Playing For Laughs Amid Horror, The Price Was Fright

by Stephen Whitty,
Star-Ledger Staff

Saturday October 27, 2007, 10:00 PM

He was born in a grand inquisitor's Spanish castle, in the most loveless of old London mansions, in a ghastly and gabled Salem homestead. He would spend his adult life gleefully arranging premature burials, presiding over sadistic masques, tending bubbling vats of pinkly horrific paraffin.
And then, as it does to all fiends -- at least in those days -- rough justice would come.

The callow hero would wrest the villain's blood-rusted weapons away. Policemen would appear, even their calm exteriors shaken by his unspeakable deeds. An undead wife would rise from her crypt and, knocking aside a guttering candle, set the decrepit old manse ablaze.

And he would scream, and the film would cut to old stock footage of burning houses, and we would cheer and throw our popcorn at the screen.

Vincent Price was not the first horror star and he might not have been the best. But he always seemed to be the fiend having the most fun. And for the "Famous Monsters" generation that grew up watching him wander the cardboard castles of low-budget '60s Gothics, he remains a beloved matinee memory.

And now, like one of those cataleptic wives of his, he rises again.

His grimy, man-against-the-vampires film, "The Last Man on Earth" -- which helped inspire "Night of the Living Dead" -- is about to see a big-budget remake as "I Am Legend." A beautifully restored print of "Leave Her to Heaven" -- a gorgeous Technicolor noir -- was just showcased at the New York Film Festival.

Meanwhile, a boxed set of his horrors -- including the dark "Witchfinder General," the campy "Dr. Phibes" films and a trio of documentary tributes -- has been released by MGM at $39.98. They also have a complimentary set of other, "Price-less" genre films by frequent collaborator Roger Corman and, in December, a deluxe DVD release of the often-bootlegged "Last Man on Earth."

You can't keep a good monster down.

Vincent Price was born in 1911 in St. Louis, the heir to a candy-factory fortune. An enthusiast of fine art since childhood, he went to Yale, then on an old-fashioned "grand tour" of Europe, poking around German castles and English museums. But when Price tried out, almost as a lark, for the London play "Victoria Regina," his passing resemblance to Prince Albert got him cast.

The play led to Broadway, and soon the 24-year-old was fielding offers from Hollywood. As Price had made his name playing a young lover in a period piece, film producers rushed the well-spoken, 6'4" actor into similar parts. He starred in a lightweight romantic comedy, "Service de Luxe," in 1938. He co-starred in "The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex" and "Tower of London," a blood-and-thunder retelling of Richard III.

Yet what had seemed courtly in the theater, seemed mannered now; what had once appeared as breeding now came off as superiority. Hollywood had bought a young leading man; they had been delivered a character actor.

Luckily for Price, it was the ¤'40s, a boomtime for supporting players. He soon carved out a nice niche at Fox, playing rich weaklings and ruthless snobs; his finest moment came in "Laura" in 1944, opposite a frequent co-star, the achingly beautiful Gene Tierney. As Shelby Carpenter, the penniless Southern gigolo, Price flits from one benefactress to another like a butterfly, his shallow charm matched only by his canny self-interest.

The sign that there might be an even more profitable genre came with "House of Wax," in 1953. Price had dabbled in such films before -- that's his uncredited voice as the Invisible Man in "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein" -- but this was an all-out shocker, and a huge hit. Later that decade, "The Fly" and two films for William Castle -- "The Tingler" and "House on Haunted Hill" -- confirmed Price's status as horror's newest star.

Confirmed his style, as well, as he brought both films a touch of self-conscious melodrama and self-mocking camp. He knew what these films were. But he was also determined that he, and we, were going to have fun.

A climax of sorts came in 1960, when Roger Corman -- who had been churning out profitably puerile B-movies for American Independent Pictures -- grew ambitious. His next picture, he decided, would be in color. It would be based on a classic of American literature. It would star a famous actor.

Of course the color was the garish Pathecolor, the classic was a Poe story conveniently in the public domain, and the actor was Price. But "House of Usher" showed that Corman could handle more than giant crab monsters and beatnik delinquents. And its basic theme -- with Price as a symbol of the corrupt Establishment, falling rapidly to pieces -- connected, subconsciously, with a newly rebellious generation.

The film spawned a series, many of them marked by poetic flourishes or surprising new talents. "The Raven" brought in young Jack Nicholson as a male ingenue; "The Tomb of Ligeia" featured a literate script by Robert Towne, who would go on to write "Chinatown." "The Pit and the Pendulum" featured a sensuous turn by femme fatale Barbara Steele; "The Masque of the Red Death" showed off Corman's flair for composition.

They were the making of Price as a star -- and, perhaps, the unmaking of him as an actor. Too many other movies began to copy them, and the actor signed on for every one; the more ridiculous they became, the less seriously Price took them. Offscreen he might have a reputation as a chef, but before the cameras, all he served was ham.

So when the moody Michael Reeves, then preparing a period drama called "Witchfinder General" with Donald Pleasance, was told by his American producers that it was to be re-titled "Edgar Allen Poe's Conqueror Worm," and star Vincent Price, Reeves was furious. From the moment Price arrived, Reeves snarled at him, on take after take. "You're doing it!" he'd shout. And then, minutes later, "You're doing it again!"

Price, by then a hundred movies into his career, was just as upset -- until he realized that what the director had caught him "doing" was the very routine he had perfected over more than 15 years of middling efforts -- winking at the audience, playing for laughs, striking camp. Reeves didn't want "the Vincent Price act" -- he wanted Vincent Price, the actor. And once Price realized that, he gave a coldly brilliant performance as the corrupt inquisitor.

The movie was too grimly serious for monster fans, and too horrific for mainstream audiences. Yet it gently eased Price into a better cycle of "revenge" films, such as the stylish "The Abominable Dr. Phibes," in which he settles old scores using the 10 plagues of Exodus, or the witty "Theatre of Blood" in which an actor executes carping critics according to the plays of Shakespeare.

That one remained, not surprisingly, one of his favorites.

In a perfect world, it would have been his last, a nice, neat capping achievement -- but lives are not nice, or neat, and Price wanted to keep working. He did more horror films. He hosted PBS' "Mystery!" He toured the country with a one-man show based on the life of Oscar Wilde, "Delights and Diversions." He popped up on records by Alice Cooper and Michael Jackson.

His last major appearance, before his death in 1993, was in Tim Burton's "Edward Scissorhands," as the inventor who never quite got the chance to finish Johnny Depp's digits; for Burton, who grew up obsessed with TV broadcasts of Price's Poe movies, it was the culmination of a life-long dream.

But then, Vincent Price had always haunted many dreams.

In the end, he was even more complicated than his characters. Although Price came from money and privilege, he was no snob; his two proudest projects were convincing Sears, Roebuck to sell paintings and establishing an art collection at East Los Angeles College. Although he was married three times, his sexuality remained ambiguous; even his devoted daughter said she couldn't figure it out. (Confusing things even further was that Price's last wife, Coral Browne, was a flamboyant bisexual.)

But one thing about Vincent Price was absolutely unambiguous, and that was that he simply loved being Vincent Price. He never refused an autograph. He answered every fan letter. He knew that he owed his career to his audience, knew that his films only made money because his fans trustingly turned out every time, knowing he would never disappoint.

And he tried so very hard not to.

We knew that too, somehow, wherever we first saw him -- at those bargain-basement Saturday matinees, or on the 4:30 movie after school. We watched, and maybe we sneered a little at the giant spun-glass cobwebs, or the bats on strings, or even Price's quivering nostrils as he spoke desperately of that eldritch horror who waits, sir, yes waits even now beyond this chamber! We watched, and we laughed.

But Price was always laughing, too -- with us, and at himself. And it is that great and gentle generosity of spirit that survives him even now.

Stephen Whitty may be reached at swhitty@starledger.com or at (212) 790-4435.

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