Corman/Poe Month part 7. The Masque of the Red Death (1964)

Last time, I talked about The Haunted Palace, a movie I think is legitimately one of Roger Corman’s best Poe films, but one I have trouble enjoying on a personal level because I tend to watch all the movies chronologically, so by the sixth movie things start to feel samey. Now we have Masque of the Red Death, a movie that’s objectively on the lower end of the Poe movies, but I nevertheless consider my favorite. And wouldn’t you know it, one of the main reasons I have such a favorable opinion of this lesser movie is the same thing that sours me on the much better Haunted Palace: when I watch the movies in order, this is a HUGE breath of fresh air.

Corman was obviously getting bored with the Poe movies by this point, between the genre-shift of The Raven and the attempted author-shift of The Haunted Palace. His desire to shake things up dovetailed nicely with his ever-present mission to save money when Corman worked out a deal to head over England and shoot on the leftover sets of big budget historical drama Becket. Right off the bat, this makes Masque of the Red Death look like nothing else in the Poe Cycle. If The Haunted Palace was deliberately decaying and dark, then Masque is astonishingly lush and opulent. This is one of those movies that I can just look at without really watching, perfectly content to just wallow in the medieval finery of the sets. This movie would look gorgeous even standing on its own, but when you unleash it on me after six straight movies of redressing the same stairwell, just the fact that it’s obviously something new and different puts me in the mood to be positive. Likewise, the cast is almost entirely new, with only leading man Price and recurring leading lady Hazel Court recognizable from any of the earlier Poe films. So even before they new crew open their mouths, I’m in that much more of a forgiving mood. And speaking of which, “The Masque of the Red Death” was the very first Edgar Allen Poe story I ever read, so I’ve got an extra soft spot for any adaptation of the story. Oh, and my favorite color is red, so I guess that means I’ve got a soft spot for that particular color of debilitating pandemic as well? The point is, there’s a lot about this movie that inclines me to cut it more slack than most people would consider fair.

Debatably, the very top of that list is Vincent Price as Prince Prospero. Not that there’s any question of whether of not Price is any good, but because the specific nature of his performance here is unique. One of the hallmarks of Price in these types of pictures is his tendency to play tortured, unstable, but ultimately sympathetic characters. Even in cases like The Pit and The Pendulum or The Haunted Palace where he’s taken over by a more malicious personality, it’s balanced out by other scenes in which he’s kind and vulnerable. Prince Prospero says SCREW ALL THAT. He is the Bad Guy with a capital “MWAHAHAHAHA.” Completely unrepentant and open about his evilness, and obviously relishing every moment of it, Price basically plays Prospero the way Max von Sydow plays Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon, except that here he’s absolutely the central character. In my book, this can only be a good thing. At no point is Prospero ever sympathetic or even really likable, but he’s confident and charming enough that it’s still believable for guy could command the level of authority necessary for the character to fulfill his role in the plot. So many movie supervillains fail to strike that delicate balance, and I have to give full credit for this success to Price and NOT to authors Charles Beaumont and R. Wright Campbell because… well…

Okay, I’ve had my fun gushing about the aspects of this movie I love, but now it’s time to take a few steps back and acknowledge that, yes, this is a deeply flawed movie. For one thing, as much as I praise the look of the film in MOST places, it’s pretty dang obvious where the leftover Becket sets run out and Corman had to build his own. This film’s equivalent of the seven colored rooms are a pretty sorry sight, and it’s easy to see why their role in the story is significantly reduced here. Likewise, the attempts to shoot “outdoors” scenes on a soundstage are far from convincing. It’s not as bad as the woeful set in The Premature Burial, but these scenes still pale in comparison to the engrossing atmosphere of The Haunted Palace. Compared to the lush castle sets elsewhere in the film, these shots look pretty jarring. Also, as much as I give Masque of the Red Death credit for spicing things up, this is still the movie where I usually realize I’ve had enough of Corman’s obligatory nightmare/hallucination/bad trip sequence. At this point, Hazel Court being attacked by a demon just feels like a particularly weird segment from The Muppet Show to me, and I spend the whole scene just wishing they’d hurry up and get to something else. And on that note, let’s talk about the script.

Like so many other Poe adaptations, Masque of the Red Death struggles to stretch what is at best a single vignette out to an entire feature film, and thus requires an awful lot of padding. The least unnatural trick that Beaumont and Campbell try is, ironically, the most drastic: incorporating an entirely separate Poe story called “Hop-Frog” in as a subplot. The tale of a dwarf jester getting humiliating, fiery revenge on his noble tormentors, while altered a bit to fit the Masque narrative, actually fits the setting of Prospero’s decadent court quite nicely. Prospero’s reaction to seeing Hop-Frog burn one of his buddies alive is to declare that the dwarf should be rewarded for his delightful jest. Totally on brand. Other additions are noticeably less effective, such as adding extra scenes for the hooded Red Death figure to make it into more of an actual characters. Even if I didn’t fundamentally disapprove of this attempt to humanize an unknowable, alien figure (and I DO disapprove) the extra scenes simply aren’t that good. The denouement especially is a mistake in my eyes, drawing out the conclusion past the natural crescendo yet also distracting from the characters I’d actually been watching up to that point. Oh, and speaking of characters, let’s get to the big central problem.

One of the major additions to Masque of the Red Death is that Prince Prospero is no longer just a rich jerk who ignores the suffering of the commoners. Instead, he’s a literal Satanist who thinks his pact with The Devil will help protect him from the Red Death. Now, to be clear, I can see how this idea COULD work. Indeed, the notion that even Satan has no authority over Death is a nice cosmological expansion of the story’s established climax. Unfortunately, that confrontation between Prospero and the Red Death doesn’t happen until the end of the film. There’s a lot of filler to get through before that point, much of which is taken over by Prospero’s pseudo-philosophical ranting, and they are the single biggest problem with Masque of the Red Death. Or, at least, one side of that problem.  Some of it’s fairly harmless, like Prospero smugly reveling in how easy it is to make those under him debase themselves at his command. Those scenes do go on too long, but there’s some hammy fun to be had in the overacting. But as for the other parts…

The movie kicks off with Prospero having a confrontation in the peasant village with rabblerousing hero boy Gino (David Weston), his fiancé Francesca (Jane Asher) and her father Ludovico (Nigel Green). Prospero starts to do his whole evil supervillain thing until his soldiers realize the plague has hit the village, so Prospero brings all three of them to the castle to continue his deviousness there. Gino and Ludovico are subjected to Prisoners Of Evil Overlord Fate #13: being trained to fight each other to the death, but Prospero has bigger plans for Francesca. No not that kind of… well, actually, yeah, it probably is (much to dismay of his mistress Juliana, played by Court), but that's not his top priority right now. See, Francesca is a good Christian girl, so Prospero decides to try and tempt her over to The Dark Side… and OH GOOD LORD so much of the film’s runtime is devoted to this. Long long looooooong scenes of Prospero trying to reason and logic Francesca into being evil like him, but with the kind of surface level “If God, then why bad?” platitudes that even a moderator on r/atheism would find logically dubious. That alone isn’t the problem, however.

For whatever reason, Beaumont and Campbell decided to try and add a second dimension to these scenes: not simply having it be an ideological clash between characters, but also a contrast between the educated, eloquent noble and the simple, illiterate commoner. Again, I can see how an idea like this COULD work… if the writers actually allowed for some kind of meaningful dialog between Francesca and Prospero. Instead, Masque of the Red Death opperates under the belief that “simple commoner” means “dumb as a sack of rocks,” because Francesca’s side of the conversation pretty much entirely consists of “Duh, I dunno.” First off, it’s a huge disservice to Jane Asher, because the poor girl has NOTHING to work with here. I haven’t seen enough of her in other roles to judge her acting chops in general, but she's pretty dreadful as Francesca. But then, I don’t see how ANYBODY could come across alright when the script just says “stand around like a confused deer” for page after page. I haven’t commented on the rest of the acting outside of Price, because it’s mostly just forgettably serviceable, but Asher comes across terribly through this thing, and I have to place a lot of the blame on this script.

Indeed, this shoddy writing even threatens to drag down Price’s performance, as it unintentionally changes the context of everything he's doing. It’s possible that this script thinks Francesca HAS to be blank as a fart in order for Prospero to look smarter than her, because Beaumont and Campbell don’t know how to write a character like this convincingly, at least in this context. It’s true that any preschool Sunday School teacher should be able to at least respond to Prospero’s rambling, but dumbing Francesca down further misses the central issue that PROSPERO STILL SOUNDS DUMB HERE. He doesn’t really have a point, he contradicts himself constantly, rhetorical fallacies abound, and if that was the whole point, it’d be one thing. But no, the only other character has been rendered too dumb to respond, so if that IS the point, it doesn’t come across. Instead, Price keeps playing the part with all the smug satisfaction of somebody who just logic-bombed the entire world… except that’s demonstrably not what happened. Prospero being proud of himself for “winning” an argument with Francesca is like being proud you won an argument with a cardboard box. In this context, Prospero just look pathetic, downgrading from the supreme confidence of Ming the Merciless to the needy insecurity of Dr. Evil. It’s a testament to just how good Price’s performance is that he manages to make me forget just how dumb the movie around him is trying to make him look.

And that brings up to the single biggest issue here. ALL. THIS. TALKING. IS. BORING. Looking back, I realize the past few paragraphs can make it seem like my issue is with the “Church is bad and God is dead” stuff Prospero is spouting, but it’s really not. Oh, I do respectfully disagree, but I don’t believe in The Great Old Ones either, and I didn’t hold that against The Haunted Palace. Even Varg Vikernes would find Prospero’s rants about Christianity offensive simply because of how badly they wreck the pacing of the movie. And yes, since Francesca doesn’t have it in her to offer up more than a line or two on her end, most of these “conversations” are just monologues from Prospero. That’s not very fun to sit through in film form. Even one of the film’s producers, Samuel Z. Arkoff, apparently complained that Masque was “too arty farty” and didn’t have enough horror set pieces, to which I must agree. If I’m promised a movie about an evil murderous prince’s confrontation with the physical embodiment of plague and death, but all I get is extended sequences of people walking down dank hallways talking about philosophy, I’m going to feel a bit shortchanged. And I’m normally the guy who responds to the “nothing’s happening” complaint by stressing the importance of establishing mood and atmosphere, but that doesn’t even apply this time since this Nietzsche-wannabe blowhard who won’t shut is up hogging the screen and strangling any mood before it can manifest! And yes, I fully realize the irony that my complaints that the debate scenes are too long has made this probably the longest of all these reviews. I apologize for nothing.

Besides, I wouldn’t come down on this stuff so hard if it wasn’t in a movie containing other stuff I really do enjoy.  If Masque of the Red Death were entirely boring, I wouldn't care. Again, this is the sort of film that, for large stretches at least, I can just look at without really watching. Even it doesn’t successfully establish the same spooky mood as Corman’s better flicks, the luscious aesthetics are a mood all unto itself, and I just can’t bring myself to hate it as much as it probably deserves. Also, while I came down pretty hard on the last scene, the movie’s closing credits actually a pretty nifty way to go out. It’s an extremely striking bright-red sequence of a hand laying out a bunch of tarot cards. Honestly, the presence of full credits at the end and not the beginning still strikes me as a bit uncommon from a film of the time, let alone something as visually arresting as this. Honestly, it reminds me a lot of the current trend of lush, flashy closing credits in movies. Am I saying Roger Corman set the template for today’s super-blockbusters? Sure, why not.

So, seven down, one to go.  Next time, we find out WHY the next one wound up being the last one...