"The Oblong Box" starring Vincent Price

(this blog was begun Wednesday night, October 9 2019)

Well, now you know why I don't watch postseason games like tonight's Dodgers/Nationals playoff. Like I said last night, it's way too nerve wracking - even if the Dodgers had won - but it would've killed me to see them lose in the way they did tonight, when they apparently had the game in the bag. Every Dodger fan knows that Clayton Kershaw can't pitch in big games. He's great in the regular season, a Hall of Famer, but he's lousy in the clutch. We've all seen it for years, but for some reason Manager Dave Roberts chose to put him out there when the team was two innings away from a win. It was Yu Darvish all over again, and it looks like Roberts mismanaged the Dodgers out of a chance to win the World Series for the second time in three years. I don't count last year, because the Dodgers were clearly inferior to Boston, but this year and in 2017 they were the best team in baseball, if not for Roberts' bad management. Anyhow, I am glad I don't dwell on sports like I used to. I still follow sports closely but I just don't get worked up about it anymore, so the Dodger loss will be forgotten, emotionally speaking, by tomorrow. ////

Thank goodness for movies, and I did see a good one tonight : "The Oblong Box" (1969), starring Vincent Price and Christopher Lee. The film is said to be based on an Edgar Allen Poe story of the same name, but I looked at Wikipedia summaries just now of the original story and of the film, and didn't see many similarities. Do your own research if you wish, and I will continue with my review.

Let us then dispense with any connection to Ed Poe, so that we can examine the movie on it's own terms. The plot is rather complex, and will be more difficult than usual for me to summarize, but here goes:

The time period is the late 19th century. Vincent Price is a wealthy English aristocrat who owns a plantation in Africa. This would be during the period of European colonialism. He has a brother named Edward, who lives with him at his manor (and we have had a lot of manors in our recent films), but something is wrong with Edward. His face is disfigured, from an incident that Price refuses to discuss, and indeed he keeps Edward locked away, chained to his bed, in a room on the top floor. What in the world could've happened to Edward?

We are shown brief flashbacks of an African voodoo ceremony, in which Edward appears to be the victim, but that is our only clue.

Meanwhile, a scheme is being planned. An associate of Price has an idea to kidnap Edward and hold him for ransom, and please bear with me here, because there was absolutely no expository dialogue in this part of the plot, which was very complex and left the viewer to diagnose everyone's intent. It looked to me like Edward was in on his own kidnapping, which was perhaps a way for him to escape the chains of his bedroom prison. The Price associate, a Mr. Trench, has hired a local African - a former witch doctor - to whip up a potion that will render Edward unconscious and slow his heartbeat and breathing to the point where he will appear dead. This happens, and Price now prepares to stage his brother's funeral. But he has a problem. In those days, among aristocratic families, it was common to have the deceased lying in state for all to see. Price doesn't want this, because of his brother's facial disfigurement, but he must act according to custom to avoid probing questions. So, he hires a pair of body snatchers to dig up a recently buried corpse from the local cemetery, to use as a substitute for Edward at the funeral. No one will know the difference, as most of the locals have never seen the hidden brother anyway.

I must interject to say, "here we go again with the grave robberies". This seems to be a popular theme in English horror, and in fact I have on dvd an entire movie devoted to the subject : "The Flesh and the Fiends". Body snatching - i.e. grave robbery - was an actual black market profession in England at the advent of surgery in the mid-to-late 19th century. As advancements were made in anesthesia, and more complicated surgeries made possible, budding surgeons needed test subjects on which to experiment and perfect their techniques. The only possible answer? Corpses!

But many looked down on this practice, especially the church, and it became illegal to use a dead person for anatomical purposes. The surgeons pressed on, however, and paid unsavory. amoral types to bring them bodies by any means necessary. Sometimes, if left unattended a corpse could be snatched from the morgue, but as hospital staff caught onto this, more often it came down to digging up graves at the cemetery. This was the practice known as "body-snatching", and as gruesome as it was, it also helped to advance the procedures of surgery.

Okay, so - getting back to the movie - Christopher Lee is a surgeon, and a good man as well. He hates to pay his grave robbers for bodies, but do so he must. The robbers have him over a barrel, too, because if they are ever caught, they will take Lee down with them.

Meanwhile, the grave robbers have been approached by Mr.Trench to secure a substitute body for Edward's funeral, but on that particular night, they are caught in the act and must kill the gravedigger who has discovered them. Now they are in a bind, and so is Christopher Lee.

It's a convoluted story - and it's Poe after all - that might be better understood if one has read the book.

At any rate, because of the murder of the gravedigger, the kidnapping plot is thrown into disarray, and Edward - who had been placed in a coffin ("The Oblong Box" of the title) and was set to be buried alive - winds up in Christopher Lee's examination room instead. Lee pries him out of the box and revives him from his curare-induced coma. He also creates a red cloth mask for Edward to wear, and allows him to live above the doctor's office in a small apartment. From there, Edward will plan his revenge.

The plot will turn it's focus mainly to the exploits of the red-masked Edward now, as he seeks to find out who placed him in the coffin to be buried. He also wants to know the secret of his disfigurement, which has been kept from him ever since he and his brother returned from Africa.

There are scenes in the second half of the film that are reminiscent of "The Elephant Man", as Edward - with mask covering his face - is accosted in the streets by drunken Cockneys. "Who are ye"?, they demand. "Why're ye wearing that mask"? At one point he is dragged into a bar and pushed about by the patrons, who force him into a tryst with a prostitute. All the while he tries to avoid the humiliation of having his mask removed, and I wouldn't be surprised if David Lynch has seen this film because the influence on his own movie is strong.

I thought "The Oblong Box" was very well done, much better than I expected going in. Vincent Price made a lot of these types of Gothic horror movies in the late 1960s, with decidedly mixed results. "Box", however, was almost as good as "Witchfinder General" (to my mind the best of these efforts), and it has the look of a classic Hammer Studios production. The direction by Gordon Hessler is crisp and forward moving, and Price pulls back on his tendency to overact. Christopher Lee is sympathetic for once, instead of terrifying, and Alister Williamson is frightening as Edward, the enraged man behind the mask. He's the kind of character that would've scared the bejeezus out of me if I'd seen the movie as a kid.

Two Definite Thumbs Up for "The Oblong Box", and we are on a roll with our Halloween movies and our grave robbery plots, lol. /////

Now I am gonna head over to Trader Joes for chips and other supplies. I will see you tonight at the Usual Time.

Tons of love!  xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo  :):)