Category: 1960s

A collection of stories written by Nathaniel Hawthorne, all three feature our man Vincent Price. The first Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment was probably my favorite of the set. Price and Sebastian Cabot are friends who meet up for dinner one evening. Secrets are revealed and regrets are made. Vincent as a controlling father standing in the way of his daughter’s romantic life in Rappaccini’s Daughter is creepy and has some wonderfully dated color effects that I still enjoyed. The last is a version of The House of the Seven Gables, about a cursed home and the feud that caused it. The story is told a bit differently than the full length feature from 1940, also featuring Price. It’s also creepy, but a bit too condensed to give the story justice.  

Vincent Price is perfectly evil as1600s witchfinder Matthew Hopkins who is more than happy to use the powers given to him to get and do whatever the hell he wants. He terrorizes the residents of a few villages, particularly one young woman whom he fancies until she becomes tainted in his mind. There’s not much to the story other than constant brutal torture, but Price is capable of encapsulating the character perfectly. 

It’s unfortunate that the racist overtones of Peter Sellers’s brown-faced Indian character overwhelms this movie. It’s otherwise a delightful fish-out-of-water romp about a bumbling actor who is accidentally invited to an elite Hollywood party. There are plenty of crazy crowd scenes reminiscent of the best films of Jacques Tati. The colorful, swinging 60s pad provides ample settings for the madcap antics, particularly with the pool/fountain running throughout the living space. Oddly this is my second Gavin MacLeod film in as many days. It’s just really unfortunate about that racial caricature.

Toward the end of the Korean War, Robert Redford is a wide-eyed addition to a company of infantrymen; John Saxton is a long-time member, prone to going on solo night patrols to gain intel and to kill enemy soldiers. Between them is an orphaned Korean boy, the pull for the boy’s loyalty is the pull on the soldiers’ souls: to let war take them to their darkest selves or to maintain some semblance of innocence. Essentially marking Redford’s film debut, it is also the beginning for Sydney Pollack and Tom Skerritt as other members of the company.