast and Furious: The Story of American International Pictures, Jefferson, North Carolina, 1984.

Morris, Gary, Roger Corman, Boston, 1985.

Eisner, Joel, The Price of Fear: The Film Career of Vincent Price, Staunton, 1993.

Williams, Lucy C., The Complete Films of Vincent Price, Secaucus, 1995.

McGee, Mark Thomas, Roger Corman: The Best of the Cheap Acts, Jefferson, 1997.

Corman, Roger, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood & Never Lost a Dime, New York, 1998.

Frank, Alan, Films of Roger Corman, London, 1998.

Price, Victoria, Vincent Price: A Daughter's Biography, New York, 1999.

Articles:

Films and Filming (London), February 1964.

Hollywood Reporter, 24 June 1964.

Variety (New York), 24 June 1964.

Kine Weekly (London), 25 June 1964.

Milne, Tom, in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), August 1964.

New York Times, 17 September 1964.

Marill, Alvin H., "Vincent Price," in Films in Review (New York), May 1969.

"Corman Issue" of Cinema Nuovo (Turin), January-February 1984.

Del Valle, D., "Roger Corman," in Films and Filming (London), November 1984.

Newman, Kim, "The Roger Corman Alumni Association," in Monthly Film Bulletin (London), November and December 1985.

Pearly, Gerald, "The Masque of Red Death," in American Film, vol. 15, no. 9, June 1990.

Peary, Gerald, "Roger Corman: They Call Him Cheap, Quick and 'America's Greatest Independent Film Maker'," in American Film, vol. 15, no. 9, June 1990.

Weiner, Rex, "Thrifty Corman Healthy in 4th Decade," in Variety (New York), vol. 359, no. 10, 10 July 1995.

Farrell, Sean, "The Raven & The Masque of Red Death," in Scarlet Street (Glen Rock), no. 20, Fall 1995.

Lucas, Tim, "The Raven/Masque of Red Death," in Video Watchdog (Cincinnati), no. 29, 1995.

Lucas, Tim, "Disque of the Red Death -Incomplete," in Video Watchdog (Cincinnati), no. 32, 1996.

* * *

The Masque of the Red Death was the seventh of Roger Corman's eight Poe adaptations, and one of two (the other being The Tomb of Ligeia ) to be produced in Britain on slightly larger budgets than usual. Throughout the cycle Corman's distinctive mise-en-scène —comprising an expressive use of colour and sweeping, elegant camera movements— had represented in external form his characters' troubled psychological states. (This differentiated him sharply from the more moralistic approach adopted by contemporaneous British horror filmmakers.)

In many ways, Masque is the least coherent of all the Poe films. While the psychological element is still present—notably at the conclusion, where the cloaked figure which brings death to Vincent Price's Prince Prospero is played by Price himself—its development is hampered by a loss of focus within the organization of the narrative. This can be attributed to the script's rather clumsy stitching together of two of Poe's short stories, "Hop-Frog" and "The Masque of the Red Death," and it results in Price, usually the most precise and expert of actors, seeming uncertain at times as to what tone to adopt. The banality of his "philosophy" of evil is a further hindrance as is the lacklustre concluding masque (which was apparently curtailed during production by budgetary restrictions).

In order then to locate the film's merits, which are considerable, one needs to look elsewhere. Firstly, to Corman's use of colour which, largely detached as it is from its usual psychologically expressive function, takes on a non-representational, kinetic force— most impressively in the various camera tracks through a series of rooms, each of which has been decorated in a different colour—which is rarely seen in mainstream commercial productions and which anticipates moments of psychedelic abstraction in Corman's later "drug-culture" film The Trip.

Secondly, all the scenes involving Juliana, played by British actress Hazel Court. Court had already appeared in several British horror films (The Curse of Frankenstein, The Man Who Could Cheat Death ) in conventionally staid leading roles. In Corman's films (she also appears in The Raven and The Premature Burial ) she is unexpectedly transformed into a figure of awesome sexual perversity. Her masochistic preparations for her "marriage" to Satan are given us in meticulous detail; first she brands herself and then has a series of hallucinations (cut from the initial British release print), all of which re-enact a brutal rape fantasy. Marriage—in a Poe-like equation—is linked to the death of the bride, and Court commits herself to this with an eagerness which is truly disturbing. The intensity of her performance has only been equalled within the horror genre in some of the films featuring Barbara Steele (another British actress who left her native country and developed her career elsewhere: she had starred in an earlier Corman production, The Pit and the Pendulum ). It is only in these brilliantly executed scenes, in which the film's formal qualities most eloquently match its content, that Corman finds a coherent theme upon which he can exercise his formidable ability to visualise a character's perverse desires. The film's true dramatic climax is the chilling epitaph spoken by Prospero over Juliana's dead body: "I beg you, do not mourn for Juliana. We should celebrate. She has just married a friend of mine." As is so often the case in Corman's work, the forces of good that eventually triumph, represented here somewhat half-heartedly by Jane Asher's Francesca, are, in comparison with this vividly drawn picture of a desire unto death, anaemic and unconvincing.

—Peter Hutchings