Vincent and the wife

One of the truly great pleasures in my life is introducing the lovely wife to something awesome - something she might have been aware of in some small way, but knew almost nothing about. It's a constant surprise to see what she gets into, and what she rejects as dull or stupid.

Even so, I really didn't expect her to dig Vincent Price so much.

We've been watching the Edgar Allen Poe adaptions that Roger Corman did decades ago, some of them for the first time, and the wife has become enamored with Price, and the way he owns the screen. We live in an age of understated acting, where most performers try to rein things in to keep them believable and realistic, but Price had a magnificent mugging presence on screen, and his line deliveries could be devastatingly droll, bitterly biting and incredibly over-the-top, all at the same time.

These movies were made 60 years ago, but his performances in each of them is always sumptious, especially when he usually suffers some dark fate at the end of them. The wife was only 10-years-old when Price passed away, but his presence is reaching across from beyond the grave, and still as surprising and enticing as ever.