In LAURA (1944), Gene Tierney defends weakling suitor Vincent Price by concluding, "He hasn't enough courage to kill a fly." Oh, baby, if she only knew.
Vincent Price was not a great actor, but he was a great horror
star, and from all accounts an enormously giving, warm and intelligent man.
With his death in 1993 came the end of a long, distinguished line of actors who willingly or not found their niche as the monsters and madmen of our cinematic nightmares: Chaney, Sr., Lugosi, Karloff, Lorre, and Price-all masters of menace from the Golden Age of Movie Horror.
Vincent Price was unique among all these men in that his identification with horror and mystery actively spanned across five decades-the longest of any of the horror stars' careers as horror stars-allowing him not only to work with Boris Karloff and Basil Rathbone in their prime, but to do so with Johnny Depp, as well.
Courtly, gentlemanly, even elegant, Price's demeanor suggested a classical figure, thus making it somehow difficult to imagine his being born in St. Louis, Missouri, a fact usually requiring proof from the claimant. He took a considerable interest in art at an early age, paying for a Rembrandt etching in five dollar installments beginning at age 12 until the $37.50 was paid off and he could call it his own. An appreciation for the painted arts somehow seems a strange sort of intellectual achievement for a pre-teen, but like many adolescent preoccupations, the desire to then collect and learn about that thing which catches your fancy became a lifelong pursuit for Vincent. Not only did he write books on art and lecture on the subject, but he used money from his foreign expense accounts while on location for films to buy favorite pieces and he was hired by Sears and Roebuck to purchase fine art that would be offered in their catalog as the very successful "Vincent Price Collection."
Artistic expression of another kind, acting they call it, also intrigued him. After he graduated from Yale and went to England to study, he found acclaim in the role of Prince Albert in a production of VICTORIA REGINA, which subsequently landed him the role stateside opposite Helen Hayes on Broadway. There's a bit of the fop that's somehow incongruous with his tall, wide physicality, yet his silky smooth voice only accentuated the slightly feminine traces of what would become his prissy evildoers and hammy villains.
Humor was, in fact, Price's trademark underscoring for the baddies he brought to life. Chaney, Sr. and Karloff rarely indulged in it, while Lugosi had no use for it whatsoever. Lorre could turn it on if he wanted to, and as he got older he did so more often. But with Vincent Price, humor was indigenous.
One senses that Price's tongue-in-cheek approach to the horrific was a way of winking at his audience and acknowledging all the fun he was having up there entertaining the hell out of us. After all, it's hard keeping a straight face when you're staring down into a spider web that's supposed to have a fly with a little man's head on it screaming, "Help me, help me," or having to go on the film world's first LSD trip before shrieking a warning at your movie audience that there's a tingler loose in the theatre...or having to act opposite Victor Mature, not once, not twice, but thrice.
His best two pre-horror dramatic roles in Hollywood undoubtedly are those in LAURA (1944) and in DRAGONWYCK (1946), though there's delight, too, in finding him amidst the casts of THE SONG OF BERNADETTE (1943) and LEAVE HER TO HEAVEN (1945). 1946's SHOCK, which might aptly be retitled "schlock" (if the title weren't already taken), gave Vincent a place to prime his mentally unbalanced mad doctors to come, having failed to make much of an impression as either the "Man" in THE INVISIBLE MAN RETURNS (1940) or his disembodied voice at the very end of ABBOTT AND COSTELLO MEET FRANKENSTEIN (1948). But it was 1953's smash 3-D hit HOUSE OF WAX that catapulted his movie career towards horror, not so much for the performance he gave as the gimmick that brought the masses into the theatre to see him play it.
The fifties found him mired in more entertaining schlock, including the quintessential sci-fi B-movie classic THE FLY (1958), but the sixties absolutely sealed his fate as he did even sillier gimmicky thrillers for William Castle (such as THE HOUSE ON HAUNTED HILL and THE TINGLER) and then began his eventual 24 film association with American International Pictures (8 of these directed by Roger Corman).
For horror fans growing up at the time, Vincent Price in anything was reason enough to go to the movies. He was the last actor to have successfully forged a career for himself as a horror star. Peter Cushing did fewer and fewer films and Christopher Lee tried desperately to disassociate himself from the genre, while John Carradine apparently refused to turn anything down from bad to godawful.
It's admittedly hard to take Vincent Price seriously as a murderer, mad surgeon, or purveyor of evil. He's too avuncular for that, which is precisely why he remains a favorite. Vincent was the safe choice for kids growing up who wanted their doses of horror to be fun and a little bit silly, be it as Erasmus Craven, Dr. Phibes, Egghead, or a greedy archaeologist threatening the Brady boys in Hawaii. You were somehow certain that after the all the scary stuff, the lights would go on, and
there would be this gentle soul with a twinkle in his eyes who'd bid you a good night, perhaps complete with a friendly pat on the top of your head. Vincent Price became a pop horror icon, whose evident sweetness allowed for warm tributes such as Tim Burton's-in both his animated short VINCENT and his casting of Price as the lonely, fragile old cookie-cutter who fashions EDWARD SCISSORHANDS (1990)-and as the ghoul rapping nostalgic for Michael Jackson's THRILLER (1984).
The legacy of Vincent Price is that while he made horror fun, he had fun while he was doing it, and he never turned his back on the genre that gave him fame and fortune, that allowed him to buy art, write cookbooks, see the world, contribute to charities, inspire young artists and poets of every ethnic heritage, in short...to enjoy life to its fullest.
