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Russell (in Mahler or Gothic, say) benefits from the opening burial outdoors, a hissing cat leaps on the casket to open the corpse's eyes. "Blasphemy!" "Benediction." The widower (Vincent Price) suffers from "a morbid reaction to sunlight," his late wife and the fascinated maiden (Elizabeth Shepherd) are linked by "willfulness." His graveside ruminations are intercut with her climb up the bell tower, it cuts to their wedding and a trip to Stonehenge. The honeymoon is curtailed, the husband is a moody creature in top hat and tinted specs, flames lick the screen as his new bride takes part in a hypnotic séance and is suddenly seized by a shuddering spirit. "Lately, I... seem to slip into reveries." The final entry in Roger Corman's Poe cycle is a sustained rhyme on Hitchcock's Rebecca, a dense welter of motifs verging on delirious abstraction. Pale grass and crumbling rock in English landscapes, dotted with splashes of red and contemplated with a tracking camera. The outsider materializes in the midst of a foxhunt and is irresistibly drawn to the familial mausoleum, her beloved is something of an archeological aesthete, confounded by the blank orbs of Egyptian relics. (Persistence of vision is a theme.) The possessed feline is repulsed by a hurled cabbage, and Robert Towne's screenplay seizes the moment for a surreal flight: "If only I could lay open my own brain as easily as I did that vegetable, what rot would be freed from its grey leaves?" The stairway behind the mirror, the "legal technicality" that mingles living and dead and blonde and brunette, a conflagration resolves all. One admirer is Truffaut in The Green Room. With John Westbrook, Derek Francis, Oliver Johnston, Richard Vernon, and Frank Thornton.
--- Fernando F. Croce |