Twice-Told Tales

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Twice-Told Tales (1963) is designed as a “trio of terror” but I prefer “three tales of the macabre”. There’s nothing terrifying about any of these tales. They have their degree of morbid to them, particularly the first tale while the third tale (House of the Seven Gables, more Hawthornian than the other two tales in this anthology) also has its share of shady goings-on. 

The first tale—Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment—concerns aging friends who are spending a rainy night celebrating a birthday. Dr. Heidegger (Sebastian Cabot) is 79, and he’s drinking away with long-time buddy, Alex (Price). Carl (Cabot) has been mourning the death (39 years ago) of his beloved fiancée, Sylvia, and with a reluctant Alex visits her casket (kept in a mausoleum nearby the mansion). Both notice a water leakage from the roof of the mausoleum onto her casket, soon discovering when the top comes off that Sylvia looks preserved, exactly as she was upon her death so long ago. Realizing that the water is a “virgin spring”, Alex and Carl drink some and return to their youth. Soon Carl yearns to return Sylvia to him, injecting virgin spring to revive her. During all of this, Alex keeps trying to halt Carl from his persistent desire to bring Sylvia back to life…the reason will become obvious when she is revived and Carl leaves the room to retrieve her wedding dress he’s kept “clean and pure” for 39 years. Alex and Sylvia were lovers and she was only going to marry Carl out of spite. So Alex and Sylvia embrace and decide to tell Carl of their affair. What they don’t realize is he hears them from the stairwell.

I love these love triangles set within the Gothic period setting, especially on a dark, stormy night. There’s nothing scary about this, but it does have the trappings of an atmospheric story about betrayal, return from death after a considerable absence of life, and renewed age thanks to the supernatural. Add the salacious detail of how Alex was behind his friend’s decades-long agony and loss due to jealousy, and the eventual scuffle between two friends over a woman both adore, and you have quite a melodrama. That the virgin spring is only temporary and a revived corpse returns to a bundle of skeletal remains while one friend kills another over her, and there’s plenty of tragedy. Left behind is someone with no virgin spring left to tap in order to return to the youth he momentarily had a chance to enjoy, and Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment is quite packed with plenty for fans of tragedy to enjoy.

Speaking of tragedy, the second tale—Rappaccini’s Daughter—is Shakespearian in its tragedy. Nearly all the characters are dead by the end of this! It concerns a scientist who left a university after his wife went away with another man (this after his daughter, Beatrice, was born). Scorned and wrought with anger, this scientist, Rappaccini (Price), decided to “keep his daughter from the touch of sin and evil” by “changing her chemistry through the use of a poison replacing her blood”, and this condemns her to a type of imprisonment he couldn’t have anticipated. As a young woman, Beatrice (Joyce Taylor), yearns to be free from her poisonous touch while her father seems quite pleased she isn’t able to be involved with anyone. A young man named Giovanni (Brett Halsey), a student at the nearby university, rents a room that overlooks Rappaccini’s garden and he is smitten with Beatrice, wanting to court her. Soon, Rappaccini’s madness sees his daughter’s happiness in a romance with Giovanni can only happen if her love is put under the same poisonous curse as her. This all ends horribly when Giovanni’s professor (Abraham Sofaer) concocts an unproven antidote that isn’t tested on humans yet (he says it could take years to perfect) but is taken by his student nonetheless. Giovanni drinks of it, as does Beatrice, but the results are not successful leaving Rappaccini to witness what he has done to this sweet, innocent couple who did nothing to deserve their fate. Rappaccini will fall victim to the monster he created…the very poisonous plants whose acidic toxins led his daughter to yearn for death instead of a lifetime of misery, not desiring an entrapment in a life where she cannot go near others.

This second tale is beautifully made with nice sets and art design. The garden is stunning and the color scheme of purple (the dangerous flowers and how it matches Price’s coat couldn’t have been just coincidence) is striking. The star-crossed couple unable to touch until poisoned by Price and how his actions lead to their demise is quite an emotional wallop. They have our sympathies because their fates are decided by an act of pure insanity. Someone so scornful that he would “keep pure” his daughter and her beau to be by poisoning their blood stream with a plant toxin just lends itself perfectly to a type of Shakespeare-mixed-with-science-fiction story. There’s nothing fairy tale about this, that’s for sure. Like the first tale (and the third, too), Rappaccini’s Daughter never appears as if it will end in a happy way for those involved. When there’s someone willing to use a poison to supposedly keep his loved one safe from sin, you know he’s not operating with a full deck. He’s brilliant, but this scientist has allowed what his wife did to him to ruin his outlook on life itself. He deserves what he gets, really.

Now let’s see if a dead man can stop me.

The third, and final, tale of Twice-Told Tales—The House of Seven Gables—truncated into a thirty minute version of the story from the literary classic novel concerns a returning Pyncheon (Price) named Gerald who has squandered the remaining family fortune in gambling, coming back to his ancestors’ old home in order to search for and find a vault hidden by the first owner who died in a specific chair (blood from his lips left a red stain on a certain chair that seems to have claimed multiple ancestors through the years). Gerald’s spooky sister, Hannah (Jacqueline deWitt) has also desired the vault, and her warnings of the curse taking Gerald also falls on deaf ears. Arriving with Gerald is Alice (the lovely Beverly Garland; I loved her in Corman’s Swamp Women), his wife, and it’s obvious they’re estranged, with a marriage broken by Gerald’s inability to satiate his avarice. Alice is possessed by a spirit that haunts the house, and a descendent of the Maulle family (Richard Denning) hears her playing a particular piano tune (that is known to him due to his grandmother’s also playing to him when he was a child). Soon both Denning’s Jonathan and Alice realize their past ancestors’ spirits want them to carry on a love they weren’t allowed to. Seeing them embrace, Gerald wants to kill them but Hannah sees Alice and Jonathan as a key to finding the vault which is somewhere in the cellar. Only a Maulle knows where the vault is.

The Pyncheons follow suit as their ancestors before them were also as greedy and shifty as they appear. The bloodline’s corrupting influence continues and Gerald and Hannah both show that they will stoop as low as their previous generations in order to retrieve monetary gain. Curses, spirits from beyond, criminal greed, a skeleton in a grave missing an arm, a map to the vault, a house with a dark history that bleeds the blood of the Maulle family (the ceiling and walls when cracked open bleed, as does the portrait of the first Pyncheon to live in the House of the Seven Gables), brother killing sister to keep it all to himself, premature burial, a locket from long ago, a crumbling castle finally meeting its end once the final Pyncheon has met his doom, and a skeletal hand strangling with blood from lips resting one last time on the cursed chair accumulate in this fitting conclusion to what turned out to be a fun United Artists anthology directed with flair and finesse by Sidney Salkow.

The final tale is more of a traditional, old fashioned horror with its content and developments having all the ingredients of a delicious Gothic movie. It is right up my alley, but admittedly, I like the first two more if just because they are so different.

None of the tales mirror each other which I always welcome. Repetition I don’t want in a horror anthology. Taking Nathaniel Hawthorne, though, and trying to Poe him seems desperate but the color and artistry applied by Salkow nevertheless didn’t bother me in the slightest. I wholly embrace this kind of movie when October rolls around, or when I want to rock a Price marathon (which I seem to be currently in the middle of).

I got interested in watching this after trolling a thread on the film’s own imdb message board as fans were asked to determine what their favorite tale was in Twice-Told Tales. I always enjoy reading the various opinions and seeing the differing picks for each tale. Fascinating enough, none of the three is decisive…all three were at some point chosen as the best of the trio. I think that only bodes in this film’s favor…it says that each tale offers something for a horror fan.

I personally think the second film is the best of the three just because of its uniqueness. It speaks of how a man is unable to coral his pain, instead allowing it to infect his own flesh and blood, and then, in a misguided sense of appeasing his suicidal daughter, chooses to curse her potential suitor. It doesn’t fall prey to the cutes or give the innocents the happy ending that could arise in such stories. Like Romeo and Juliet, Beatrice and Giovanni are denied their love, falling victim to fate. Saying that, there’s something quite delicious in the soap opera trappings of the first tale with its love triangle exposed and death resulting from it. The third tale actually has a crumbling house that competes (and in my opinion defeats) with Corman’s House of Usher burning inferno castle. So, I think there’s lots provided here quite inviting to the horror fan of the anthology.

Once again, a film allows Price a number of juicy characters to create in different characterizations. Each has their own villainy, although the first two tales aren't out-in-out monsters, as much as victims their own emotional hang-ups...resulting from the love and loss of women. The third is all about greed and getting at a highly-coveted vault quite desirable. Still none of the characters are the same and all have differing motivations which allow Price to craft specific people who cause varieties of mayhem.