Raven, The
Roger Corman’s ‘The Raven’ is loosesly based on Edgar Allen Poe poem that gives it its title and which Vincent Price intones sepulchrally at the beginning. A retiring magician, Craven (Price) has opted out of the power struggles of peers such as Dr Scarabus (Boris Karloff) to brood on his dead wife and bring up his daughter. The arrival of Bledlo (Peter Lorre), an incompetent drunk whom Scarabus has turned into the raven of the title, involves him in everything he had renounced. Life is complicated further by the arrival of Bledlo’s son Rexford, played by a young Jack Nicholson.