Stars in My Crown

The Comedy of Terrors (1963)
directed by Jacques Tourneur
rating: 4 out of 5 cravats
watched instantly on Netflix

I don't know if this is the best movie of Peter Lorre's Basil Rathbone's Les Baxter's Richard Matheson's Jacques Tourneur's Boris Karloff's career, but it is without a doubt, as of now, my favorite Vincent Price performance. This is Beat the Devil for the aging horror set, and not just because Lorre gets to be happy before it's through. Price plays a drunk undertaker who marries into a business founded by his father-in-law, a senile Boris Karloff. Lorre is the hapless assistant who, when money is tight, is forced upon threat of exposure for past crimes to help Price break into wealthy homes and murder the inhabitants. As the only morgue in town, Hinchley & Trumbull is inevitably (and profitably) employed to put said bodies into the ground.

Between the two sets of picture credits, the ongoing jokes about Lorre's pronunciation, and Price's alcoholic reveries, I wondered if I was dreaming. Tack on an 80-minute run-time and enough physical comedy to underwrite a square dance and I think I'm in love. The rest is a competition - to the death! - between the gentlemen at the firm and Basil Rathbone as the narcoleptic landlord who demands payment for a year's back rent. Syl showed me a still from this, years ago. I'm slow but I get there.

The basement set is full of taxidermied bears, candelabras, and of course coffins. There is no need for it to be so lovingly constructed, or filled with just the right pockets of dark. But Tourneur was a man who valued clutter as testament to the interests that characters held. A crowded cafe in I Walked with a Zombie or Cat People, the crowded cabins in the trees in Canyon Passage: in spite of all the quiet in those films, Tourneur liked evidence of adventure. A crowded soundstage couldn't begin to say it all about any of these heroes of mine, but as a place to at least share a laugh at Peter Lorre's expense, it's a start.