Twinkle, Twinkle, Lucky Stars (1985)

Director: Sammo Hung
Writer: Barry Wong, based on a story by Lo Kin, Barry Wong, and Roy Sze-To
Stars: Sammo Hung, Jackie Chan and Yuen Biao

Index: The First Thirty.

Twinkle, Twinkle, Lucky Stars may not be quite as varied as The Owl vs. Bumbo but it’s far more schizophenic. In fact, it feels like two different features were spliced together into a new one featuring a notable all-star cast.

Half of it is an action movie and this half is fantastic stuff, even if the story behind it isn’t particularly clear. Then again, it’s the third of seven films in the Lucky Stars series of movies and it’s been rather a long time since I last saw the first, Winners and Sinners. I remember that one a lot more fondly than I’ll remember this.

Sibelle Hu is Chief Inspector Woo Ba-wah of Special Unit CID and she’s after the MacGuffin of the movie, a letter sent by Ma in Thailand to Wang Yi-ching in Hong Kong right before he’s assassinated. That’s a memorable scene right there, because he’s parasailing at the time and the trio of assassins take to the sky too, merely armed with machine guns and bazookas. Most notably, one of them is Richard Norton firmly in extra-villainous mode.

The Owl vs. Bumbo (1984)

Director: Sammo Hung Kam-Bo
Writer: Lai Ling Cheung
Stars: Sammo Hung Kam-Bo, George Lam, Deannie Ip and Michelle Khan

Index: The First Thirty.

Everyone has to begin somewhere and Yeoh Choo Kheng began by becoming Miss Malaysia in 1983. She was born in Malaysia, to a senator and his wife, so grew up speaking English but only understood a little Malaysian Cantonese. So, when she was offered a TV commercial for Guy Laroche watches with Sing Long on a call in Cantonese, she had no idea who that was. That commercial led to this picture and four decades later she won the Academy Award for Best Actress, breaking a lot of glass ceilings in the process.

Of course, if you’re reading this zine, you’ll know Yeoh Choo Kheng as Michelle Yeoh and may well know that Sing Long is Jackie Chan. He isn’t in this film but it was directed by and stars Sammo Hung, who grew up with Chan in the Seven Little Fortunes group at the Chinese Drama Academy in Kowloon, so there’s a clear connection there. He’d also appear in Twinkle, Twinkle, Lucky Stars, her second film.

Sammo plays Bombo from the title, who’s a thief. This picture begins with his final job, to rob a bank, for which he’s well armed indeed, with a crazy amount of ammo, grenades and a bunch of explosives, lots of which turn out to be fake, as we discover when he strafes a fish tank with a machine gun and nothing breaks.

I Bury the Living (1958)

Director: Albert Band
Writer: Louis Garfinkle
Stars: Richard Boone, Theodore Bikel and Peggy Maurer

Index: 2024 Centennials.

Robert Kraft is the new chairman of the Management Committee of the Immortal Hills cemetery in Milford so Andy McKee, who’s been its caretaker for as long as anyone can remember, shows him around. Bob Kraft is Richard Boone, well known on TV in 1958 for his role in Medic, which landed him a 1955 Emmy nomination, but was becoming a bigger star through roles in westerns like The Tall T, Ten Wanted Men and Man without a Star, along with a new TV show for 1957 called Have Gun – Will Travel, in which he played a gentleman wandering the West as a gun for hire to help people in need. McKee, an old Scot with a thick accent whose retirement is one of Kraft’s first priorities, is Theodore Bikel, then a thirty-four year old Austrian Jew. He was born in Vienna but moved to what was then Mandatory Palestine (now Israel), learning acting there and later in London, to which he moved at twenty-one to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. He racked up many European nationalities in movies. A Scot was just one more.

The easiest way to see I Bury the Living is as an unassociated feature length episode of The Twilight Zone, so it doesn’t hurt that Boone bore a resemblance to Rod Serling. He had similar rugged good looks, a similarly serious attitude and, of course, a similar suit given that Bob is also the president of the Kraft department store. The Kraft family run the town of Milford and Bob’s Uncle George, who was chairman two years prior, explains to him how they maintain their level of prestige. Every man in the family “served on every community project, board and committee that was ever created. They served for free but they did it for business.” So, even though Bob is busy with the store, he’s now going to have to dedicate a few hours a week to the cemetery. Given that most of the feature is set at Immortal Hills and we never see the store, you can imagine how well that doesn’t go for him. There’s a reason for that and it is inherently tied to the big board on the far wall of the cemetery’s office that McKee talks him through on that first fateful visit.

Two for the Road (1967)

Director: Stanley Donen
Writer: Frederic Raphael
Stars: Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney

I had never heard of Two for the Road before plucking it out of Stanley Donen’s filmography for this project, but I’m very happy that I did. It’s technically a British film, but the funding came from a Hollywood studio—20th Century Fox—and it was primarily shot in France, so it’s an international picture and that’s highly appropriate because it feels like an international film, a romantic comedy obviously influenced by the French New Wave. It was shot in 1966 and, while it certainly looks like it was shot in 1966, it also feels like it could have been made yesterday because it’s that timeless; and let’s be honest, how many films shot in 1966 can you say that about? It wasn’t much of a commercial success, making back $12m on a $5m budget, but it was highly regarded by the critics. More than one has described it as Donen’s best movie, even though he also directed Singin’ in the Rain; it’s often been described as having Audrey Hepburn’s greatest performance; and Henry Mancini has claimed that his theme is his personal favourite from his work.

Clearly I should take a look at it to remember Donen and his career, on what would have been his centennial; he came pretty close to celebrating it too, passing in 2019 at the age of 94. The lead actors are Hepburn and Albert Finney, the latter of which was fresh from the success of Tom Jones and the former very close to her initial retirement, with only Wait Until Dark following it until a much anticipated return a decade later in 1976’s Robin and Marian. The most important name, though, at least to this particular picture, is that of Frederic Raphael, who wrote the original screenplay. It’s not exactly autobiographical, but it was sparked by a road trip that he and his wife took through France, some of the script taken from things that they did but much of it taken from things that they didn’t do but could well have done in a parallel universe. He received an Oscar nomination for his work, the film’s only nomination as Hepburn was nominated for Wait Until Dark instead, but he lost to William Rose for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.

Adventures of Captain Fabian (1951)

Director: William Marshall
Writer: Errol Flynn
Stars: Errol Flynn, Micheline Prelle, Vincent Price, Agnes Moorehead and Victor Franken

Index: The First Thirty.

It’s a shame that Adventures of Captain Fabian isn’t a better movie to wrap up the First Thirty of Vincent Price, but, as we all know, he went on to much better things, not least the horror genre that turned him into an icon. At least that gives me a start for this review, because it would otherwise be awkward.

This ought to be an Errol Flynn film, partly because he’s the star, top billed and in the title role, but also because he wrote the screenplay. It may be telling that he never wrote another one, though he did write whatever counted as a script for Cuban Rebel Girls, his final feature which is so utterly bonkers I included it as my Q for Quickie chapter in my first book, Huh?

However, he simply isn’t notable here. The film establishes itself before he shows up, but he does have an impact when he does. He’s an older seafarer, not remotely as ripped as he is in the poster but still dashing and charming. However, he’s also annoyingly calm, whatever else is happening at the time, leaving every bit of drama to his co-stars.

He also vanishes again for a while, as events play out, because he isn’t the protagonist, just a character who sticks his nose into something he shouldn’t and thus enables a whole bunch of chaos and heartbreak. What’s telling is that, had he left well alone, we wouldn’t have a film but a lot of fictional people would still be alive. Is that what Flynn saw as adventure?

Curtain Call at Cactus Creek (1950)

Director: Charles Lamont
Writer: Howard Dimsdale, based on a story by Stanley Roberts and Howard Dimsdale
Stars: Donald O’Connor, Gale Storm, Walter Brennan, Vincent Price and Eve Arden

Index: The First Thirty.

Vincent Price is the best thing about most of the films in this book, whether they’re bad or good or great, because he began fully formed as an actor and demonstrated his versatility quickly. However, I’d suggest that he isn’t the best thing about this one, even with most of the best dialogue thrown his way.

That’s because, while his character, a hack of a travelling showman called Tracy Holland, is crucial to the plot’s existence, he isn’t that important to where it goes. This is obviously intended to be a showcase for its star, Donald O’Connor, and the scene stealer this time out is Walter Brennan, in one of the largest roles I’ve ever seen him take. He’s no sidekick here!

Cactus Creek is apparently right here in my home state of Arizona and it turns out to be the immediate destination for all the core cast.

Champagne for Caesar (1950)

Director: Richard B. Whorf
Writers: Hans Jacoby and Fred Brady
Stars: Ronald Colman, Celeste Holm, Vincent Price, Art Linkletter and Barbara Britton

Index: The First Thirty.

Vincent Price apparently had a serious soft spot for Champagne for Caesar. When I asked his daughter, Victoria Price, to choose two movies from his expansive filmography to review for my Make It a Double project, she immediately chose this one. She said it was his favourite of all his films.

That’s initially a little surprising for a bunch of reasons. It’s not a horror movie, it’s not well known and it’s not a Vincent Price movie per se. He’s third billed after stars Ronald Colman and Celeste Holm, though he does get a small caricature at the bottom of the poster. No, he’s not Caesar. Caesar’s standing on his head.

However, the longer the movie runs and the more frustrated his character gets as a rather odd corporate villain, Burnbridge Waters, the more it becomes obvious just how much fun he was having making it.

The Baron of Arizona (1950)

Director: Samuel Fuller
Writer: Samuel Fuller
Stars: Vincent Price and Ellen Drew

Index: The First Thirty.

It took sixteen films for Vincent Price to get top billing, with Shock, and it took eleven more for him to get it again, with a low budget gem from cult director Sam Fuller. Like Bagdad, I’ve seen this one before. Unlike Bagdad, I’m happy to watch it again.

“To the state of Arizona!” is the toast as this film begins and that’s because it’s Valentine’s Day 1912 and we’re finally part of the union as the 48th and last continental state. John Griff is giving this toast and he follows up with “to a real lover of Arizona, my friend James Addison Reavis.” And everybody present is shocked.

They’re shocked because, while Reavis is the lead character here, he’s not the hero; he’s the villain. And we promptly go into flashback to a rainy night outside Phoenix forty years earlier to find out why.

Bagdad (1949)

Director: Charles Lamont
Writer: Robert Hardy Andrews, based on a story by Tamara Hovey
Stars: Maureen O’Hara, Paul Christian and Vincent Price

Index: The First Thirty.

OK, so this wasn’t as bad as I remembered it from a previous viewing in 2007, but it’s not a good film by any standards and it has to rank alongside Brigham Young and Up in Central Park as the worst of Vincent Price’s First Thirty.

Of course, he’s easily the best thing about it, though he really didn’t need his right eye to be glued shut to make him seem sinister and corrupt as Pasha Ali Nadim. He also narrates the film, because, of all the stars in Hollywood at the time, he was surely the one best suited to pronounce Scheherezade correctly.

The biggest problem with the film is that it isn’t the Arabian Nights fantasy that it might be mistaken for. It’s a generic story of intrigue in an exotic locale, Bagdad, the largest city in the world during the Islamic Golden Age, and here somewhere where “all unbelievable things are possible”, apparently including the overt rear projection. It might have worked as an indie distraction on a B-movie budget and in black and white, but it doesn’t have the substance to work as a Technicolor blockbuster.

The Bribe (1949)

Director: Robert Z. Leonard
Writer: Marguerite Roberts, based on the short story by Frederick Nebel
Stars: Robert Taylor, Ava Gardner, Charles Laughton, Vincent Price and John Hodiak

Index: The First Thirty.

Here’s another Vincent Price movie that I’d never even heard of, though it turns out that I have seen parts of it, in Steve Martin’s comedy nod to film noir, Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid. He takes his name of Rigby from this film and the whole Friends and Enemies of Carlotta angle is taken from its location, Carlotta being a town on the Central American island of Los Trancos.

Of course, this is the original and it wants to be taken seriously, a little too much if Rigby’s got anything to say about it. That’s Rigby the American cop, in the form of Robert Taylor, who’s sent to Carlotta to find out who’s behind a war surplus racket.

Apparently someone’s buying lots of scrap, but someone’s including good airplane motors in the shipments, which are then shipped out of the country, where they’re conditioned and sold. That’s millions of dollars in profit, none of it taxed, and if there’s anything that’s more un-American than taking money from Uncle Sam, I don’t know what it is.

There are only two suspects, so Rigby looks at them first when he gets to Carlotta in the guise of a fisherman. Apparently, nobody goes to Carlotta except to fish. Or to steal airplane engines, of course. They’re a married couple, Tugwell and Elizabeth Hintten. Tug flew down with the airline, but lost his job so now tends bar at Pedro’s and drinks himself into a stupor on his day off. Liz sings there and well too, but we only get a couple of songs. Tug is played by John Hodiak, Liz by Ava Gardner.

The Three Musketeers (1948)

Director: George Sidney
Writer: Robert Ardrey, based on the novel by Alexandre Dumas
Stars: Lana Turner, Gene Kelly, June Allyson, Van Heflin, Angela Lansbury, Frank Morgan, Vincent Price, Keenan Wynn and John Sutton

Index: The First Thirty.

For a beloved family classic, there’s an awful lot wrong with this famous take on The Three Musketeers, now only the seventh result for the famous title on IMDb, but the fifteenth made at that time. However, it won me over again in the end, as it does each time. I’m embarrassed early on but it leaves me smiling by the end.

The Three Musketeers this time out—Athos, Porthos and Aramis, as always—are played by Van Heflin, Gig Young and Robert Coote, who make for a jolly lot of honourable scoundrels, Heflin in particular bringing substance to his role and not only in the sense of alcohol.

The new fish, D’Artagnan, who trawls them into a rash of adventures, is Gene Kelly, utterly sure that he’s in a musical even though writer Robert Ardrey and director George Sidney had no such ambition. He overdoes everything as a living cartoon and I never bought his comedy, but the balance and energy he has as a dancer does lend itself to magnificent swordfights.

On his first day in Paris, he manages to find his way into a duel with all three of the above musketeers on the very same day, but the first turns into a rout of Richelieu’s men, who show up to arrest them. Given a string of ambitious leaps, I wondered if he was aiming at Douglas Fairbanks Sr. more than Errol Flynn, but then I realised that his ability to turn anything into a prop meant that he was aiming at Jackie Chan, merely thirty-five years too early.

Rogues' Regiment (1948)

Director: Robert Florey
Writer: Robert Buckner, based on a story by Robert Buckner and Robert Florey
Stars: Dick Powell, Marta Toren, Vincent Price and Stephen McNally

Index: The First Thirty.

Back to regularly scheduled programming, Price’s next film proper after Up in Central Park is a picture that tries to be every different film genre all at once. It doesn’t work, which might explain why this is criminally underseen and unavailable outside the grey market, but it is a particularly fascinating attempt.

As the opening credits roll, it’s obviously a French Foreign Legion movie, which is backed up by those very words showing up under the title on the movie’s poster. And it is, but not in the usual way. This is a far cry from Beau Geste.

For a start, the very next scenes involve the burning of the bodies of Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun outside their bunker in Berlin in 1945. It might seem historical to us but it was notably topical for 1948, being only three years on. It’s only two years after the Nuremberg Trials, our next stop, to watch in archive footage, the fate of the leading Nazis to survive the war. One, however, also sentenced to death, isn’t there.

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948)

Directors: Charles Barton and Walter Lantz
Writers: Robert Lees, Frederic I. Rinaldo and John Grant
Stars: Bud Abbott, Lou Costello, Lon Chaney, Bela Lugosi, Glenn Strange and Lenore Aubert

Index: The First Thirty.

While it took Vincent Price sixteen films to land top billing, achieving it with Shock, and he was very much a supporting actor throughout the rest of his First Thirty, his profile was such that his name made it onto every single poster for every single feature he was in from Service de Luxe to Up in Central Park. That remarkable streak, comprising his first twenty-one films, is ended here, as he’s given less to do in this one than in any other thus far and possibly in his entire career.

That’s because he’s basically just a sight gag in the last minute of the film, delivering a pair of lines and some maniacal laughter to serve as the final punchline to the original Universal comedy horror flick. Let me set the scene.

Abbott and Costello have survived the film, thinking back on what they just went through. While Lou saw everything, his partner didn’t, consistently so for comedic effect, and so he’s adamant to get that across now they’re safe.

“The next time that I tell you that I saw something when I saw it, you believe me that I saw it,” Lou spits out in his infamously thick Brooklyn accent.

Bud is dismissive. “Oh relax. Now that we’ve seen the last of Dracula, the Wolf Man and the Monster, there’s nobody to frighten us any more.”

Up in Central Park (1948)

Director: William A. Seiter
Writer: Karl Tunberg, based on the musical by Herbert Fields, Dorothy Fields and Sigmund Romberg
Stars: Deanna Durbin, Dick Haymes and Vincent Price

Index: The First Thirty.

Four words are needed to set you up for Up in Central Park and not all of them are obvious from the poster. Sure, it’s a romantic musical, as you’d expect. It’s also a comedy, or at least it’s supposed to be, and that’s there too. The fourth word needed, though, is “politics”.

You see, this is a fictional story set against the backdrop of a very real political era, that of the dominance of Tammany Hall in 1870s New York. Vincent Price is notorious William Tweed, whom everyone calls “Bill” or “Boss”, depending on whether they’re in his favour or not. And, just in case a word like “notorious” wasn’t enough, here’s a little history lesson.

Back when the Republicans were liberal and the Democrats were conservative, there was a Democrat named William Tweed, who owned New York, not literally, as he was merely third in the ranks of landowners, but through his influence and control. He sat on the boards of railroads, banks, utilities, mines, newspapers, even the Brooklyn Bridge Company. He was a state senator in New York and a congressman in Washington. He orchestrated elections and controlled finances, to the degree that, by the time he was convicted of corruption and sent to jail for life, he had extracted the equivalent of $5 billion in today’s money from the city.

Moss Rose (1947)

Director: Gregory Ratoff
Writers: Jules Furthman and Tom Reed, adapted by Niven Busch from the novel by Joseph Shearing
Stars: Peggy Cummins, Victor Mature and Ethel Barrymore

Index: The First Thirty.

It would be easy to find fault with Moss Rose, a gothic film noir murder mystery drama of a movie, but it feels relentlessly unusual and I’d be lying if I said that it’s not going to stay with me. I have a feeling I’m going to remember it a lot longer and a lot more fondly than Vincent Price’s previous couple of movies, even if he isn’t actually in it much. It kept me guessing all the way, partly about whodunit but mostly about where the heck it would travel next. It’s thoroughly unpredictable.

Breaking his trend of playing four villainous roles in a row, Price is a police inspector here in a Victorian London straight out of Jack the Ripper, with cobbled Coin St., near Waterloo Bridge, drenched in fog. It starts suspensefully with young chorus girl Belle Adair going home from work and wondering who’s hiding in the shadows watching her. Of course, we can see that it’s Victor Mature, who we don’t expect to play a 19th century stalker.

If that’s our first surprise, our second is that Belle is not our victim; that’s a friend, fellow chorus girl and neighbour, Daisy Arrow, who’s flustered already the moment we first meet her. As Belle goes on a date with Georgie that night, the pair of them hear Mature’s voice as he rides off with Daisy. Next day, she brushes past him on the stairs to her apartment. She’s coming in and Mature’s rushing out in a hurry because Daisy’s dead in her room, having been drugged and then smothered.

The Long Night (1947)

Director: Anatole Litvak
Writer: John Wexley, based on a short story by Jacques Viot
Stars: Henry Fonda, Barbara Bel Geddes, Vincent Price and Ann Dvorak

Index: The First Thirty.

I’ve seen The Long Night before and I’ve even reviewed it at Apocalypse Later, but I didn’t remember my 2009 viewing at all. Watching again, I find that it starts to fade quickly from memory, not because it’s bad but because it’s weak. It’s a Hollywood adaptation of a classic French film, 1939’s Le jour se lève, or Daybreak, but with much of its palpable edge removed.

It opens neatly, with Vincent Price tumbling down a staircase with bullet holes in his body, the only witness a blind former soldier played by Elisha Cook, Jr. Of course, we saw it too and we know that he emerged from the front room on the top floor, which we soon discover is Joe Adams’s apartment.

Bill Pulaski has a room behind him, but he’s working a swing shift, so Henry Fonda is the one and only suspect in the death of Vincent Price. Of course, it doesn’t help his case when the cops knock on his door and he greets them with more bullets. He even comes out to look around, with his gun still in his hand. This has to be the easiest murder to solve in the history of the movies!

The Web (1947)

Director: Michael Gordon
Writers: William Bowers and Bertram Millhauser, based on a story by Harry Kurnitz
Stars: Ella Raines, Edmond O'Brien, William Bendix and Vincent Price

Index: The First Thirty.

I’ve wondered throughout this project when the studios would start to realise the potential that Vincent Price had to be a villain. It turns out to be halfway through his First Thirty, the success of his first top billing in Shock enough to somewhat stereotype him into villain roles in films noir for a while. After fifteen films of not playing a single villain (albeit not always a hero either), this one marks three villains in a row, with another one on its way right after it.

This time, he’s a businessman who lives in a different world to the rest of us. We learn that when Bob Regan barges into one of his board meetings to serve him with a summons. Regan is very serious about the $68.72 he wants from him on behalf of a client whose banana cart he knocked over with negligent driving. Andrew Colby of Colby Enterprises merely laughs and promises to write him a cheque.

However, that night, he also hires Regan to be his bodyguard for a couple of weeks. Maybe he’s a little upset that the attorney got in that easily and maybe he appreciates the balls that he demonstrated in doing so. Either way, he’s offering a lot of money, so Regan takes the job, noting that “Until this morning, I had to save up to weigh myself.” One day later, he starts to regret his decision because he has to shoot a man dead to earn that money.

Regan is a young and thin Edmond O’Brien, who feels like the lead actor but was actually second billed to Ella Raines, who plays Colby’s trusted personal secretary, Noel Faraday. Price is credited fourth after William Bendix as a cop, Lt. Damico, who knows Regan and quickly has to investigate him anyway.

The Killers (1964)

Director: Donald Siegel
Writer: Gene L. Coon, based on the short story by Ernest Hemingway
Stars: Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson, John Cassavetes, Clu Gulager, Claude Akins, Norman Fell and Ronald Reagan

Index: 2024 Centennials.

I was surprised to find that I hadn’t seen The Killers, at least in this incarnation, the 1964 feature by Donald Siegel, not yet to shrink that into Don. It started out as a short story by Ernest Hemingway, originally published in 1927, which was set in Chicago during a peak era for organised crime: prohibition. It’s about a couple of hitmen, Max and Al, who arrive at Henry’s Lunch-Room to murder a Swedish boxer called Ole Anderson, only to find that he isn’t there. It’s an interesting story, because Anderson doesn’t die within it; instead Hemingway focuses on the responses of the various characters to the knowledge that he’s about to. It’s been adapted to screen many times, most notably by Anthony Veiller in 1946 in a version that I have seen and rate very highly indeed as one of the best films noir Hollywood ever made. That version is far more cinematic than the painful wait of the story, with the hit happening first and the story behind it unfolding in flashback, giving a debuting Burt Lancaster plenty of screen time as Anderson.

This later version updates that one, keeping the hit at the start and the story behind it in flashback, but with the two hitmen as the reasons why the story is told. In 1946, that was done by Edmund O’Brien as an insurance investigator called Jim Reardon; here, it’s the killers who mount an investigation because one of them is puzzled by why his victim was completely resigned to his imminent demise. As the names have all been changed and the timeframe was updated to the sixties, the killers are now Charlie and Lee and the victim is Jerry Nichols. Charlie recognises him as Johnny North, a former race car champion who supposedly pulled off a heist of a mail truck that netted him a million bucks, so he starts to wonder about why they were paid well above the typical rate for the hit and where that money went, given that whoever hired them didn’t care. Thus the investigation, which unfolds chronologically within the contemporary scenes, while the back story fleshes out through the memories of the characters that they interview.

Dragonwyck (1946)

Director: Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Writer: Joseph L. Mankiewicz, based on the novel by Anya Seton
Stars: Gene Tierney, Walter Huston, Vincent Price and Glenn Langan

Index: The First Thirty.

My mother had lots of Anya Seton novels on her bookshelves and I inappropriately thought of them alongside the gothics of the centuries before, because of their shared period settings. This, for instance, is set in early 19th century New England, and speaks to historical themes like the patroon system and Anti-Rent Wars, both of which made it into the movie, and the Astor Place Riots and steamboat racing on the Hudson, neither of which did.

However, when 20th Century Fox adapted this novel, it was so recent that it was still in stores, having been published only two years earlier. While this picture sits well alongside an earlier Vincent Price, The House of the Seven Gables, the authors of their respective source novels were born a century apart, Nathaniel Hawthorne before the Victorian era, in 1804, but Seton after it, in 1904.

In both, Price’s character is a member of an old family who lives in the sprawling mansion of the title. However, in this one, he’s wealthy and influential, friend and neighbor to Martin van Buren, the previous U.S. president, and his estate Dragonwyck is thriving, not least due to him being a patroon, meaning that he owns a significant amount of land that tenant farmers work for him, paying him substantially in rent and tribute at the annual kermesse.

Shock (1946)

Director: Alfred L. Werker
Writer: Eugene Ling, based on a story by Albert DeMond, with additional dialogue by Martin Berkeley
Stars: Vincent Price, Lynn Bari and Frank Latimore

Index: The First Thirty.

Shock is one of the easier movies to see from Vincent Price’s First Thirty, because it’s in the public domain, but it’s one that I haven’t seen before and am very happy to see for the first time now, because it’s Price’s first top billing.

He was the leading man his first film out in Service de Luxe, but it was a Constance Bennett movie and he played her love interest rather than the other way around. He played the title character in The Invisible Man Returns, but that had Sir Cedric Hardwicke top billed. Price saw his name on the poster for his earliest fifteen films, but this sixteenth marks the first time it was either listed first or indeed above the title.

It’s a B-movie film noir, merely 70 minutes long, but it’s a telling picture that starts Price out on the road to the roles we generally know him from, far more so than the more overtly horror-based The Invisible Man Returns. That’s because he plays another mad doctor, as he would so often later, from The Fly, The Tingler and The Bat to the Dr. Phibes duology, via, of course, the wacky Dr. Goldfoot pictures.

This sure looks like a horror movie from the outset and it sounds like one as well, with dark ominous music behind the opening credits. It also features a nightmare sequence early on, after Janet Stewart checks into a San Francisco hotel to meet her husband, who’s been at war for a few years and presumed dead for two, but he doesn’t show. She imagines him outside but he can’t get in and she can’t find the door; even when she does, the handle is too big; and, when she finally makes it through, he’s gone again. These visuals are primitive but effective and they set a mood for the picture as a whole.

Leave Her to Heaven (1945)

Director: John M. Stahl
Writer: Jo Swerling, based on the novel by Ben Ames Williams
Stars: Gene Tierney, Cornel Wilde and Jeanne Crain

Index: The First Thirty.

I had no idea what this film was before this project cued it up for me, but then I’m unsure now, having seen it. It’s often been described as the first colour film noir, which does make sense to a degree, but it’s truly a psychological thriller, one that would have a very different poster if it was remade today. And it may well be, as it’s apparently one of Martin Scorsese’s favourite movies. The man has taste.

Like Laura, Vincent Price’s first film noir, it’s told in flashback after an introductory scene. This one has a sombre Cornel Wilde returning to Deer Lake after a couple of years in prison. Off he goes over the lake in a rowboat as we’re told the background behind that, which begins with him meeting Gene Tierney by chance on a train journey.

He’s Richard Harland, a bestselling novelist. She’s Ellen Berent, who’s partway through one of his books but doesn’t realise who he is until they’re introduced on the platform after they disembark. They’re aiming to stay at the same New Mexico lodge, he with friends and she to scatter her father’s ashes.

A Royal Scandal (1945)

Director: Otto Preminger
Writer: Edwin Justus Mayer, adapted by Bruno Frank from the play Die Zarin by Lajos Biró and Melchior Lengyel
Stars: Tallulah Bankhead, Charles Coburn, Anne Baxter and William Eythe

Index: The First Thirty.

There are a few things to say about A Royal Scandal before I start. It’s a comedy more than it’s a historical drama, emphatically so. As in The Keys of the Kingdom, Vincent Price doesn’t have a large role but he’s welcome. It’s utterly and unashamedly ridiculous. It’s also a whole heck of a lot of fun. And all these things are obvious quickly.

It’s set in Russia during the 18th century, in a palace of Catherine the Great. In fact, for all that some details of national or international importance are mentioned, we never set foot outside that palace, whichever one we happen to be in. Historical detail is not important here in the slightest. It’s just stage dressing.

There’s also no attempt by anyone to sound remotely authentic. Not only do none of these British and American actors sound Russian but neither do the actual Russian-born actors, like Vladimir Sokoloff, Michael Visaroff and, most recognisably, Mischa Auer, who’s very happy manning the east gate. Nobody even tries and there’s a general’s nephew with such an out of place accent that I started to wonder if this was really a parody.

What saves it early and often is the writing, especially the dialogue, which is stellar. For a little while, it feels like it’s all given to Charles Coburn, who’s the man effectively in charge of Russia, Chancellor Nicolai Ilyitch. When Price arrives, as the only actor willing to attempt a foreign accent, even if it’s a stereotypical one, he gets great lines too. Fifteen minutes in, as we finally meet Catherine the Great, Empress of All Russia, and we realise she has plenty of great dialogue too, we accept that it’s going to be consistent and it is, throughout the film.

The Keys of the Kingdom (1944)

Director: John M. Stahl
Writers: Joseph L. Mankiewicz and Nunnally Johnson, based on the novel by A. J. Cronin
Stars: Gregory Peck, Thomas Mitchell and Vincent Price

Index: The First Thirty.

This is very much a film of its time, made at a point in history when moviegoing audiences were happy to pay money to see a story about a Roman Catholic priest without wondering as it begins why he’s spending so much time at a fishing hole with a young boy.

Fr. Francis Chisholm is the sort of good man who does good things for long enough that he leaves the world a better place for his being a part of it. We struggle to believe in this sort of good man today, but Gregory Peck, one of the quintessential good men of the movie screen, does make our job a little easier in this film.

As such hagiographies tend to do, we begin towards the end of his life, back in the Scottish village in which he was born, Tweedside. Now he’s a priest, but his teachings are raising the sort of concern with the church that they have sent a monsignor to suggest that he retire. But he goes to bed and finds Fr. Francis’s journals, so settles down to read and we learn his story in a set of long flashbacks.

Laura (1944)

Director: Otto Preminger
Writer: Jay Dratler, Samuel Hoffenstein and Betty Reinhardt, based on the novel by Vera Caspery
Stars: Gene Tierney, Dana Andrews, Clifton Webb, Vincent Price and Judith Anderson

Index: The First Thirty.

While we all likely remember Vincent Price from a variety of movies much later in his film career, this is the big one from his First Thirty. It wasn’t his personal favourite and it wasn’t the one that gave him the happiest memories, but it’s the best of them, The Song of Bernadette notwithstanding, and it’s one of the great and most impactful films noir of the forties.

It’s a story of obsession, a trait shared by an admirably varied set of characters, not just the inevitable gritty detective, Mark McPherson of the NYPD, who’s investigating the murder of a young advertising executive. Laura Hunt was answering the door to her apartment when a shotgun blasted her in the face and it’s his job to catch her killer.

First and most important of the obsessed is Waldo Lydecker, a newspaper columnist who believes he was the only one who really knew her. Clifton Webb is impeccable in his first role in a feature film since 1925 and he’s given an impressive amount of the best lines. He was given a deserved Oscar nod as Best Supporting Actor but lost to Barry Fitzgerald for Going My Way. That’s a tough choice right there!

The Marriage Circle (1924)

Director: Ernst Lubitsch
Writer: Paul Bern, based on the play Only a Dream by Lothar Schmidt
Stars: Monte Blue, Florence Vidor, Creighton Hale, Adolphe Menjou, Marie Prevost, harry Myers and Dale Fuller

There must have been something in the air in early 1924, because two out of the first four films have been outright comedies that verge on the screwball. Finances of the Grand Duke was directed by an unlikely German, F. W. Murnau, but The Marriage Circle by a far more likely one, Ernst Lubitsch, though this was a Hollywood feature, his second after 1923’s Rosita.

He made that while under contract to Mary Pickford but, while the film was a success with both the critics and the public, they clashed in production enough that he was able to sign to a Warner Brothers contract instead, one that unusually allowed him complete creative and casting control.

Whatever reasons Jack Warner had for that, it worked, because this is a treat of a comedy. Yes, we ache to slap some sense into Dr. Franz Braun for most of the running time, but that’s fine. If he had the requisite amount of sense to begin with, this would be a five minute short.

We’re in Vienna, which an introductory title confidently tells us is “the city of laughter and light romance”. There’s laughter and romance in this film, but not so much as we might think for a comedy about relationships. We’re doing all the laughing while the characters get into more and more outrageous misconceptions.