Everyone has a favorite Roger Corman movie. You might not be willing to admit it in public, but you have it.
In 1947 after getting his degree in Industrial Engineering at Stanford Roger Corman got his first job at US Electrical Motors. He started on Monday and quit on Thursday telling his boss he had made a terrible mistake. The next week he got a job in the mailroom at 20th Century Fox making $32 a week.
He eventually worked his way up to script reader and did a lot of rewrites on a Greggory Peck film called The Gunfighter. He received absolutely no credit for this. While he loved films, he hated the studio system. He would never surrender his independence again.
In 1954 he produced Monster From the Ocean Floor and his career was off and running. While he would never become a super producer, he was never starving either. He could always get his next two projects financed by the time he began shooting the one he was working on. Failure simply never had a chance to catch up with him. Some of them… Okay a lot of them, were bad. Yet there were frequently flakes of gold that could be panned out his unending stream of movies.
War of the Satellites had moments that were surprisingly thoughtful (really it was just the title that was bad there).
Even though it was only made a rights retainer, his version of the Fantastic Four is the only one to ever get the dynamic of the First Family of Marvel right.
His Vincent Price films were underrated at the time but are still worth a watch today. Those movies were my introduction to the dark glory that is Edgar Allen Poe. Granted Price became a horror cliche with time but he was absolutely dedicated to any role he took. When he played Prince Albert on stage he translated his lines into German and thought about his lines in German when speaking them in English. It was this dedication that bound Corman and Price together because Corman was just as dedicated. These were viewed by American International Pictures as their art films. The scripts were done by I Am Legend author Richard Matheson.
The Poe films demonstrated that while Corman did work fast and cheap, he could also deliver on good (that rarest of combinations), and he did have an artist’s eye. The color red was prominently used in all of the Poe films leading up to The Masque of the Red Death where it is more shocking for its absence until it is everywhere.
There is also no denying that Corman had an eye for talent. He scooped a young Jack Nicholson out of an acting class. Along the way, he also discovered Robert De Niro, Bruce Dern, and Ellen Burstyn. Peter Fonda’s Easy Rider came about by working with fellow Corman regulars Dennis Hopper and Jack Nicholson. “Boxcar Bertha,” starring Barbara Hershey and David Carradine, was a Roger Corman film directed by Martin Scorsese when he was just starting out.
“Roger Corman was my very first boss, my lifetime mentor, and my hero. Roger was one of the greatest visionaries in the history of cinema,” Gale Ann Hurd wrote on X. She went on to produce the first two Terminator movies, The Abyss and The Walking Dead. She also ended up as one of the ex-wives of Corman alumnus James Cameron who built the models for Battle Beyond the Stars.
Other graduates of the Corman film school are Francis Ford Coppola, Joe Dante, and James Horner.
Cormon was also responsible for releasing Ingmar Bergman’s films in the United States.
There are definitely some mixed feelings about Roger Corman. James Cameron’s only remark about him was, “Tell him he still owes $400.” On the other hand, Ron Howard (to whom Corman gave his first directing job) and Jonathon Demme both cast Corman in Apollo 13 and Silence of the Lambs respectively.
While he was derided for most of his career as a B-movie producer, Roger Corman denied that he ever made one.
In 2009 the Academy decided they could no longer deny his overwhelming contributions to the American film industry and awarded him an honorary Oscar.
Roger Corman
1926 – 2024
“You think that you have killed me. But I will be with you forever. I am unbound”
–Frankenstein Unbound (1990)
What’s YOUR favorite Roger Corman film? Leave it in the comments, if you DARE!
I’m a big Corman fan and I love his Poe cycle. I also find Bucket of Blood to be a unique, enjoyable horror movie and Frankenstein Unbound is his magnum opus.
I just found a dvd collection in a box, Roger Corman Drive-in collection