Directed
by Douglas Hickox
At
Film Forum, Oct. 30-Nov. 5
Almost
10 years before Vincent Price’s definitive performance as the ghoulish rapper
in Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” Price had already riffed on his career as a
veteran Hollywood survivor in 1973’s Theater of Blood (playing this week
with Scream of Terror as part of Film Forum’s Halloween double bill).
Price rode out the transition from major studio contract leading player in
A-list films like Laura (1944) to a star of André de Toth’s atypical
thriller House of Wax (1953), which tracked him from icon status through
American International’s low-budget grand guignols. Jackson intuited how
Price—St. Louis, Missouri’s most urbane export—turned scary into camp.
Theater
of Blood itself
riffs on Price’s American International junk, casting him as Edward Lionheart,
a flamboyant classical actor out for revenge on the London Critics Circle, who
denied him an award for his season of Shakespeare repertory. It’s a role that
showcases Price’s natural hamminess. The prevailing joke is Price’s pretense of
British aristocracy. His vocal affectations suggest high-toned virtuosity to
untutored audiences—the culture vultures who think Aussie Cate Blanchett is a
great actress. (Spielberg’s intuition rightly cast Blanchett as a Price-like
villain in last year’s Indy Jones film). These hoi polloi are depicted as
Lionheart’s minions—street bums and boozehounds—his only remaining fans who
carry out his murderous plans.
Lionheart
plots to kill each theater critic by restaging various murder scenes or violent
anecdotes out of Shakespeare. This novel idea lifts Theater of Blood out
of the exploitation proto-Saw category,
and yet Douglas Hickox’s inelegant direction sinks potential. Hickox doesn’t
grasp the splendor of theatricality—where the meaning of life and death are
heightened, as well as the meaning of ambition and ego and tragedy. Hickox
never pauses to highlight Willy’s poetry or even Vinny’s learned elocution.
Given
its impressive cast of pedigreed guest victims—Coral Browne, Harry Andrews,
Jack Hawkins, Dennis Price, Diana Dors, Michael Hordern and Robert Morley—plus
Diana Rigg (Helena in Peter Hall’s 1968 film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream)
as Lionheart’s crafty daughter, Theater of Blood should have been good
enough to satirize the Olivier ego and legend. That way, Price’s performance
could be both spoof and salute. Lionheart’s monstrous deeds are not far from
Olivier’s unintentionally campy Price-like performance in The Boys from
Brazil.
Theater
of Blood is
still worth seeing as one of film history’s best could-have-beens. Its
reenactments of Shakespeare’s greatest “hits” demonstrate the cultural
expectations that were still part of pop art during the ’70s. Imagine a
contemporary horror film that depended on non-comic book literary awareness as
part of the audience’s delight.
Armond
White’s new book, Keep Moving: The Michael Jackson Chronicles is
available at resistanceworks.blogspot.com and resistanceworkswdc@yahoo.com
anonymous
