Once again we have a Vincent Price collection, but unlike the Poe-based vignettes reviewed earlier, these are based on Nathaniel Hawthorne stories and are more suspenseful. I speak of Twice Told Tales (1963), in which Price stars in the adaptations of the stories.
In “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment“, Price is the friend of a doctor and scientist, Heidegger (Sebastian Cabot), both now elderly. A storm hits and lightning strikes the mausoleum of Heidegger’s long-dead fiancee, Sylvia, from whose death he never really recovered, and the old men venture out to examine the structure for damage. They find the woman’s body extraordinarily well preserved, and Heidegger hypothesizes that a liquid coming through the roof and finding its way into her coffin is responsible. In a devil-may-care moment, he drinks the liquid and regains his youth. Pressed, Price’s character does likewise, and now they are young bulls.
Heidegger becomes hopeful, and despite Price’s bland discouragements, presses forward to administer the solution to his fiancee’s corpse, and the ultimate is achieved! Sylvia revives. But as the doctor disappears to fetch clothing, we discover the disaster waiting to happen – Price and Sylvia had been lovers, cheating on the good doctor, and, the two filled with the hormones of youth after decades of decay, indulge in lust’s sweet embrace, much to the consternation of the doctor. He returns with a knife, with which is he is incompetent and suffers the indignity of a sudden death. Meanwhile, the effects of the liquid are effervescent, and Sylvia dries up, leaving Price to scrabble after the last few drops in a tomb run dry. A simple story of how the most base of sins will have repercussions even at the end of a life, spoiling all that one may have worked for, and for all that it is of the speculative fiction genre, it is effective.
“Rappaccini’s Daughter” tells the story of a man’s obsession with keeping sin from his daughter: she becomes a poison, a danger to everyone. But one chemistry student aspires to her hand, nonetheless, and this cannot be tolerated, and so, rather than cure the girl, the man becomes poison as well – never able to cheat on her. In the end, all is lost. It is properly told: why is the bush poisonous, why is its essence administered to her, oh why why why? And so we’re hooked on the story, and the work of the actors, all the way to the end.
Unlike the first two, “House of the Seven Gables” lies in the horror genre, with supernatural forces at work, but for all that the moral questions are serious: are the relatives of a man unjustly executed for witchcraft required to help the family of those who accused that executed man find treasure? Do sins accrue over the centuries? Sadly, at least for Vincent, his family is a dusty, corrupt echo of what it once was, and he succumbs to the ghostly (and poorly done) skeletal hand around the throat, as a due answer to the questions du jour, and as the house collapses and the opposing family member escapes, we’re left to meditate upon the sins of the past and how they effect the current election, the general competency of the performances of Price’s bygone age, and how much was done with so little money.
There are more ways to tell a story than with 200 digital artists working on computers.
