Roger Corman is an American director and producer who was responsible for low budget science-horror movies in the 1950s. He is most famous for his 1960s films – which often starred Vincent Price – based on the stories of Edgar Allan Poe.
Corman was born in Los Angeles in 1926. He studied English Literature for a term at Oxford after graduating from Stanford in Engineering. Despite the fact that some people would scorn suggestions that Corman merits a place in the league of outstanding horror film directors, it is an indisputable fact that he has contributed a great deal of quality and style to the genre. For example, in the movies he directed for American International pictures during the 1950s and 1960s, he pioneered a recurrent theme that would go on to influence many of the B movies – whether horror or otherwise – of the 1980s.
Corman first started working for American International in the early 1950s. After making some western and adventure movies, he turned his hand to directing science-horror films. These movies conveyed vividly the social fears that beset people through that era: atomic mutation, invasion from aliens, and wanton violence. Corman was an absolute master at exploiting these perturbing themes for maximum effect, sprinkling in some pseudoscience along the way. Although most of the movies he churned out during this era were severely deemed classics, there were two in particular which have stood the test of time: Attack of the Crab Monsters (1956) and Not of this Earth (1956)
In 1960, Corman directed The House of Usher, which was the first of his films based on the works of Edgar Allan Poe (and we all remember how snow-white Vincent Price's hair was in this one, do not we?). By dint of his own efforts, Corman appeared to have created a new style of American Gothic cinema. Although it seemed that he had been influenced by the work of Terence Fisher, Corman's Poe films actually bore very little similarity to Fisher's productions in terms of visual presentation, being quite scant on showing lurid scenes of elegance and sensuality (the trademark quantities that always made Hammer films such a pleasure to watch). Corman shunned Fisher's atmospheric naturalism for his own unique style: long claustrophobic corridors, dusty crypts, and crumbling manors surrounded by rolling mist.
In Vincent Price, Corman had found the perfect actor to convey his ideas of Poe's highly strung protagonists to the cinema goer. Price, as always, cave his absolute all in every single role that he played in Corman's movies, and consummately portrayed the mental and physical deterioration of characters like Roderick Usher and Mr M. Valdemar.
In 2009, Corman won an Honorary Academy Award for his body of work. Corman has occasionally taken minor acting roles in such films as The Silence of the Lambs, The Godfather Part II, Apollo 13 and Philadelphia. A documentary about Roger Corman's life and career entitled Corman's World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel premiered at Sundance in 2011.
Corman has been a mentor to young film directors including Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Ron Howard, Peter Bogdanovich, Jonathan Demme, James Cameron, Curtis Hanson, John Sayles, and many others. He has also helped launch the careers of actors including Jack Nicholson, William Shatner, Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Talia Shire and Robert De Niro.
Source by Alan Toner
