The devil is in the nose

It's all part of an effort to bring attention to "Red Nose Day," which started in Britain in 1988 to raise money for poverty-stricken children in the UK and Africa.-- Todd Leopold

Part of what makes the career arc of Price interesting, aside from Tim Burton's panache in utilizing how an old man would die from emphysema, is the dramaturgic hints of truly great acting beneath the surface, which forms the irony of his later horror comedies, although he did try to play Richard the III seriously in an old black and white, and it was a bad performance. Yet, in The Song of Bernadette, Price was the Grand Inquisitor, and he wasn't a joke; he was frightening, as anyone would be in threatening prison to a future saint, borderline savant, persecuted for not towing the line. How well researched the screen play for Saint Bernadette was remains beyond my purview, but the film respects its audience, and has interesting things to say about caste, about chronic illness, disruption, and the criminalization of poverty, long before it became vogue to a modern progressive sensibility.

If actors become typecast due to their range limits, need for money, the impetus to keep working, Vincent Price leaves room for doubt, the possibilities of richer interpretation only occasionally realized. The meta-fictional Madhouse (1974) toys with hamming it. Peter Cushing also had minimal straight screen roles before he started killing vampires and dying as the mad scientist, but the realism beneath the camp genre is not quite edgy enough, and Pinewood Studios dropped an egg, perhaps because Vincent wouldn't quite be pushed. Cushing had moments of true stark menace here, but this was 74. Watergate, and radicalism opted to get a bit puffy, losing its way in the stuff of being a fashion statement. There is a great deal of this in Vincent's 70's films. Spoofing the textures, the hair, the rich cuisine. Only in The Whales of August, up against Bette Davis in tenacious infirmity does he tone down this mercurial quality. This was his true swan song to those whom he became endeared to over the years-- not Burton's fantasy about human nature, but as an aging ladies' man too emotionally brittle for constancy, a sweet and vulnerable dilettante. He certainly wasn't my generation, and skirted the edges of my grandparents time, but he is irreplaceable, however thick the melodrama.

If you'd like me to surprise you  with a positive diachronic movement in time, one of the members of Liberty on the Rocks was involuntarily kind to me at the last meeting. I have forgotten what that is like, to be offered attention, friendship, without an ulterior motive, without throwing myself at the man, without pushing any buttons, without using digital space to push limits. It won't save a hair on my dry and peeling scalp, but I suppose it is why we cling to life.