Masque of the Red Death (1964)

In the 60's, Roger Corman produced and directed a number of loose Edgar Allen Poe and H.P Lovecraft adaptations, many of which starred Vincent Price. Even hindered by Corman's notoriously low budgets, these films were often lovingly made and quite good, although much of that must have had to do with Price's presence. I can't imagine any other actor in any time who would have been a better suited tool for invoking the worlds imagined by Poe and Lovecraft (as altered and mutated as they were once they made it to celluloid). One of my personal favorites has always been Masque of the Red Death, thanks mainly to the fact that's it's also based from the first Poe story I ever read (back in the second grade...yes, I was a precocious brat.)

Of course, to pad out the story to a feature-length film, many additions were made and many liberties were taken with the story. It starts with a woman gathering herbs in the forest running into a mysterious robed man who hands her a rose and promises her an end to the oppression. Then we cut to the 'oppression,' a corrupt and decadent prince named Prospero passing through a tiny Italian village he 'owns' and going about a yearly ritual where he invites a number of villagers to feast at his castle (as you expect, the benevolence of this gesture is downplayed by two factors: 1) the dude is played by Vincent Price, and 2) the carriage almost ran over a baby with the same lack of regard for human life as a modern SUV driver). A couple of men, both looking very well-groomed for two medieval serfs, take the oppurtunity to criticize Prospero's approach to government. Forgetting that they're in medieval Europe, the men actually act a bit suprised when Prospero gets peeved and is about to have them killed.

Here we meet the film's heroine, Francesca, who happens to be connected with both of the men: one is her father and the other her lover. She intercedes, pleading for their lives. Prospero obviously becomes smitten with her but decides to make a game out of the situation for his courtiers who watch from the carriage. He tells Francesca that he will only kill one of the men, but she must decide which one dies. Unfortunately for Prospero and the courtiers (and probably a few members of the audience), this situation is interrupted by the screams of the old woman from the beginning, who is dying from the 'Red Death.' Obviously spooked, Prospero snatches Francesca, her lover, and her father with him, orders that the village be burned almost as a second thought, and takes them to his castle, where a number of other Italian nobles have gathered to protect themselves from the 'Red Death.'

Francesca, being a devout Christian, is shocked at the decadant world of Prince Prospero and his courtiers, where the latter are willing to degrade themselves for Prospero's gifts, much to the Prince's disgust and cynical amusement. Separated from her loved ones, Francesca is made Prospero's mistress, despite the meager protests of his wife Juliana. Francesca and Prospero are eventually united by their determination to convert the other to their respective faiths: Francesca Christianity, and Prospero Satanism. After a failed attempt to escape with her father and lover, and after Juliana dies after making a pact with Satan, Francesca begins to fall for her captor as Prospero and his courtiers prepare for a grand masque, but who's that strange red-hooded man hanging around outside?

With a lesser script and a lesser actor, the character of Prince Prospero might have just been a "boo! I'm EE-VIL!" Satanist/tyrant, but here he is, even while doing quite nasty things to poor peasants and aristocratic friends alike, a psychologically interesting invention. Although his Satanist theology is never really defined beyond what you'd normally expect, there is an actual and even sympathetic motive behind it: a real disillusionment with the hypocrisy of the practitioners of the dominant religion and society's "best and brightest" and a nihilistic attitude about the nature of mankind. Price's Prospero does have a grudging respect for Francesca's god of love, but such a god could only be dead in the world he sees (as one of his ongoing conversations with Francesca explicitly states). Even the times when he forces his victims into horrific ethical situations or encourages his guests to humiliate themselves for him, there's a charged and interesting goal. He endlessly seeks to prove that no one is better off morally than he is. That makes his love for Francesca (well, besides the fact that she keeps her looks well for a peasant) all the more understandable and bizarrely tragic; he sees in her his only intellectual (and perhaps, in a strange way, moral) equal, therefore she must be won over to his side of things.

Even more intriguing is that the script makes it clear that not only has Francesca started to succumb to Prospero's seductions, but she seems to have even begun to seriously adopt Prospero's philosophy. Although Francesca begins the film as your generic gothic heroine, her theological debates with Prospero and growing acceptance of his outlook give her a much appreciated depth. Sadly, though, Francesca's apparent 'conversion' is one of the many plotlines that wind up ignored by the movie towards the end.

That's the main thing about this movie that keeps it from becoming a Vincent Pride classic like The Abominable Dr. Phibes. The script is strong enough when it comes to the main story with Prospero and Francesca, but pretty much all of the movie's main subplots are dropped and ignored once the film winds down. There's even a sub-plot about a midget couple (!) kept around for the courtiers' entertainment (I know that midgets were always the highest in entertainment for the European nobility, but it's still bizarre) starting up a scheme to escape from Prospero's palace, which somehow involves playing a prank and killing one of the courtiers. How does that work, and do they escape? We never find out. Does Francesca go back to her lover or has Prospero's influence truly changed her? What's happened to him really anyway? Same here. Why did Prospero spare the baby when he had the surviving peasants from the village killed? Ditto. The fate of the movie's protagonists are mentioned off-handedly by the man in red, who is joined at the movie's last scene by other men dressed in differing colors. Are they embodiements of the different types of plagues striking the world? The horsemen of the Apocalypse? Representations of the different 'messengers' of death? We don't even get a definite answer to these questions.

Also lacking is the film's treatment of its periphery characters. The swashbuckling antics of Francesca's lover are distracting and boring, especially since the character is incredibly generic (in fact, you astute readers probably noticed that he was such a non-entity I failed to take note of his name). The long-suffering Juliana comes across a little better, although the most interesting dillema she faces-the prospect of losing Prospero to Francesca unless, or so she thinks, she drastically commits her soul to Satan-doesn't recieve much attention from the script. The surreal sequence that accompanies the ritual where she becomes a 'handmaiden to Satan' is one of the film's pivotol moments, if overdrawn and controversial given that she's haunted by images with representatives from various non-European cultures (I like to think that it was just a shot at being bizarre, rather than something intentionally linking other cultures to ungodliness, but that just might be my love for this film trying to cover up a sore spot. On the other hand, I really can't see Roger Corman endorsing that kind of thinking).

Despite the writing flaws, the cinematography is quite good and the costume and set design, although limited, are surprisingly professional, especially considering the budget. Of course, though, the main reason to see this is for Vincent Price and he does an excellent job here. The movie's climactic scene (which should have also been its last, but sadly it wasn't) where Prospero witnesses his courtiers' 'dance of death' and faces a terror he cannot control is, to put it simply, exquisite. If only the script was stronger and the film not as loose with its other elements, we might have had a classic on our hands.