Corman/Poe Month: 2. The Pit and the Pendulum (1961)

Okay, last time I warned that, if you aren't already set on watching the whole cycle in chronological order no matter what, I don’t think House of Usher is a good place for you to start watching Corman's Poe cylce. If you just want to jump right in at watch a strong, memorable offering, I highly advise starting out with The Pit and the Pendulum. Not only does this movie do just about everything it does better than House of Usher did the year before, but most of what it does basically IS what House of User did!

An attentive reader familiar with Edgar Allan Poe will immediately have two questions upon me saying that.  The second question is “How on earth is “The Pit and the Pendulum” supposed to be the same as "The Fall of the House of Usher”? They’re not even remotely similar!” The answer to that is tied to the FIRST question any reader would ask, that being “HOW CAN ANYONE POSSIBLY MAKE A FEATURE-LENGTH MOTION PICTURE OUT OF “THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM?” Indeed, this is the great obstacle all attempts at filming the works of Poe must tackle: most of his stories only barely have enough material to fill out the runtime of a short film, and even then most of that material is the inner monologue of the narrator. “The Pit and The Pendulum” in particular seems virtually unfilmable, at best being a striking idea for a set-piece. Indeed, that’s just how screenwriter Richard Matheson seems to have approached it, using the concept of the titular torture device as little more than the climax of a whole new story. And by “new story” I of course mean a story almost entirely recycled from House of Usher.

Seriously, all the Edgar Allan Poe Starter Kit plot points included in House of Usher are on full display in The Pit and the Pendulum, regardless of whether or not it has anything to do with the original short story. Madness? Check! Familial guilt? Sure thing! Morbid obsession? You betcha! Premature burial? Oh, you know it! And the thing is, I enjoy Matheson’s generic Poe substitute story concocted to fill out this film FAR better than his attempt to modify and adapt the ACTUAL Poe story of House of Usher. That’s just one of the many reasons I recommend starting here rather that the ACTUAL start of the cycle. It’d be a real shame if your enjoyment of all the Poe tropes in use here were dampened by the memory of having just seen them all in an inferior film. And make no mistake, the memory of the preceding film will be strong. The opening scenes of Pendulum and Usher, where the leading man arrives at the creepy house and has to bluster his way in past the help to get in, are so similar that it’s genuinely disorienting to watch both movies back to back. It sounds like a joke, but there legitimately have been times where I found myself wondering if I'd started the wrong movie by accident. Even as I sit here and write this, it’s a bit hard to keep my memories of the two scenes separate.

Where House of Usher hinged its action (such as there was) on a main character trying to find his mysteriously ailing fiancée, The Pit and the Pendulum has as its protagonist a young man investigating reports of his sister’s sudden death, after she’d gone off to marry a nobleman who also happened to be the son of an infamous member of The Inquisition. Theoretical leading man John Kerr still doesn’t give an especially MEMORABLE performance, but he’s at least not as boring as Mark Damon was. Whether that’s due more to Kerr bringing more energy or simply because Matheson gives him more agency as a character is open to interpretation, I just know I didn’t regret seeing him on screen. Antony Carbone’s Dr. Leon is far more forgettable, though at the risk of spoilers, that can actually be excused as a deliberate plot point if one is feeling especially forgiving. Both the menfolk fair better than the ladies of the film, if for very different reasons. Luana Anders, playing Kerr’s love interest Catherine, is hands down the worst part of The Pit and the Pendulum. She’s a force of unrelenting blandness while onscreen and even worse when she’s limited to doing voice over. Seriously, there’s a flashback with Anders as narrator, and she reads her lines with all the fire and passion on a schoolteacher narrating an educational filmstrip about cleaning out an aquarium. Harrison Ford doing the Blade Runner narration would tell her to try and sound a little less bored. It’s all the worse when combined with the utter squandering of the film’s other leading lady, the legendary Barbara Steele. For the most part, The Pit and the Pendulum wastes Steel as bad as Usher wasted Price, mostly relegating her to flashbacks where she has little to do but sit around and look pretty. Thankfully, she does get ONE scene to really cut loose, and in those precious few minutes she’s the second most compelling thing in the movie, but it’s so short that it just makes the soggy limp that is Anders’ performance all the more disappointing in retrospect.

But, of course, that brings us to the main event, Vincent Price as Don Nicholas Medina. I dare say that The Pit and the Pendulum just might be the perfect introductory course for anybody who wants to learn what Price is all about. If House of Usher unfairly reigns Price in, then Pendulum sends him off to run a decathlon. Don Medina goes on a mental and emotional rollercoaster throughout the film, and intentionally or not, it allows for a sort of Vincent Price’s Greatest Hits performance. He goes from Creepy Suspicious Guy Who’s Hiding Something to Genuinely Sympathetic Scared Guy to Total Crackpot to Legitimately Intimidating Monster, all within the course of a single film. Most actors would struggle to manage just ONE of these characterizations, but Price tears through all of them with equal gusto, and it’s a joy to behold. I don’t want to spend too much time gushing over Price right now, otherwise I won’t have much of anything to say in the other blogs, but this really might be his most well-rounded tour de force in the Corman Poe cycle.

Of course, it always helps if Price has some truly solid material to work with, and Corman definitely comes through on his end. The Pit and the Pendulum looks fantastic, especially for a movie that, comparatively speaking, was still pretty dang cheap to make. The titular set piece alone is stupidly memorable, to say nothing of the use the film gets out of other tools of medieval torture, and the overall plot has some nicely mean-spirited twists to it. It’s not perfect, mind you. Even if you DON’T hold Luana Anders’ lackluster performance against it, the script relies far too much on flashbacks and recaps and “Actually, what happened was THIS” revelations. A lesser movie might have collapsed under all the narrative weight, though Pendulum has enough good stuff going on the ensure that it’s not anything worse than a second-act lull. People who know more about movies than I do talk about how The Pit and the Pendulum has a major influence on European horror cinema, specifically the giallo movies that started coming out of Italy a couple years after Pendulum came out. I don't pretend to be an expect of that particular sub-strata of exploitation films, but from what I have seen, I can TOTALLY see where Pendulum's influence can be detected.  Apparently I'm not the only one who puts The Pit and The Pendulum on his short list of Corman/Poe movies.

And, alas, from these heights, there’s nowhere to go but down.  Tune in next time when I have to be a lot less positive about things…