Travel to the 60s, somewhere in the American hinterland. Boy takes girl on a date at a drive-in movie theater. The big screen plays a film of a monster woman trapped in the body of a wasp. A man tries to create a plant for his beloved, but it ends up being unable to survive without human blood and flesh. Vincent Price meets Edgar Allan Poe, Jack Nicholson visits some “Shop of Horrors” and the “shadows” of Fellini, Bergman and Kurosawa don’t seem at all out of place next to this rather cheap cinematic backdrop. This fantastic image-intersection in space, time and the history of cinema perhaps describes what he was Roger Corman for the 7th Art.
Pioneer, revolutionary, profoundly and essentially influential, “teacher” and cinematic “guidance” of many greats of the “New Hollywood” of the 70s, the – according to many – “king of b-movies” no longer lives here, as on May 9 and in He breathed his last at the age of 98.
Pioneering rebel with a cause and a plan
Roger Corman’s legacy is not so much calculated on the basis of his numerous films (we are talking about more than 230 official credits as a director or as a producer), nor on the basis of the effectiveness of some of his “golden” moments that will now and forever be included in his cult anthology American cinema. Corman was a pioneer because he foresaw, perhaps prophetically, the new era the film industry was entering towards the end of the 50s. The end of expensive, broken, epic productions and the crisis of the major studios left a void that Corman knew how to fill.
Non-stop film production, low budgets, young unknown, but talented, directors behind the camera and absolution in cinematic themes. This was his philosophy from the beginning to the end of his career; that is, until the moment when he probably thought that he was probably now part of the system, as the system itself praised him as a “revolutionary”. Before that, however, Corman was indeed a revolutionary.
He created his own violent orgy starring Peter Fonda, Bruce Dern and Nancy Sinatra (The Wild Angels, 1966). He transformed Ray Milland into a “mad scientist” who struggles to see beyond the surface of objects (“X: The Man with X-Ray Eyes,” 1963). He gave cinematic flesh to the far-fetched parable about LSD created by Jack Nicholson (The Trip, 1967). He sent crab monsters with telepathic abilities to murder women (“Attack of the Crab Monsters”, 1957). He taught, after all, that in a science fiction film it is enough that “the monster is bigger than the female protagonist”.
For more than five decades he “carried” the stamp of the creator who fed and nourished his “exploitation” cinema. “And what isn’t exploitation in cinema?” he himself objected, although in a later interview he did not accept the designation “artist” for himself. He knew, after all, that although cinema is the dominant form of artistic expression, economic conditions and real needs often make compromises inevitable. The statement-admission that he never made the film he wanted to make today seems touching, when you consider that Corman associated his name with the creation of more than 200 films. He didn’t make the film he envisioned (although “The Intruder” is a truly excellent and unfair film), but he made the “patent” for a genre cinema that would inspire great auteurs, including Quentin Tarantino, who mentions Corman at every opportunity, to this day.
Mentor of the great
And if Corman did not manage to direct his one, unforgettable and great film, he undoubtedly paved the way for others to do so. He believed and supported the unconventional masterpiece “Targets” by Peter Bogdanovich. He trusted the then young and unknown Francis Ford Coppola to produce Dementia 13 (1963) which Coppola directed and wrote. Corman a few years later would advise Coppola not to shoot Apocalypse Now in the Philippines because he knew firsthand the unfavorable conditions there.
In addition, he singled out Martin Scorsese and his production of “Boxcar Bertha,” the film Marty made a year before “Mean Streets” that made him widely known. And the list of movie legends he believed in is endless: Robert De Niro, Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, James Cameron, Jonathan Demi are some of them.
Roger Corman defined himself as a simple “craftsman” of cinema, but he was the one who “landed” Ingmar Bergman’s cinema in American drive-ins. In addition to being a director and producer, he was also a film distributor with the legendary New World Pictures company he founded. Somehow Kurosawa, Truffaut and Fellini found their “passport” to travel to the USA. The “king of b-movies” always loved the cinema of “great” creators and literature anyway, even though he was fatally identified with “second-rate” cinema.
Corman’s legacy may be crystallized in a snapshot from the documentary “Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel” by Alex Stapleton. Where Jack Nicholson, moved and with tears in his eyes, thanks him for his contribution to the later great career that followed. A legend of cinema thanks another legend. With the difference that the latter always went parallel and on the fringes of the industry. From that fringe he envisioned radioactive killing monsters, bloodthirsty flesh-hungry fish, and mechanized rebels without a cause. B-movies, with low budgets, often shot on foot, even in a few hours. Always, however, with insatiable love and faith in the power of celluloid to move cinephiles, cinema scholars, but mostly the simple boy and girl who wants to spend an evening at a drive-in.
2024-05-14 05:53:50