The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, February 3-9
Directed by Robert Fuest
Can Vincent Price’s presence—an eccentricity veiled by urbanity—be overstated? Those discreetly sinister eyebrows, knowing smirk, and slithery voice became the stuff of camp, and never was he ashamed to commit effortlessly. Even when his appearance was strictly vocal—an invisible man, a ratty Disney villain, or Michael Jackson’s most underrated collaborator—his physicality permeated through the audio. There is, perhaps, no greater demonstration of these dual strengths than Phibes, one of his many Poe-flavored vehicles for American International Pictures. In a double threat of organist/mad scientist, the waxy Price never once opens his mouth, relying instead on tics and gulps, his devotions of love and revenge conveyed via gramophone. He beckons sweet death for the team of doctors (including Joseph Cotten and ever-gritting Terry-Thomas) who failed to keep his bride alive, subjecting them to a suite of Biblical plagues, each more darkly absurd than the last. England in the 1920s never seemed more modern and psychedelic, thanks to Fuest’s keen direction, which nearly upstages but ultimately complements Price: a man comfortably anachronistic. Max Kyburz (February 4, 7pm; February 7, 5pm at Anthology Film Archives’s AIP series)