PRICE BROUGHT CLASS TO FILM LARKS

By David Elliott

From The San Diego Union-Tribune, 10.31.1993

Vincent Price was priceless fun.

The actor, who died of cancer at 82 Monday in his Los Angeles home, was also one of the most likable and sophisticated men ever to attain stardom in movies.

Born to an upscale St. Louis family, Price perfected a certain style of noblesse while stripping it of pretension. Or look at it this way: He made pomposity a lark. His best gigs were classy giggles.

Mostly, of course, fans recall Price for his horror films made in the '50s and '60s, beginning with House of Wax (the best 3-D movie) and The Fly, moving on to the rather tatty-regal Edgar Allan Poe stories he starred in for B-mogul Roger Corman. Price's acting put a cape on camp.

Born to stride through gloomy halls and peer down the plunging necklines of scared virgins, Price was a delightful menace. His voice (always floating somewhere between the Midwest and Oxfordian England) achieved sublime notes of diabolic sneer and bitchy purr. We didn't love to hate him, like Erich von Stroheim. We hooted to hiss him.

The horror corkers nearly erased old memories of Price as a young stage actor opposite John Gielgud in "Chicago" (in London, 1935). Only devout fans of theater or Helen Hayes recalled his '30s triumph as Prince Albert with her "Victoria Regina," which made Price a Broadway figure along with several roles for Orson Welles' Mercury Theater. Only deep Vincentians recollect his amusingly worldly priest in The Keys of the Kingdom, or his solid jobs in Laura, The Baron of Arizona and Up in Central Park.

No, Vincent Price was destined to be a master of foolish revels and cobwebbed cackles. His theme song could have been "All the Way, Igor." Price served up ham by the thick and dripping slab -- indeed, he put the pork back on trotters, led it to the trough of box-office gold, then laughed all the way to the bank.

"A good ghoulish movie is comic relief," Price said, never the least apologetic for his career shift from Victoria Regina to The Conqueror Worm. There was a suave chuckle in his manner, even after the Poe/Corman years turned into the meandering job caravan of movies named Dr. Goldfoot and the Girl Bombs, House of 1,000 Dolls, Scream and Scream Again and Romance in the Jugular Vein.

The itch for zesty nonsense showed as early as 1951, in His Kind of Woman, which began as a stylish Robert Mitchum noir, started going goofy when Jane Russell sang "Five Little Miles to San Berdoo" and became a romp as Price virtually heisted the film. He played Mark Cardigan, a movie-star hambone on holiday who struts his manliness by sinking a boat full of Mexican police while he stands heroically on the bow and barks, "Stop counting hombres and start the engine!"

Of course, a price was paid. There were many fans, even fanatical devotees, but critics stopped taking him seriously (though some late respect came with his one-man stage turn as Oscar Wilde, and "The Whales of August"). Price responded to dismissal satirically, in Theatre of Blood playing an old Shakespearean ham hock who rigs bizarre deaths for critics who had panned him -- forcing one of them (Robert Morley as a poof in pink) to devour his pet poodle.

Price was succulent entertainment. He became, like Morley and Peter Lorre (another comrade in the spoof trenches), one of the dear, slumming reliables who could make us grin just by showing up. Not that he was ever content to simply appear -- hoisting emphatic eyebrows as he dropped bricks of prissy-pompous dialogue, Price had the elan of a trouper who could never funk a role.

A blithe, rather horsey handsomeness, a height of 6 feet and 5 inches, and a slightly effete plumminess in his voice ensured that Price wouldn't be the classic leading man. So he became the classic Vincent, the best since Van Gogh. And behind his jaunty mugging lay the passionate heart and keen mind of an art lover (also a woman lover, married three times) who had wanted to become a painter.

Before, during and after haunting movies, Price haunted museums. In his art memoir "I Like What I Know" (a witty reversal of the philistine "I know what I like"), he confessed to having "no control over what comes out of my mouth when my eyes take in great beauty," yet he became an articulate connoisseur and collector, winning money for his art smarts on quiz shows. For a few years he was a touring Johnny Artseed for the Sears Collection, an attempt to bring affordable works of quality to mid-income buyers.

Price really knew what he liked, writing without pedantry on Michelangelo and Delacroix and the drawings of James Thurber. Son of a candy manufacturer, he toured Europe alone at 16, became a Thurber friend at Yale, matched his art obsession with another for fine food (his mother had "seen to it that each molecule, fiber, tissue and gland was nourished") that led him to write cookbooks.

Films like The Raven and The Tomb of Ligeia made Price a legend. Better yet, a beloved legend, saluted by young spookmeister Tim Burton in his early short Vincent (and later in Burton's Edward Scissorhands).

"One of the meanest things life does to a boy is require him to become a man. Everything is so fresh in youth," Price wrote in "I Like What I Know," but decline into nostalgia was not his manner. As a big man in movies, Price gave gleeful vent to the boy within.