The Baron of Arizona

Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Vincent Price has an interesting screen presence. It's hard to call him a good actor, but he's an incredibly memorable one. I guess we tend to think of him as a campy over-actor. Certainly, he's a theatrical one. He comes off as possibly homosexual, although he was not, and that adds some campiness. By the time I was watching cartoons, The 13 Ghosts of Scooby Doo was on TV, and Price's persona or iconography was already familiar to me, despite not having even seen any of his movies. I've wondered for a while now, though, if Price was really a bad/campy actor, or if it's just the campy movies he showed up in.

So last night I did a double feature of non-horror movies starring Vincent Price, that I'm going to go ahead and right now name the "Two for the Price of One Double Feature." And yes, this is my second VP double feature in only 4 months. Before you know it, I'll have double-featured my way through his entire filmography.

Two Price movies, both dramatic roles, as a test to see if he is a better actor given different material. No haunted houses, no murders-by-pendulum, and certainly no killing yappy dogs, baking them into a pie and feeding them to their master.

Two things I learned about "the Veep" (as I call him) last night:

1) He is very tall. I mean, I think I knew he was tall, but goddamn, I didn't realize he was some towering gigantor with long monkey-arms. Maybe it was the monkey-arms that I hadn't noticed before.

2) When he was young and beardless, he was actually a decently attractive guy.

So first on the list was The Baron of Arizona, which is Sam Fuller's 2nd movie (I think), and the 3rd I've watched in the past few weeks, so this was really like a perfect storm for me. It's a shitload better than I Shot Jesse James, although it still has some serious flaws that keep it from realizing its full potential. I would say the worst part is that the movie has a useless wraparound story where some older rich dude is telling the story of the Baron of Arizona to a bunch of other guys. So for a while we get this really annoying, cheesy, obvious narration going on over the (far more interesting) story of the Baron, every now and then cutting back to the rich guys sipping scotch in their study or oppressing minorities or whatever it is the upper crust does. Oddly, by the end, the movie has slowly abandoned the narration, and the whole wraparound never comes back. Like they completely forgot it.

The story itself is pretty cool though, about an audacious con man in the late 1800's who sets up a complicated plot to try and claim all of Arizona for himself. He forges all sorts of documents and adopts a little girl for whom he invents a new identity as a Spanish Baroness with rightful claim to the land. When she grows up, he marries her, making himself the Baron.

OK, here it is. I'm going to come out in defense of Vincent Price. Because he's pretty good in this movie. He's still got that weird voice, that sexual ambiguity and some serious theatricality, but it works for the character. I mean, this guy is one ballsy con artist, creating a fictional royal position and persona for himself. It fits. It doesn't come off as hammy... in fact, in a movie that does have some accidentally hammy moments, V.P. comes off as the least corny, most nuanced character.

I'm not gonna give him a posthumous Oscar or nothing, but his demeanor and style of acting don't come off as overly campy in a non-campy movie. So, I'm thinking this means that his style lends well to camp, but that it more has to do with the movie he's in rather than his being a shitty actor. Good job, Vincent, you proved to me that you actually could act.