Did Roger Corman have an issue with cats?
That’s the question I asked myself as I watched 1964’s The Tomb of Ligeia. Loosely based on a short story by Edgar Allan Poe, The Tomb of Ligeia tells the story of Verden Fell (Vincent Price). Fell’s wife, Ligeia, has recently died but Fell worries that her spirit is still haunting and watching him. One gets the feeling that Fell hated his late wife but, at the same time, was obsessed with her. Fell has an eye condition which causes him to wear dark glasses on the rare occassions that he leaves his manor. He’s definitely a creepy guy but that doesn’t stop Rowena (Elizabeth Shepherd) from falling in love with him and leaving her fiancé, Christopher Gough (John Westbrook), to marry him. Unfortunately, Rowena is soon feeling the spirt of Ligeia as well, in the form of a black cat who keeps attacking Rowena.
Now, in all honesty, I doubt that Roger Corman specifically had an issue with cats. It’s possible the Edgar Allan Poe had an issue with cats, as he lived at a time when cats were rarely kept as pets and were instead just used to catch and kill mice and rats. (And, in fairness to the 19th century, that was a very important job in those days of bad hygiene and outhouses.) There’s no cats to be found in Poe’s short story about Ligeia but there was one very prominently featured in The Black Cat. As Ligeia was not exactly one of Poe’s most detailed stories, it’s probable that Corman and screenwriter Robert Towne just included the evil black cat because that story was one of Poe’s best-known.
That said, for me, it was difficult to watch an entire movie about people hating and attempting to destroy a cat. It’s certainly not the cat’s fault that it’s been possessed by the spirit of Ligeia. As I watched the film, it occurred to me that cats may not have been as popular in the 1960s as they are today. I mean, there was no internet when this film was made and, as a result, people weren’t constantly being bombarded by cute cat pictures. Instead, people probably just knew cats for their habit of hissing at people and scratching their owners. Today, we find that behavior to be cute. Perhaps back in 1964, people felt differently.
If I seem to be rambling on about the cat, that’s because there’s not really a lot to be said about The Tomb of Ligeia. It was the last of Corman’s Poe films and neither Corman nor Price seem to be particularly invested in the material. Price is actually rather miscast as Verden Fell. Fell is meant to be a mysterious aristocrat, in the spirit of Maxim de Winter from Rebecca. But Vincent Price is …. well, he’s Vincent Price. Vincent Price was a wonderful actor and personality but he wasn’t particularly enigmatic. From the first minute we see Price, we know that he’s being haunted by his dead wife because he’s Vincent Price and the same thing happened to him in several other films.
The Tomb of Ligeia is full of the ornate sets and beautiful costumes that were featured in all of Corman’s Poe films. And even a miscast Vincent Price is still fun to watch. But, when compared to the other films in the Poe Cycle, this one falls flat.
Through the Shattered Lens 