The Premature Burial ***½ (1962, Ray Milland, Hazel Court, Richard Ney, Alan Napier, Heather Angel) – Classic Movie Review 563

The good-looking, atmospheric 1962 American horror film The Premature Burial is the third in Roger Corman’s series of eight Edgar Allan Poe-themed pictures and stars Ray Milland and Hazel Court.

‘Within this Coffin Lies a Man… Yet ALIVE!’

A very mature-looking Ray Milland (aged 56) is oddly chosen but is effective enough as a cataleptic artist in director Roger Corman’s engrossing, eye-catching horror thriller adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s 1844 intricate, intriguing suspense-driven short story about Guy Carrell, a man with an all-consuming fear that he will be buried alive like his father before him.

Hazel Court co-stars as Emily Gault, who arrives at Carrell’s mansion to rekindle an old relationship with Guy Carrell, despite the disapproval of his sister, Kate (Heather Angel). Guy marries Emily, but he builds a crypt to guarantee that he will not fall prey to his nightmare.

To prove that he is cured of his phobia, he opens his father’s tomb and is shocked into a catatonic state. He is lowered into a grave and covered over. So, unfortunately, the man’s nightmares come true, but he is able to flee from his coffin and soon he is avenging himself on his treacherous, plotting wife Emily and doctor (Alan Napier).

Corman ghoulishly tingles the spine, with the help of a suitably eerie screenplay by Charles Beaumont and Ray Russell, doing justice to the Poe original.

The Premature Burial is a particularly good-looking, atmospheric film, especially considering its low budget and era, and it helps enormously that there are lashings of eerie gothic atmosphere, thanks to Floyd Crosby’s superior Panavision-Eastmancolor cinematography, Crosby’s special effects and Daniel Haller’s art direction. Its setting of the dark early Victorian-era around the 1830s is simply but effectively realised.

Richard Ney, John Dierkes and Dick Miller also star. Richard Ney plays Miles Archer, the name of the private eye played by Jerome Cowan in The Maltese Falcon.

It is the third movie in Corman’s sequence of eight adaptations from the works of Poe, sometimes called the Poe Cycle. He had made two hit Poe movies for American International Pictures starring Vincent Price (The Fall of the House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum) but decided to make his own Poe film with financing through Pathé Lab. He wanted to use Price, but AIP had him under exclusive contract, so he cast Milland instead.

Pathé Lab did the print work for AIP and had backed a few of their productions. On the first day of shooting at Producers Studios, Melrose Avenue, Hollywood, James H Nicholson and Sam Arkoff of AIP turned up on set and told Corman that they were working together again, having threatened to end all lab work with Pathé and convinced them to bring the film to AIP.

James H Nicholson (September 14, 1916 – December 10, 1972) and Sam Arkoff (12 June 1918 – 16 September 2001) founded the American Releasing Corporation, later known as American International Pictures, in 1954. It produced and released films from 1955 until 1980.

Francis Ford Coppola worked on the movie as dialogue director. The film won a 1962 Golden Laurel Sleeper of the Year Award.

The BBFC cut the UK cinema version to remove shots of maggots being poured from a cup and to edit scenes of Emily’s body being covered with earth. The Optimum DVD is uncut.

It is the last film of Heather Angel. She and Milland previously appeared together in Bulldog Drummond Escapes (1937).

Guy has sticks of dynamite in case he needs to blast his way out the tomb. Dynamite was invented in 1868, 19 years after Poe died. Poe was found delirious, in a dire condition and wearing clothes that were not his own on the streets of Baltimore on 3 October 1849 and was taken to the Washington Medical College, where he died on 7 October 1849, aged 40. The cause of death remains a mystery

The cast are Ray Milland as Guy Carrell, Heather Angel as Guy’s sister Kate Carrell, Hazel Court as Guy’s wife Emily Gault, Alan Napier as Dr Gideon Gault, Richard Ney as Miles Archer, John Dierkes as Sweeney, Dick Miller as Mole, Clive Halliday as Judson, and Brendan Dillon as Clergyman.

Roger Corman (born April 5, 1926), aged 95 in 2021, is the producer of 405 movies. His most recent as director is Frankenstein Unbound (1990).

The eight films in the Corman Poe Cycle are The Fall of the House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), 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).

© Derek Winnert 2013 Classic Movie Review 563

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