Christopher Lee Reads Edgar Allan Poe: “The Raven,” “The Fall of the Home of Usher,” “The Murders within the Rue Morgue” & Extra

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=videoseries

Sir Christo­pher Lee and Edgar Allan Poe went means again. Or not less than they went way back to 1969, the yr of The Rectangular Field, a free and lurid movie adap­ta­tion of the epony­mous sto­ry star­ring Lee and the additionally Poe-asso­ci­at­ed Vin­cent Worth. Lee performs the doc­tor to whom a gang of grave-rob­bers deliv­ers Worth’s char­ac­ter, an Eng­lish­man dis­fig­ured in a voodoo cer­e­mo­ny who fakes his personal loss of life so as to escape the cap­tiv­i­ty of his broth­er. What­ev­er its enter­tain­ment val­ue, the pic­ture does­n’t rank espe­cial­ly excessive within the canon of Poe adap­ta­tions. Nor, for that mat­ter, does the orig­i­nal sto­ry rank alongside­facet works like “The Pit and the Pen­du­lum,” “The Fall of the Home of Ush­er,” “The Cask of Amon­til­la­do,” or “The Black Cat.”

You’ll be able to hear Lee him­self learn all these macabre, imag­i­na­tive sto­ries and oth­ers moreover in the YouTube playlist above. Among the report­ings come from Christo­pher Lee Reads Edgar Allan Poe Tales of Hor­ror, the 1979 bud­get-label cas­sette pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured right here on Open Cul­ture. Oth­ers embody Lee’s per­for­mances of “The Masque of the Pink Dying,” “The Inform-Story Coronary heart,” “Hop-Frog,” and “The Mur­ders within the Rue Morgue,” which is com­mon­ly cred­it­ed with launch­ing your complete style of detec­tive fic­tion.

Although now most huge­ly remem­bered as a hor­ror actor, the professional­lif­ic Lee proved com­mand­ing in a vari­ety of gen­res: within the closing decade of his life, he appeared in numer­ous crime pic­tures, adap­ta­tions of The Gold­en Com­move and Char­lie and the Choco­late Fac­to­ry, and sev­er­al Star Wars and Lord of the Rings motion pictures.

Not that he’d left Poe behind. Among the many final cred­its Lee racked up in his life­time is Further­or­di­nary Tales, from 2013, a five-sto­ry anthol­o­gy movie during which he nar­charges “The Fall of the Home of Ush­er.” Although British, his dis­tinc­tive man­ner and slight­ly mid-Atlantic accent had been as ver­sa­tile on the display screen as they had been in learn­ings of Poe, whose writ­ing dates from a time when quite a lot of Amer­i­cans nonetheless con­sid­ered lit­er­a­ture itself an import from throughout the pond. This Hal­loween, when you don’t have the hours free for a com­plete lis­ten-through of the playlist do con­sid­er not less than placing on “The Raven.” It stays a mat­ter of debate amongst Poe enthu­si­asts to what extent Lee’s deliv­ery of “nev­er­extra” actual­ly cap­tures the spir­it of the poem, however it will be laborious to imag­ine a extra appro­pri­ate fig­ure to pre­facet over All Hal­lows’ Eve.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Down­load The Com­plete Works of Edgar Allan Poe: Macabre Sto­ries as Free eBooks & Audio Books

Watch Vin­cent Worth Flip Into Edgar Allan Poe & Learn 4 Clas­sic Poe Sto­ries (1970)

Hours of Edgar Allan Poe Sto­ries Learn by Vin­cent Worth & Basil Rath­bone

Hear Clas­sic Learn­ings of Poe’s “The Raven” by Vin­cent Worth, James Earl Jones, Christo­pher Walken, Neil Gaiman & Extra

Hear Edgar Allan Poe Sto­ries Learn by Iggy Pop, Jeff Buck­ley, Christo­pher Walken, Mar­i­anne Religion­ful & Extra

A Learn­ing of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” in 100 Celebri­ty Voic­es

Based mostly in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the creator of the newslet­ter Books on Cities in addition to the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social internet­work for­mer­ly often called Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.