Culture Shock 05.03.12: Don't open your door to this 'Raven'

This is an idea that should work. Take a real-life writer known for his explorations of murder and the macabre, and embroil him in a murder mystery of his own.

But "The Raven" seems as lost as any maiden whom the angels named Lenore.

John Cusack stars as a man who answers to the name Edgar Allan Poe. While this Poe has the same name as the famous poet and claims to have written that Poe's works, he doesn't really seem a lot like the historical Poe he's meant to be — even allowing that this is an alternate history in which Poe pursues a serial killer.

Perhaps it's because this Poe is also in love, seemingly having put the memory of his dead wife Virginia — inspiration for many of his works — behind him.

Well, it wouldn't be a Hollywood movie without a love story shoehorned into it, would it?

Poe did court other women after his wife's death, but they're omitted here. In this case, the object of Poe's affection is Emily Hamilton (Alice Eve), whose father (Brendan Gleeson), quite naturally has no desire for his daughter to marry a disreputable, drunken and impoverished poet like Poe.

As plot points go, this seems far too familiar.

But why dwell on that when we have a murderer on the loose? And the particulars of his murders seem familiar, too. Intentionally so, leading Detective Fields (Luke Evans) of the Baltimore police to suspect they are all based on Poe's stories.

So, how do you catch a killer whose methods mimic the stories of the city's most notorious writer? You enlist that writer's help, of course.

So, Fields and Poe are on the case, collecting clues even as the morgue collects corpses.

Director James McTeigue ("V for Vendetta") is still trying to shake all of the bad habits he picked up while working for the Wachowskis — including the unwelcome, if brief return of "bullet time" — while the screenplay never delivers the twists and turns needed for a good mystery.

The one unsatisfying twist we do get tries to put a new spin on the historical Poe's final days, which remain the subject of speculation.

So, it falls to the movie's star to carry us through, but Cusack, while likable, has little to work with. His Poe occasionally hints at the moodiness of the genuine article, but just when that seems to be going somewhere, he has to be happy again because he's in love. His mood swings are dictated by what the plot needs at the time. The only time Cusack really seems to be Poe is when he is launching an attack on one of his literary rivals — something the real Poe excelled at.

It's almost a given that movies that take shots at critics are made by people who don't expect to get favorable reviews. Now, I don't take it personally, but "The Raven" isn't especially kind to critics. One of them even ends up beneath Poe's infamous pendulum, and fittingly he's named Griswold, after a real-life Poe rival who did his best to tarnish Poe's reputation after his death.

It's one of the few, fleeting clever bits that only Poe enthusiasts will recognize and appreciate, although I find myself wishing Griswold had been the killer — a Salieri to Poe's Mozart — because there are no feuds quite like literary feuds.

Another clever moment hints at the posthumous rehabilitation of Poe's literary reputation among French critics before American critics finally started to take him seriously.

And what would Poe, no slouch as a critic himself, have made of what's been made of him in "The Raven"?

The real Edgar Allan Poe's life was filled with enough tragedy, drama, heartbreak and rivalries to make a pretty compelling movie. I wish someone had made that movie instead of this one.

Culture Shock 02.03.11: Poe's life is even stranger as fiction

More than 200 years after his birth, and more than 160 years after his still-mysterious death, Edgar Allan Poe is alive and well — as a fictional character.

A movie starring America’s most iconic literary figure is now in post-production. Meanwhile, ABC has ordered a pilot episode for what could become a prime-time series with Poe as the main character.

Poe’s life certainly has all the elements of a good story: The troubled relationship with his family, especially his foster father; The tortured poet who struggled with alcoholism and despair following the premature death of his young wife (who was also his first cousin); The artist who was better known and more widely respected during his lifetime for his criticism than his verse; The death at age 40, often attributed to alcoholism, after Poe was discovered disheveled and incoherent on the streets of Baltimore.

But it seems even that tale is not fantastical enough — not for Poe, the man whose own fantastical tales are among the most popular and influential in American letters.

The movie, titled "The Raven" after Poe’s most famous poem, is directed by James McTeigue ("V for Vendetta") and stars John Cusack ("High Fidelity") as our good author, who must track down a serial killer inspired by his works.

The TV pilot, "Poe," follows a similar formula, envisioning Poe as a detective. ABC describes the show as a "crime procedural following Edgar Allan Poe as the world’s very first detective, using unconventional methods to investigate dark mysteries in 1840s Boston."

An unconventional detective? Now there’s a novel idea.

The Boston locale has some in Poe’s final resting place of Baltimore feeling slighted. One, The Baltimore Sun’s Michael Sragow, retaliated by citing the historically frosty relationship between Poe and his birthplace: "Poe had such a contentious relationship with the scribes of his native city that it took until 2009 for Boston to designate ‘Poe Square’ near the writer’s birthplace."

To complicate matters, Poe was raised in Virginia and "sometimes posed as the Southern gentleman," writes J. Lasley Dameron in "The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture."

Perhaps someday there will be a "Young Edgar Allan Poe Adventures" set in Richmond.

But whether or not Boston is the appropriate setting, Poe as a detective isn’t a new idea — it’s been around since at least the 1940s — and it’s not totally off the mark. Poe may not have been the world’s first detective, but he did invent him: C. Auguste Dupin, who appeared in three of Poe’s stories, including the classic "Murders in the Rue Morgue," credited as the first detective story and published more than four decades before Sherlock Holmes’ debut.

The fictional Poe has had a career almost as noteworthy as his real-life inspiration’s. Apart from being a detective, he’s been a Confederate general in a story by Walter Jon Williams ("No Spot of Ground") and a vampire with a chronic case of writer’s block.

In Kim Newman’s "Anno Dracula" novels, Poe survives into the 20th century after becoming a vampire in the 1840s. He first appears in the second book "The Bloody Red Baron," a retelling of World War I with Germany led by Dracula and a cast of both historical figures and fictional characters from works of the period. It’s like "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen," only no one has made a terrible movie based on it yet.

By the third novel, "Dracula Cha Cha Cha" (aka "Judgment of Tears"), set in 1959, Poe is calling himself Eddie Poe and is in Italy working as a screenwriter.

Here’s an idea: Edgar Allan Poe as a Hollywood screenwriter writing TV shows about himself as a vampire detective. I’d watch that.

Culture Shock 10.14.10: Corman's Poe films continue to haunt audiences

With films like "It Conquered the World," "Gunslinger" and "Teenage Caveman" to his credit, Roger Corman established himself in the 1950s as a reliable director of low-budget movies aimed at drive-in audiences.

But by 1960, he was ready for something more ambitious.

In his memoir "How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime," Corman writes that he was ready to make "bigger, better movies on longer schedules and to direct more experienced actors from better scripts. The chance to do all of those things came in the visually and thematically rich gothic horror genre."

Gothic horror ruled the cinema in the 1930s and '40s, when Universal Studios and its imitators released films like "Dracula" and "Frankenstein" and made unlikely stars of Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff. But gothic horror fell from favor in the '50s, when horror movies shifted toward atom-age monsters and extraterrestrial invaders.

But in 1958, Britain's Hammer Films found success with "Horror of Dracula," starring Christopher Lee as Bram Stoker's bloodthirsty count. "Horror of Dracula" revived the gothic horror film and drenched it in vibrant, Technicolor blood.

After 10 years of bug-eyed monsters, audiences seemed ready for the movies Corman wanted to make.

So, Corman convinced his producers at American International Pictures, James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff, to give him larger budgets that would allow him to shoot on color film and construct more elaborate sets.

The resulting films became classics of the horror genre and, along with Hammer's films, defined cinematic horror for the next decade.

From 1960 to 1964, Corman directed eight movies based, more or less, on the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Corman had read Poe as a youth, and Poe's poems and stories had the virtue of being in the public domain, meaning Corman didn't have to pay for them.

With Vincent Price as his leading man and a team of skilled writers and technicians behind the camera, Corman made what would become known as his "Poe cycle." The series started with "House of Usher" in 1960 and continued with "The Pit and the Pendulum" (1961), "The Premature Burial" (1962), "Tales of Terror" (1962), "The Raven" (1963), "The Haunted Palace" (1963), "The Masque of the Red Death" (1964) and "The Tomb of Ligeia" (1964).

Technically, however, "The Haunted Palace" is a Poe film in name only. It's based on "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" by H.P. Lovecraft, making it, as far as I can tell, the first film based on Lovecraft's stories.

Three of Corman's Poe films will screen this month at Decatur's Princess Theatre Center for the Performing Arts as part of this year's Big Read program focusing on Poe's works. First up is "The Raven" on Friday night at 7. It will be followed by "House of Usher" on Monday and "The Pit and the Pendulum" on Oct. 22. Tickets are $5.

Price starred in all but one of Corman's Poe movies; the exception is "The Premature Burial" with Ray Miland. By 1960, Price already had established himself as a bankable horror-movie star in "House of Wax" and William Castle's "The House on Haunted Hill." Before that, he was a charismatic villain in the 1949 film noir "The Bribe." But the Poe films are what cemented Price's reputation as a horror icon — the Lugosi or Karloff of his generation.

Working alongside Price in the Poe movies were veterans like Karloff and Peter Lorre and newcomers like Jack Nicholson.

Meanwhile, the screenwriters who adapted Poe's tales were top notch. Richard Matheson ("I Am Legend") and Charles Beaumont, both "Twilight Zone" veterans, wrote seven of the films, while future Oscar winner Robert Towne ("Chinatown") scripted "The Tomb of Ligeia."

Corman's Poe films are undeniably B movies, but they're also classics. And as fast and loose as they play with Poe's words, they're still worthy and lasting tributes to America's master of the macabre.

Poe gains respect in time for his 200th birthday

Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe died too soon and under mysterious circumstances, a sad yet somehow fitting end for America’s master of the macabre.

He died Oct. 7, 1849, four days after being discovered delirious and “in great distress” on the streets of Baltimore. Poe never regained his senses, so he never said how he came to be wandering the streets alone. He was 40 years old, and his cause of death remains mostly speculation. Newspaper reports at the time attributed it, more or less, to alcoholism. Thus began the legend of Poe — the tortured, self-destructive, unfairly maligned and often misunderstood artist.

Poe himself, however, began 200 years ago Monday.

He was born Jan. 19, 1809, in Boston. His parents died when he was young, and John and Frances Allan of Richmond, Va., took him in. The couple never adopted him, but they did give him his middle name, and because of his time growing up in Virginia, Poe always thought of himself as a Southern gentleman. The Southern literary establishment reciprocated by claiming Poe as one of its own.

While some critics debate just how Southern Poe was, there seems little question that the bleak, gothic style of Poe’s poems and stories fits well with the Southern mindset after the Civil War. The crumbling castles and corrupt bloodlines of Poe are a non-regional counterpart to the wrecked plantations and ruined families of the South. Obvious comparisons between Poe and William

Faulkner are the stuff of which college and high school term papers are made.
But it was much later before the rest of America’s literary establishment — the critics and the college professors — would give Poe his due.

Poe did himself no favors. He disliked most of the powerful and influential literary figures of his day, except Nathaniel Hawthorne. He practically dared later critics to take sides against him.
Sure, the French have always loved Poe, but they also think Jerry Lewis is a comic genius. So, what do they know?

Stephen King counts Poe as an influence. So did H.P. Lovecraft, the early 20th century pulp writer who admired Poe above all other American writers.

King won a National Book Award in 2003, which dismayed self-appointed keepers of the American literary canon like Yale professor Harold Bloom. Meanwhile, the Library of America recently published a collection of Lovecraft’s stories, admitting Lovecraft into that canon that Bloom so loves to defend.

In the 1960s, director Roger Corman made a series of films loosely based on Poe’s stories and starring Vincent Price. Some critics now rank Corman and Price’s Poe adaptations — considered cheap, drive-in fare at the time — among the finest horror films ever produced.

Poe’s own reputation has undergone a similar rehabilitation, and perhaps it’s because his critics have finally caught up to him. They now have a healthy appreciation for a finely crafted weird tale filled with horror and despair.

But Poe has never needed the appreciation of the literary gatekeepers to capture his readers’ imaginations. And even some people who have never read his poems can quote the first lines of his most famous work, “The Raven.”

“Once upon a midnight dreary…”

So, on Monday, the 200th anniversary of Poe’s birth, a 60-year-old ritual will continue. A person concealed beneath a heavy coat and hat will visit Poe’s grave in Baltimore and leave three roses and a half-empty bottle of cognac. It’s a ritual begun by one of Poe’s admirers and carried on still, supposedly as a family tradition.

Few people have ever tried to discover the mysterious mourner’s identity. Knowing would spoil the mystery, and mystery has been part of Poe’s legend since the day he was laid to rest.