THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH @ 60

Prince Prospero stops at a local village on the way to his castle. After a scene of verbal revolt from two of the villagers, he orders Francesca, daughter of one and wife of the other, to choose which should be put to death. She refuses. He orders the village burned, ostensibly due to signs that the Red Death plague is there, and he takes Francesca and the two men for his sport to the castle. If he can corrupt her to his avowed Satanic ways, all this might turn to his advantage as entertainment for the crowd of aristocrats he's invited over to wait out the plague in high style.

While Francesca is given the run of the place, her father and husband are locked up in the dungeon and the decadent frolics of the well-born who dance with seemingly interminable energy in a display of bright moving colour. Here happen some telescoping moments like the paedophilic Alfredo striking the dancer Esmerelda in front of Prospero's jester and more than a few allusions to Prospero's master Satan. And, hey, it's not a party without the Red Death himself, who'll be along later.

The Masque of the Red Death is Roger Corman's most complex and ambitious Poe adaptations and plays as the most grown up. Vincent Price's Prospero gives us a believable aristocrat, one eye on his administrative duties and the other on his pleasures. He's urbane and assured of his place but adolescently gleeful to share his Satanism as though it's his own personal discovery he can use to shock the straight world. When it comes to respecting persons, learning that a fellow noble has journeyed through infected territory, he has no problem thwanging the whole family with a crossbow. He might like the darkness and the chaos but he's no dummy.

Patrick Magee as Alfredo is a rounded sinister, expressing his lust for the dwarf dancer Esmerelda as arising from her resemblance to a child. He's a notch under Prospero in that his gleeful receipt of licence the situation gives him takes him beyond his aristocracy into the realm of the workaday depraved. Magee's seriousness in this is intentionally disturbing. The role of Hop Toad (oddly renamed from Hop Frog, another Poe story borrowed here) is taken by Skip Martin in a characteristically non-exploitative depiction. Corman was careful to distinguish characters' othering from offering it to his audiences. Here, we see a performer take to his character, seriously and skilfully. Hop Toad's and Alfredo's binding as characters adds a poignancy to this. 

Jane Asher came from formal theatrical training as well as child roles in British cinema and would have a fun '60s with significant and very cool film roles as well as being part of the Beatles' gangalang, partnering up with Paul. Here she breaks through the woodenness Corman often gave to his leading women by taking the central conflict of good and evil upon herself. Her avowed weapon against the ethical ravages of Prospero is that of hope, something he can scoff at but not fully vanquish. Her modesty at being seen in the bath by the prince is ingenuous enough to see him recoil a little from his own brashness. The worry on her face is confused and it gives the scene depth. She is Price's match in their every shared scene.

Hazel Court is a disruptive influence in the story as without Francesca, her Julia might have been the female lead. She is the humiliated and shunned consort of Prospero. Her anger is admitted but kept repressed until her attempt to escalate her position through ritual and its consequences which are horrifying. It's a performance that can evade memory, surrounded by such a cast, but she meets the complexity of her character's role industriously.

Corman's pallet is bright in the safety of the castle and mud and mist for the wastelands and villages. There is even less concession to realism in the mis en scene than in similar gothic fantasies like Fall of the House of Usher. The more human the vices and entitlement, the more colourful the look. This might be dismissed as old school pictorialism or cheap irony but there's a distinct sense that this itself is just dressing, that the genuine horror is that of the illusion of control that Prospero and his foppish hedonists exhibit. There is a clear sense of the nakedness beneath the finery that will be rendered unto dust. It's not the inevitability of this that bothers the film as much as attempts to intellectualise oneself out of it. 

Corman was notably pessimistic about humanity, declaring more than once that he though war to be the natural state of humanity. Prospero is not far from this, except for his overt Satanism (but this is explained as being less evil than intellectual), but Francesca is its opposite. She is not a Panglossian blind optimist, she acknowledges the delights of the court dances with them easily enough, but her note of hope survives the sensuality where shallow optimism would be eroded. Corman appears to be testing the worst of his excesses with this plain wish. He is sincere enough about it to push it forward at the expense of the audience-pleasing horror he was famous for.

This is the one horror tale that does not end in fire with the same stock shots re-sequenced yet again to show the flames of damnation licking at the hapless figures. The ending which tastes a little too much of cheese today, is a kind evocation of the final image of Bergman's Sixth Seal. but it's a serious proposition for all that. The mini conference of personified plagues walking in line through the waste ground suggests the inevitability of mortality but this is after we see the value of hope against its ravages. We can take home what we want from this but on the eve of Vietnam, the violence against the civil rights movement, assassinations that went beyond the one just before this production, and the ghost of politics future in Watergate. Is a walk on the moon balance enough for us? This time, Corman refuses to say, and his film is by far the better for it.

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