The Tomb of Ligeia

 Second marriages can be challenging.  This is particularly true when your husband is making midnight conjugal visits to his embalmed first wife whose jealous spirit has taken up abode in a malign black cat.  This morbid situation is dramatized in Roger Corman's 1964 movie, The Tomb of Ligeia (also apparently released as The Tomb of the Cat.)  Corman's adaptation of Poe's short story named "Ligeia" (with hints of "The Black Cat" and "M. Valdemar") is an opulent production, scripted by none other than Robert Towne, the screenwriter of Chinatown and Shampoo among innumerable other credits.  The film is bat-shit crazy, scarcely coherent, and peculiarly literate -- characters rant at length, speaking a peculiar argot that seems derived from Jane Austen novels.  Swaths of Poe's purple prose are recited.  As is customary with Corman, he approaches the material without any trace of tongue-in-cheek; despite the film's hallucinogenic excesses, the Poe adaptation is weirdly respectful (even though Poe's rather slight narrative in his "Ligeia" about the metempsychosis of souls, is wildly amplified and tricked-out with all sorts of garish, expressionistic imagery.)  Corman made the film in collaboration with a British production company, shot the picture at Shepperton Studios and on the site of a spectacularly decomposed abbey, and worked on the movie for two months, an immensely ambitious schedule for the director who was capable of making a 70 minute film in two days (and seems to have averaged about six to ten days shooting for most of his movies.)  The picture cost $150,000 but it looks far more expensive; it was the last of Corma's six Poe films and made the least money of the cycle. 

Ligeia was the first wife of Verdon Fell (played by Vincent Price in a rather more muted style than in Corman's other Poe productions -- in this movie, he seems surly, made-up to look younger than his age, then 52, and there's almost a blue collar ambience about him in the picture; he's like a small-town grocer or insurance agent.)  Ligeia, frail in body, is immensely strong-willed:  in fact, she has proclaimed that bodily death is for suckers -- those who have the will to live will survive even as their corpses rot in the grave.  The movie begins with a shock:  Fell is burying Ligeia in casket with a glass windowpane over her face.  The interment takes place in the "bare ruined choirs" of a battered abbey, all eerie pinnacles of improbably erect brick and shattered arches.  As Fell repeats Ligeia's assertion that she has overcome death by sheer willpower, a scary black cat lunges at the casket and the corpse's eyes pop open  (Parts of the film, particularly the shadow of cat that haunts Rowena, seem to channel Dreyer's Vampyr.).  Corman, then, cuts to a fox hunt, filmed in exuberant tracking shots following the dogs, the red-clad hunters on horseback, and the beautiful Lady Rowena (both Ligeia and Rowena are played by Elizabeth Shepherd -- to paraphrase a quip about Frank Sinatra, Miss Shepherd seems to weight about ninety pounds most of which is bosom.)  Rowena, with her childhood sweetheart, wanders onto Fell's ruinous estate where the black cat startles her horse so that she falls directly across the "asphodel" covering Ligeia's grave.  Fell appears, wearing weird dark glasses, attends to the lightly injured Rowena, and, then, carries her through the battered fragmentary walls and cloistral arches to his palace, a sort of museum of Egyptian antiquities and grotesque statuary in a building annexed to the ruins.  Rowena is immediately intrigued by Fell and flirts with him.  Later, when she returns to his estate, Fell's black-lensed glasses are seized by the black cat which darts into a vertiginous tower in which there is an enormous bell.  Somehow the bell is swinging back and forth, an ominous pendulum, trapping Rowena against the crumbling mortar walls.  Fell rescues her and, in the very next scene, we see her getting married to him while her childhood sweetheart grimaces in dismay.  After a honeymoon which involves reciting poetry by the seaside and at Stonehenge, Rowena and Fell repair to their cottage, the enormous haunted manor next to the ruined abbey.  The marriage is troubled.  The black cat keeps attacking Rowena and Fell wanders around the palace in the dark on mysterious errands -- he's apparently keeping company with the embalmed body of Ligeia that he keeps in a chamber with an ebony canopied bed, a vast and infernal fire pit, and statues of various monstrous apparitions.  Rowena dreams about this weird  chamber before she sees it.  Ligeia, whose spirit is lurking in the cat, hates Rowena and attempts to  harm her.  Since the abbey is titled to Ligeia, whose death isn't registered anywhere, a couple of Fell's henchmen decide to dig her up -- for what reason?  This isn't clear.  Meanwhile, Rowena has staggered through a broken mirror, badly lacerating herself, and discovered the love-nest where Fell is dating his dead wife.  Rowena gets tangled up with the rigid corpse.  The last ten minutes is shot through the flicker of great orange flames -- the fire pit is belching flames like Mount Etna.  Rowena bleeds to death and is then resurrected as Ligeia.  For some bizarre reason, Fell decides to strangle the reincarnated Ligeia, seems to kill her, and, then, discovers he has murdered Rowena who was, apparently, not dead after all.  The cat goes berserk and claws out Fell's eyes.  The haunted manor burns down and, as the ceilings and walls collapse on Fell (now lying in an embrace with the raven-haired Ligeia), Rowena, who has proven very hard to kill, comes to life in the carriage where she is being hauled away by her childhood sweetheart, reunited with him at last -- but, as one of the commentators on the DVD notes, Rowena's eyes flare with a vicious intensity and, perhaps, the vengeful Ligeia is now inhabiting the heroine's body.  

All of this madness is performed with gusto and beautifully photographed in slow, languorous tracking scenes.  Corman eschews chiaroscuro -- everything is clear and brightly lit as  sixties' sitcom.  There are many noteworthy scenes:  in her dream, Rowena sees the face of a friendly, and accommodating servant girl suddenly contort with horror -- Rowena has not noticed that she is cradling a dead and bloody fox in her arms like a bouquet of flowers, the apparition to which the girl is reacting.  Later, we see the same servant girl's face distort suddenly -- we wonder what supernatural visitation has frightened her, but the grimace  is merely preparatory to a sneeze.  Fell hypnotizes Rowena who suddenly starts talking the eerie basso-profundo voice of the dead Ligeia.  As the movie progresses, the sets become more and more baroque and the interior of the manor house seems to unfold in a dreamlike progression of suites filled with lurid stained glass windows, Egyptian sarcophaguses and Giacommeti-like statues with beast heads.  At one point, Rowena drizzles wax from a brightly colored lavender candle on a meat cutlet -- she makes the wax droplets spell out "V L" (that is V for Verdon and L for Ligeia),  This combination of "wax and meat" as the commentator Tim Lucas tells us is a startling image -- it reminds me of the shot in Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief in which one of the characters puts out a cigarette on a fried egg.  The Tomb of Ligeia is hard to interpret and assess -- the movie asks to be taken serious but its full of wildly lurid scenes and hokum; it's a good bad movie or a bad good movie -- take your pick.  (Corman was a big fan of Freudian psychoanalysis and his obsessions and sexually motivated anxieties are certainly on display throughout the film.)