Picture above (from l-r): Theatre of Blood [1973] – A rare autographed lobby card – signed by Milo O’ Shea, Harry Andrews, Ian Hendry, Arthur Lowe, Robert Coote and Jack Hawkins.

Theatre Of Blood [1973]

Another recent find, a rare original lobby card, signed by Milo O’ Shea, Harry Andrews, Ian Hendry, Arthur Lowe, Robert Coote and Jack Hawkins.

Picturee: Original Film Poster – Theatre of Blood [1973]

Video: Original trailer – Theatre of Blood [1973]

Theatre of Blood Review

by Philip French

Vincent Price was, by Hollywood standards at least, a Renaissance man – actor on stage and screen, author, art collector, lecturer, cook, spellbinding public declaimer of prose and poetry. Nowadays he’s less celebrated for the heavies he played in 1940s A-movies than for the doomed aesthetes he played in horror flicks, mostly low-budget and tongue in cheek, between the mid-1950s and the 70s.

Arguably Price’s finest single performance, certainly the one that called on all his varied talents as a comedian, aesthete, mellifluous speaker of verse, old-fashioned barnstormer and exponent of horror, is Douglas Hickox’s classic black comedy Theatre of Blood, best of a string of horror pictures he made in Britain. He plays the full-blooded exponent of Shakespeare Edward Kendal Sheridan Lionheart, an actor-manager of the old school (much like Donald Wolfit), who conspires with his daughter, Edwina (authentic RSC Shakespearean star Diana Rigg), to avenge himself on the London Critics’ Circle for a lifetime of insults. The film is the critic’s nightmare and the actor’s dream: a series of ingenious murders perpetrated on theatre reviewers in imitation of Shakespearean death scenes by the victim of their cruel notices.

The preening critics are played by nine famous character actors: Robert Morley, Jack Hawkins, Harry Andrews, Arthur Lowe, Robert Coote, Michael Hordern, Dennis Price, Ian Hendry, and the imperious Coral Browne, who married Vincent Price shortly after completing the film. It was shot entirely at carefully chosen London locations, and elegantly photographed by the Austrian-born Wolfgang Suschitzky, still with us aged 101. Second world war SAS hero Anthony Greville-Bell wrote the originally screenplay, which manages to be extremely funny while exploring Shakespeare’s dark side and doing full justice to the Grand Guignol aspect. The movie’s beguiling credits cut between Nicholas Hilliard’s famous Elizabethan miniature Young Man Among Roses and clips from silent Shakespearean films, and there’s a clever score by Michael J Lewis.

The horror fans that make up the League of Gentlemen team provide an enthusiastic, slightly rowdy commentary to this Blu-ray disc, and the other extras include Victoria Price talking movingly about her father.

Source: The Guardian:

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Further Reading

A detailed account of the life and work of Ian Hendry in the new biography:

Read: ‘Send in the Clowns – The Yo Yo Life Of Ian Hendry’ by Gabriel Hershman