Hawthorne bored me in high school. I thought Vincent Price et al would be more interesting, but nope. How can a writer be interesting when he peoples his stories with characters named Hannah and Abigail and Hepzibah? But I've gathered over the years that Hawthorne was obsessed with the past, particularly the witch hunts of 1690s, and that what he was doing was basically what the great Southern writers of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s were doing with regard to race relations, namely work out an understanding of their Big Sin, slavery or religious intolerance, to their own satisfaction, while at the same time trying to explain to the rest of us what it looked like from the inside. The anthropologist John M. Roberts called this "the conflict-enculturation hypothesis." You work out your guilty obsessions in model form. That's why Italian-American directors make so many Mafia movies.
Well, I couldn't get through Hawthorne's novel, and this movie is of no help. It's ordinary in every respect. Hawthorne's Calvinist themes -- materialism combined with a phantasmic past sin -- seem to be there, but they're transposed into stories about poisonous plants and elixers and whatnot that Roger Corman might have found appealing.
The movie is cheaply made. The colors are gaudy, the acting routine for a B movie, the plots simplified (I'm virtually certain) to comic-book level. The art direction is okay in the interiors. The exteriors are obviously staged, with multiple-source lighting, plastic greens, no wind, and a generally airless stuffy atmosphere. My attention drifted while I watched this, as it used to drift when I was a sophomore. Everything seemed gloomy and unpleasant. It might have helped if they'd had Bill Murray prance naked through one of the scenes.
Price was evidently an interesting guy, an aesthete from Saint Louis. In one of his movies, I can't recall the title, he's called upon to throw grenades or something at his pursuers and he throws them the way the rest of us would throw darts, not the way we would throw a baseball. A highly publicized art collector, author of several cookbooks (one has a misprint; use only one cup of breadcrumbs in the eggplant parmesan, not two cups), kind of a purchasing agent for Sears' art department, keen sense of humor. I enjoy some of his performances. See "Theater of Blood," if you can, and "Champagne for Caesar." But not this. Spare yourself, the way Hawthorne never could.
Well, I couldn't get through Hawthorne's novel, and this movie is of no help. It's ordinary in every respect. Hawthorne's Calvinist themes -- materialism combined with a phantasmic past sin -- seem to be there, but they're transposed into stories about poisonous plants and elixers and whatnot that Roger Corman might have found appealing.
The movie is cheaply made. The colors are gaudy, the acting routine for a B movie, the plots simplified (I'm virtually certain) to comic-book level. The art direction is okay in the interiors. The exteriors are obviously staged, with multiple-source lighting, plastic greens, no wind, and a generally airless stuffy atmosphere. My attention drifted while I watched this, as it used to drift when I was a sophomore. Everything seemed gloomy and unpleasant. It might have helped if they'd had Bill Murray prance naked through one of the scenes.
Price was evidently an interesting guy, an aesthete from Saint Louis. In one of his movies, I can't recall the title, he's called upon to throw grenades or something at his pursuers and he throws them the way the rest of us would throw darts, not the way we would throw a baseball. A highly publicized art collector, author of several cookbooks (one has a misprint; use only one cup of breadcrumbs in the eggplant parmesan, not two cups), kind of a purchasing agent for Sears' art department, keen sense of humor. I enjoy some of his performances. See "Theater of Blood," if you can, and "Champagne for Caesar." But not this. Spare yourself, the way Hawthorne never could.