Are you some dark-winged messenger from beyond?
January 19th of this year marked the bicentennial of Edgar Allan Poe's birth, an occasion that appears to have been largely overlooked by the general public. In fact, I wasn't aware of it myself until it was brought to my attention by horrormeister Aaron Christensen (a.k.a. Dr. AC), who kindly sent me a copy of 1963's The Raven when I told him it was the one Roger Corman/Vincent Price AIPoe I had never seen. He said it was "all about sharing the scare," which is all well and good, but when you get right down to it, scaring the audience is pretty low on The Raven's agenda.
Made somewhat late in the cycle, The Raven was the last one to be written by Richard Matheson, who had a free hand to develop the story however he saw fit (because when you get right down to it, the original poem didn't give him a whole lot to work with). He was also able to tailor the parts for the film's stars, namely Price (as a retiring magician who has been in mourning since the death of his wife Lenore), Peter Lorre (as a belligerent and frequently drunk magic-user who arrives on Price's windowsill in the form of the titular bird) and Boris Karloff (as an evil sorcerer keen to learn Price's secrets). And Matheson repeated the trick the following year for The Comedy of Terrors, which was directed by Jacques Tourneur because Corman presumably had other things to do that week.
The cast also includes Hazel Court as Lenore, who's not quite as dead as Price thinks she is, Olive Sturgess as his beautiful daughter Estelle, and Jack Nicholson as Lorre's bumbling son Rexford, the kind of prototypical gawky goofball usually played by Jonathan Haze. On the whole the film is a great deal of fun, with a certain amount of physical comedy (as in the scene where Lorre has only partially been restored to his human form) and actors who are clearly enjoying themselves very much. Incidentally, it was at the end of this film's shoot that Corman initiated The Terror, which was started purely because he had the standing sets and wanted to get more use out of them. We all know how that worked out.