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Director: Douglas Hickox
Screenplay: Anthony Greville-Bell
Cast: Vincent Price (as Edward
Kendal Sheridan Lionheart); Diana Rigg (as Edwina Lionheart); Ian Hendry (as
Peregrine Devlin); Harry Andrews (as Trevor Dickman); Coral Browne (as Miss
Chloe Moon)
Synopsis: A circle of theatre critics led by Peregrine Devlin (Hendry) is being picked off one-by-one
through a series of bizarre murders. Fears rests upon the idea that actor
Edward Lionheart (Price), presumed to
be dead, is the culprit getting revenge on the critics who trashed his
performances of William Shakespeare
and deprived him of a critics' award years earlier. Will Devlin be on the list
of deaths inspired by the Bard's plays?
Vincent Price is as much a pop culture figure separated from his
filmography as much as he was a popular actor. I'd have first encountered him
as a young child through his narration in Michael
Jackson's Thriller, both
menacing yet having too much fun describing ghoulish horrors for the words to
get too serious. His figure in horror films like House on Haunted Hill (1959) suggests someone who presided over
high camp and relishes his evil villainy while about to twirl his slickly
combed moustache. But watching even a small sample of his films paints
additional layers onto him as an actor. The heavy in a film like Otto Preminger's Laura (1944), the seriousness of Witchfinder General (1968), or the lurid yet baroque Poe films by Roger Corman. With Theatre
of Blood you see the mix of the absurd in Price's acting style with moments of elegance and seriousness, the
high and low brow melding together. A strange double bill, strange because they
were so close together, appeared in Price's
career in the early seventies with The
Abominable Dr. Phibes (1971) and Theatre
of Blood, all about people being picked off by his character in bizarre
ways. The film being covered today had the inspiration, truly mixing the high
and low brow, of taking Shakespeare
as its central text.
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Here, this rather brilliant idea
of using the deaths from Shakespeare's
plays in a black comedy horror film works out for multiple reasons. First it enforces
that, as much as his work was great poetry and life enhancing, William Shakespeare was doing so in
populist plays which could be violent and bawdy. Titus Andronicus alone has plenty of gristly events that are still
shocking centuries later, and it's not surprising the most infamous part of
that play is the most memorable scene here in its reinterpretation, with Price
hamming it up as a French chef as the moment plays out. But in having this
premise as well, Price was allow
while still in the type of film he was typecast through to play something
different, able to show a dynamic range through being allowed to monologue
actual Shakespearian soliloquies and dialogue between the ridiculous plot
twists. He's exceptionally good at all of them, Theatre of Blood itself an incredibly silly genre film which
realises this and has Price balance
between playing a theatrical ham and also perform these extracts with full
sincerity. It's rare for an actor to be able to do this in the same film where
he has to play, in one of Lionheart's various disguises, a camp hairdresser
with a giant, white guy afro but Theatre
of Blood completes the cinematic bucket list for that sort of cinematic
image.
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A huge part of the film's appeal is that, even
in small roles, there're actors here I'm becoming more and more knowable of
from British cinema - Michael Hordern, Dennis Price and Diana Dors amongst
others - their various and diverse catalogues of roles adding to this film a
web between the type of movies made in this era. This could be seen as
indifferent to the best virtues of Theatre
of Blood - that it's playful, funny, and never drags its feet in pointless
plotting but gets to the gruel quickly - but at the same time the acting is a
significant part to why the film actually works. Casting Diana Rigg as Lionheart's daughter is not a bad thing in itself at
all, but also for the critics being picked off you need actors who stand out in
their roles even playing stereotypes. My only disappointment in this area is
that Arthur Lowe - most well know for
Dad's Army but appearing in films
like from Lindsay Anderson's to The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer (1970)
- only gets a short time onscreen, a shame because in the films I've seen he's
managed to steal scenes for titans like Peter
Cook and Malcolm McDowell
effortlessly despite looking like a middle age banker. The actors' various
roles in other films - the most surprising for me that Dennis Price went from Kind
Hearts and Coronets (1949) to Jesus
Franco's Vampyros Lesbos (1971) -
adds to this.
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The other factor is that, while
no way near as violent as modern films or even the horror films being made in
the early seventies and earlier around it, Theatre
of Blood is still incredibly sadistic and more so because it's played for
laughs. As you forget how barbarous Shakespeare
could be, you forget how vicious British cinema could be in the humour or the
murders that take place in our movies. An American like Price fits the grand eloquence and cheekiness of this film with
ease, but even at its most high minded, this is still a film where he gloats as
a man is drowned in a giant barrel of wine and he suits that perfectly as well.
Even if it seems like part of the older horror films from before - the
seventies when companies like Hammer
or Amicus were going to go from their
glory days to dying legs by the end of the decade - it matches the grim tone of
the era even if its laughing at the same time.
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Technical Detail:
One thing I've had to adapt to
with my country's cinema is that, while there're plenty of auteurs, the
backbone especially of sixties and seventies cinema in the country was made of
working directors, incredibly talented and experienced but who didn't put
personal trademarks into the films, instead filming them as faithfully to their
material as possible. I've grown to love these films, after originally
dismissing the genre films especially, and if anything now the really
fascinating aspects of these sorts of films is the period detail. All shot in
London, you have both elaborate, deserted theatres in their aged beauty and the
grimy realism of an urban street; as much a history lesson of what life was
like before I was born, accepting the grubbiness of the locations means there's
as much fun soaking in said aesthetic too.
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Abstract Spectrum: Grotesque
Abstract Rating (High/Medium/Low/None): None
Not abstract all but I have to
step back and think how odd some of the content actually is. A fully realised
theatrical stage, with multiple levels, with Price in full costume and makeup for The Merchant of Venice...all in favour for only killing one
person and populated with homeless meth drinkers who had their own choreographer
for the film. Price as the
aforementioned camp hairdresser flirting with a policeman, even if it might be
un-PC today, a fencing battle were the fighters partially brawl doing flips on
separate trampolines, and Devlin decrying Lionheart rewriting the Bard are all
strange and utterly entertaining things even if they don't make the film
abstract. Compared to genre films made in Britain now, few have anything like
in this one.
Personal Opinion:
A film that's just entertaining,
and that's more than enough to say.
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