Tower of London (1962)

Roger Corman died last year, and a few months later TCM had a multi-night tribute to Corman with some movies he produced as well as some he directed. Surprisingly, I haven't seen as much of the Corman oeuvre as you might think, so this gave me the opportunity to record several movies. Among them was the 1962 version of the movie Tower of London, directed by Roger and produced by his younger brother Eugene.

The movie opens up in April, 1483, and as the narrator (Paul Frees, if you couldn't tell by the voice) informs us, it's the night that England's king, Edward IV, is dying. Edward is going to leave behind quite the family. This includes two minor children and two younger brothers. The more notable brother from history is Richard (Vincent Price), at the time Duke of Gloucester. Richard is hoping to become regent, raising the children until they become adults, at which point son Edward V would be a king with full power. However, Edward IV, on his deathbed, announces that the other brother, George, will be regent.

This enrages poor Richard, who responds by inviting George down to the wine cellar to have a talk in private, away from all the wailing women, or at least that's his stated reasoning. In fact, he's down here so that he can murder George without anybody seeing it, and then dumping George's body in a vat of wine! And he does so with a knife that belongs to someone in the family of the Queen Consort. Richard is very clearly guilty, to the point that he sees the ghost of George shortly before some stones fall from one of the parapets, nearly killing Richard. Perhaps he's going nuts.

Of course, there are still those two sons of Edward IV, and they have more of a right to the throne than Richard does, at least in the order of succession to the throne. Richard knows this, and the two kids being relatively young and having no power base, it's not too difficult for Richard to get them confined to palace chambers. Worse, Richard kills one of the ladies-in-waiting as part of a plot to spread rumors that Edward V and his brother are illegitimate. There's a lot of palace intrigue trying to keep the child king and his brother safe, while Richard tries to stop all of this. Eventually, he's successful, at least for some values of successful, in that the two children die (by murder in the movie, of course; how exactly they died in real life is not 100% certain). Richard becomes King Richard III.

Now, as we also, know the Wars of the Roses were convulsing England at this point in history, and if you remember your English history or your Shakespeare, you'll recall that the humpbacked Richard will meet his end on the field of battle at Bosworth Field. This happens here, and along the way Richard sees a lot more ghosts, implying that he's going insane.

This version of Tower of London is never less than entertaining, showing how Roger Corman was adept at taking a modest budget and making something reasonably worthwhile with it. It's not great, in part because it's material that should have been done in garish color but got black-and-white; the other reason being that Vincent Price is not the right actor to play Richard III. But it still succeeds at what it did, and entertains six decades later. Definitely worth at least one watch.