An Evening of Edgar Allan Poe

Vincent Price, alone on a bare stage, tells four stories by Edgar Allan Poe: The Tell-Tale Heart, The Sphinx, The Cask of Amontillado and The Pit and the Pendulum. The set changes for each section but the performer does not; the camera shows only him and the objects in his hands. The texts are shortened, though Poe's own sentences are kept. This fifty-four-minute television production is a kind of one-man show. Price had by then become the face of the genre through Roger Corman's Poe adaptations; here he works with no makeup, no effects and nobody to play against, using only his voice and his face. The manner of delivery sits close to television theatre now and stays too theatrical in places. Against that, the Cask of Amontillado section is counted among the most cited performances of Price's career.