Monday, 20 January 2025

The Raven (1963)

Director: Roger Corman
Writer: Richard Matheson, based on the poem by Edgar Allan Poe
Stars: Vincent Price, Peter Lorre and Boris Karloff

Index: The First Thirty.

I’ve always been in two minds about Roger Corman’s fifth Edgar Allan Poe adaptation and a fresh viewing doesn’t change that.

On one hand, it’s a flimsy movie indeed, the source material—Poe’s famous poem—adapted so loosely that it would be unrecognisable but for Vincent Price’s memorable voice reading a part of it at the very beginning. There are very few characters and, twists aside, they’re all of little substance. What’s more, unlike its four predecessors, it’s played primarily for laughs and with inconsistent effect.

On the other hand, it’s a ridiculous amount of fun. Price camps it up unashamedly. Peter Lorre steals every scene he can from him with ruthless intent. And Boris Karloff adds some weight to proceedings by playing it straight, a stellar decision regardless of how outrageous his character actually is. Hazel Court and Jack Nicholson are really just icing on the cake. We could focus only on the sorcery duel with 1963 special effects and this would be worthy.

As a result, the critic in my head continued to find fault, but the fan next to him ignored it all and revelled in its insanity. How it will play to you in 2025 will depend on which voice you want to listen to.

Price is Dr. Erasmus Craven, who uses magic powers to paint a raven in the air with sorcery because, well, because the picture’s called The Raven. He’s been mourning his wife Lenore for a couple of years but sadly all he has left of her is an abysmal painting and a daughter, Estelle, who wasn’t even Lenore’s.

Who’s that tap tap tapping on his chamber door? Why nobody. It’s a raven tapping at his window. He lets it in and it talks to him in the equally memorable voice of Peter Lorre. He’s Dr. Adolphus Bedlo and he’s been turned into a raven by Dr. Scarabus after he drank far too much wine and challenged him to a sorcerer’s duel. He needs Craven to turn him back.

Other than a brief scene for Olive Sturgess as Estelle, it’s the Price/Lorre Show for half an hour and that’s no bad thing. Price was clearly delivering carefully rehearsed lines with camp layered onto them and Lorre was clearly doing whatever he could to steal the scene, not least improvising to make Price break character. In my favourite example, Craven ponders, “Shall I ever see the rare and radiant Lenore again?” Bedlo replies, “How the hell should I know?”

They’re about to leave the house to visit Dr. Scarabus, Bedlo having persuaded Craven that his dead wife is alive and well and living with his nemesis (and also his father’s successor as Grand Master of the Brotherhood), when a few other characters start to show up.

Firstly, it’s Craven’s servant Grimes who has been taken over by an unknown force and told to kill his master with an axe. Fortunately, the unconscious Craven comes to soon enough to zap Grimes with a green laser finger to defuse such “diabolic mind control”.

Then it’s Bedlo’s son Rexford, for no better reason than he’s been looking for him. That’s Jack Nicholson, who’s promptly taken over by Dr. Scarabus, who forces him to drive the lot of them to his castle, which, after all, was what he was doing anyway. Maybe it’s a subtle way to enforce his superiority before we even meet him, the core of the story being a battle for magical supremacy between two sorcerers.

While Nicholson likely felt privileged to see these three legends of the genre do what they do, his character is almost an afterthought. If a scene stealer of the calibre of Price is unable to stop Peter Lorre from stealing scenes from him, what chance had a young Nicholson? I’m pretty sure that’s why the screen father and son didn’t get along well on set.

Nicholson doesn’t do a bad job here, but it’s still hard to pay attention to him whenever he gets screen time. Early on it’s Lorre over Price. Then it’s Karloff. His first words are, “Afraid, my dear? There’s nothing to be afraid of!” and we don’t even need to watch this to hear them in his voice. Eventually it’s Karloff and Price in a hilariously nonchalant magical duel.

If anyone else gets a look in, it’s Hazel Court as Lenore, because she’s arguably a MacGuffin and as such gets plenty of crucial moments. In reality, we care about her as much as we care about the sled in Citizen Kane or the uranium in Notorious, which is to say not at all.

It’s hard not to like The Raven, however silly it gets and however far it departs from even a token acknowledgement of the source poem. I much prefer The Comedy of Terrors, a non-Poe comedy horror that doesn’t pretend to be one. It was also released in 1963, written by Richard Matheson and starring the trio of Price, Lorre and Karloff, plus a welcome Basil Rathbone for good measure. It has a much more substantial story, even though it still plays it very much for laughs. However, while The Raven is weaker in comparison in almost every way, it’s still a huge amount of fun.

It’s almost unfair to Nicholson that Rexford is a honest character who is who he is and has no need to change. Price and Lorre may not be blessed with deep characters either, but they have both secrets and the screen time to build up to revealing them. Karloff’s character has as many secrets, but they’re more obvious and so have less impact when they’re revealed. I’m not entirely sure if Lenore’s secrets are secrets to anyone but her husband, so she drifts away from our focus except to be eye candy in a film that’s almost entirely focused on men.

Rexford is kept blissfully out of all the wheel within wheel plans and counterplans. He’s just a pawn whose most powerful moments arrive unknowingly as part of the plans of others. For instance, he sees something during one duel between his father and Dr. Scarabus, so needs to tell Craven about it, which means that he’ll have to traverse a narrow ledge on the outside of Scarabus’s castle during a storm. It’s hardly a crucial moment in the film, but it’s all that he had to play with.

It’s been fascinating watching Nicholson try to establish himself as an actor in a gloriously varied set of early pictures. This was his first horror movie and he plays along gamely, with memorable scenes being possessed or talking with his father in the form of a bird.

What he really got out of The Raven, though, segues into his next film, The Terror, which was shot on the same sets before they were taken down, with Karloff but not Price or Lorre and with Nicholson not only as the leading man (if not top billed actor) but also, for the final day of shooting, a director.

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