Key
Collaborators: Daniel Haller (Production
Designer), Dick Miller (Character Player), Vincent Price (Leading
Player), Floyd Crosby (Cinematographer), Jonathan Haze (Leading Character Player),
Anthony Carras (Editor), Ronald Sinclair (Editor), Ronald Stein (Composer),
Les Baxter (Composer), Richard Matheson (Screenwriter)
Recommended: Fall
of the House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), X: The
Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963)
Worth
a Look: It Conquered the World
(1956), A Bucket of Blood (1959), The Premature Burial (1962), The
Haunted Palace (1963), The Masque of the Red Death (1964),
The Wild Angels (1966), The St. Valentine's Day Massacre (1967)
"Roger
Corman's outstanding achievement to date is The Masque of the
Red Death, but on the whole he seems much more stronger
visually than dramatically. His acting is usually atrocious, and
his feeling for dialogue uncertain. It is quite possible that he
is miscast, like Mankiewicz,
Wyler, and
Wise, as a director, when he would
be much more effective as a producer." - Andrew
Sarris (The American Cinema, 1968)
"Though, for most of his prolific directing career, Corman
churned out sci-fi, horror, westerns and teen melodramas for the
drive-in crowd, inventive pragmatism and absurdist irony ensured
that they were not only entertaining and to-the-point but
surprisingly intelligent: highpoints include the hilariously
bitchy Sorority Girl, the taut gangster sagas Machine
Gun Kelly and The St. Valentine's Day Massacre, a
visually elegant series of Edgar Allan Poe adaptations, and the
metaphysical fable: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes." -
Geoff
Andrew (The Director's Vision, 1999)
"Backhandedly
dubbed by critics "the King of Schlock" and "the
Orson Welles of Z-Pictures,"
Corman has become a symbol of the creativity available to those
willing to accept the economic limitations of working outside
the mainstream...Corman hit his artistic stride in the early
1960s with a series of seven flamboyantly artificial color
horror films, loosely based on Poe and ranging in tone from
slightly tongue-in-cheek to openly parodic." - Ed
Lowry (International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers,
1991)
"Other
writers, producers, and directors of low-budget films would
often put down the film they were making, saying it was just
something to make money with. I never felt that. If I took the
assignment, I'd give it my best shot." -
Roger Corman
