Although a fan of Vincent Price, especially his Edgar Allan Poe movies of the early 1960s, I did not see TWICE TOLD TALES (1963) when it first played in movie theaters but I did have the DELL comic book adaptation which I paid 12 cents for and liked very much. It would be over 20 years before I finally caught up with the film when I rented a VHS copy in 1987. I was disappointed with TWICE and didn’t see it again until after the turn of the century when it was coupled on DVD with the movie that inspired it, Roger Corman’s 1962 TALES OF TERROR. It was based on 3 stories by Edgar Allan Poe which were MORELLA, THE BLACK CAT, and THE FACTS IN THE CASE OF M. VALDEMER.
After the box office success of TOT, producer Robert E. Kent decided to create his own anthology film using Price and 3 stories by Poe contemporary Nathaniel Hawthorne. They were DR HEIDEGGER’S EXPERIMENT, RAPPACCINI’S DAUGHTER, and a condensed version of HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES. I didn’t much care for Hawthorne having had to read THE SCARLET LETTER in high school. I knew SEVEN GABLES from a CLASSICS ILLUSTRATED version but had never read any of his short stories. Once I did, I developed a growing appreciation for Hawthorne. Having recently watched TALES again, I found a lot to admire which I had missed in previous viewings.
In the first story, DR HEIDEGGER’S EXPERIMENT, Vincent Price and Sebastian Cabot are elderly friends celebrating Cabot’s birthday during a violent thunderstorm. Lightning strikes a nearby crypt where Cabot’s intended wife, who died the night before her wedding, is buried. While examining the damage, they discover that her body is perfectly preserved after nearly 40 years because of a mineral spring which had been dripping on her coffin.. Conducting tests on the water, Cabot discovers that it has the power to restore a long dried up rose. After using it to restore Price and himself to their youthful selves, Cabot then decides to see if the water can bring his bride back to life. He succeeds with his experiment only to discover a terrible secret.
RAPPACCINI’S DAUGHTER is set in Renaissance Italy. A young student takes lodgings next to an old villa that has a beautiful garden full of rare and exotic plants. One day he spots a young woman in the garden. When he tries to speak with her, she runs away. He later learns that no one has ever seen her. She is the daughter of a renowned scientist who now lives in seclusion. After finding a way into the garden, they meet and begin to fall in love but he can never touch her because to do so is to die. Her father has made her that way so that she will always be free from sin. When the student still professes his love, the father decides to alter him, without his knowledge, so that they can always be together.
Finally there is THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES which is one of Nathaniel Hawtorne’s best known novels. Although ostensibly a work of romantic fiction, HOUSE tells the story of two families and how one family’s property was stolen by the other resulting in a curse that continues through generations. Vincent Price had starred in a 1940 film version as the romantic lead. 23 years later, he is the villainous older brother searching for the treasure that is hidden in the house. This segment simplifies and heavily alters the novel but the adaptation is effective as a flat out ghost story with good performances from Beverly Garland as Price’s downtrodden wife and Richard Denning as a descendant of his wronged ancestor. .
Although shot on a smaller budget than the American International Poe films, TWICE TOLD TALES makes good use of it and made over 1 million at the box office.. The period costumes look better than those in the AIP movies and the Technicolor photography could almost be in 3-D. While he’s no Richard Matheson (who wrote the Poe screenplays), script writer Robert E. Kent, who was also the movie’s producer, acquits himself nicely. The story adaptations are good and the dialogue is above average with both capturing the essence of Hawthorne’s source material. TTT’s only weak element is in some of its special effects while whoever painted the portraits for stories 1 and 3 needs to take art lessons.
The Capsule Critic 