The Tomb of Ligeia
It was in 1960 that producer and director Roger Corman began his long cinematic affair with Edgar Allan Poe; there had been ups and downs, and there had been indiscretions, such as 1963’s The Haunted Palace, which had in fact been an adaptation of H P Lovecraft rather than Poe, but their final fling together was something of a second honeymoon, Corman taking Poe abroad for the first time and allowing into their relationship a light which had long been absent.
Filmed in the summer of 1964 and seeking to cut costs, the normally principally studiobound Corman elected to relocate production of The Tomb of Ligeia to England, with sets constructed at Shepperton Studios in Surrey and exterior filming taking place at the beautiful ruins of Castle Acre Priory in Norfolk. In order to avoid the complication of lighting night shoots, the majority of the scenes at the Priory and surrounding countryside take place during the day, giving this film a different feel to any of the other films of the Corman/Poe sequence.
Opening with the funeral of Ligeia, beloved raven haired wife of Verden Fell (Vincent Price), at the service he defies those who protest her interment – “You cannot bury her in consecrated ground. She desecrates the earth in which she lies!” Oddly calm, Fell is unmoved, refusing to repent on his own account or for his wife, whom he maintains lives on in his memory.
The action resumes after the beautiful painted opening titles, atypically subdued for Corman, with a foxhunt across the countryside, the lone quarry frightened and tired as it is tracked to the same ruined abbey where Ligeia rests by the hunt leader and his daughter, Rowena Trevanion (Elizabeth Shepherd).
Rowena enters cautiously but by the graveside her horse is startled by a black cat and she is thrown, falling among the flowers of death. Verden carries Rowena to his home and attends to her ankle. Lord Trevanion (Derek Francis) arrives with the body of the fox, and Verden explains to them that it was the pet of his late wife.
They depart, but drawn to the morose widower Rowena returns to visit him, confessing that she wishes to make him laugh; her father is not impressed, though he himself is blunt about his daughter’s prospects: “Wilful little bitch. Hell to be married to.” What Rowena is unprepared for is Verden’s temper when his brooding is interrupted, and that is far from the only oddity she finds in the mansion which seems to be haunted by the spirit of Ligeia and the black cat who stalks her and tortures her…
With the looming presence of the ruined abbey and location shooting adding huge production value, the beautiful restoration work of Arrow Film’s new Blu-ray highlights the glorious colours but also an unfortunate scratch in the first reel. Enhanced by pieces of set obtained from the recently complete Beckett directed by Peter Glanville and starring Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole, Fell’s mansion is a vast set filled with exotic and decayed props, the only life the startling abstract stained glass windows, though behind the tinted spectacles which give him an air of Peter Sellers, Fell is unlikely to notice.
Premature burial and reincarnation are themes which run throughout the work of Poe; his 1844 short story, the basis for the third of Corman’s films based on his work, 1962’s The Premature Burial, was written while his wife Virginia was suffering from consumption though she did not succumb to the illness until 1847, while Ligeia itself had been published in 1838.
Featuring a subdued performance by Price as the grieving widower, it is very much Shepherd’s film. Red hair flowing as she runs the corridors of the house in her nightgown, pulling open heavy wooden panelled doors, the nightmarish banging outside her bedchamber which stops as she reaches the source, all recall Julie Harris’ Eleanor Vance in a similar situation in Hill House, released just over a year before.
Though The Tomb of Ligeia cannot compare with Robert Wise’s masterpiece, also filmed in England, like that film it’s as much about her mental decay as the more usual male protagonist of a Poe tale, and it is the power of Shepherd’s performance which sells the picture.
A year later, Shepherd would film an episode of The Avengers as Mrs Emma Peel before the role was recast with Diana Rigg who herself would of course later work with Vincent Price, playing his daughter in Theatre of Blood.
The question remains of why Rowena is so determined to pursue Verden when he is so unpleasant and angry, though it has been a part of the style of the gothic novel since Jane Eyre met Edward Fairfax Rochester, an unacknowledged additional source which this film draws on, expanding beyond the (very) short Poe story, and this arrangement carries forward even into modern gothic fiction, the Sookie Stackhouse novels and the Twilight saga being just two examples.
Despite the freshness of the location, the film does follow the familiar format; Rowena’s passage to the belfry in pursuit of the cat initially appears to have supplanted the traditional Corman dream sequence, but a in fact a dream sequence does appear later in the film, and perhaps inevitably it ends in flames, though perhaps not as dramatically as Corman would have proposed, the staging being enhanced by the inclusion of stock footage from House of Usher.
“They were warned about me in England,” the affable director recalls on the commentary track. “The English fire department refused to go all the way.”
Even so, in the accompanying interviews first assistant director David Tringham and clapper loader Bob Jordan both recall the conflagration well, Jordan noting that while the shots were brief and the flames extinguished between takes, flammable fumes were building up in the rafters which fortunately did not ignite. Tringham, somewhat contradicting Corman’s own version of events, is vivid in his description: “The flames were going up to the ceiling.”
In his interview, production assistant Paul Mayersberg who had previously worked with Joseph Losey on The Servant, explains that as an Englishman he was asked by Corman to look at the script to see if there were any discrepancies of language or period setting that American writer Robert Towne might have included, that it was he who directed the honeymoon scenes on the coast in Cornwall and at Stonehenge with costumed body doubles and that asked for ideas on casting he suggested the girlfriend of a former schoolfriend for the role of Rowena, Elizabeth Shepherd.
“A better than average director, a brilliant producer,” Mayersberg states that Corman fostered “any spark of talent that could become genius along the line.”
In a separate commentary track, Shepherd herself recalls that working very fast with little rehearsal there were five weeks shooting me on location, funeral which opens the film was the last days of shooting and that she was taught by her stunt double to ride side saddle for the film and did everything herself except the jumping.
With the final brief interview with composer Kenneth V Jones, the subjects are all charming people but were not key personnel in the production and as a consequence are not all that exciting, and covering the same topics individually the pieces become somewhat repetitive. Having been somewhat spoiled by previous Arrow releases these could have been better structured and the absence of a comprehensive documentary is apparent.
The Tomb of Ligeia is available now from Arrow Films
