In Sunday’s tribute to Charlton Heston, I mentioned something called the Big Money Movie. I think I’ve written about that before, but in case you didn’t catch the reference, the BMM was a local movie show here in Salt Lake that aired every weekday afternoon back in the mid-70s or thereabouts. The host was a funny little guy named Bernie Calderwood; his job was to introduce the day’s title and then, about midway through the show, to pull a phone number out of a rotating drum and call a lucky viewer at home. If the person answered and could tell Bernie what movie he was running or answer a trivia question or something, they won some cash (hence the “big money” part of the show’s title).
As best I can recall, the selection of films was exactly what you’d expect for a mid-afternoon slot in a (then) small television market (I’d imagine we probably qualify as “mid-sized” now), i.e., anything the station could get for cheap. That meant beat-up prints of decades-old back-catalog classics and a lot of B-grade genre flicks. I saw a lot of movies on the old BMM that I still adore, but the ones that are really standing out in my memory this afternoon are the adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe stories that starred Vincent Price and were directed by the legendary Roger Corman.
The “Poe movies,” as I think of them, are really amazing pieces of filmmaking: visually sumptuous and dripping with creepy atmosphere (if a bit sedate by modern standards) that become even more remarkable when you know the details of their creation. (Basically, they had budgets of about $1.98, but Corman cleverly “borrowed” sets, props, and costumes from A-level productions after they’d shut down for the day. Guerrilla filmmaking at its best, baby!) The films are rightly noted for their male stars, which included the always charming Price (he was in six of the seven Poe films produced by Corman) as well as Ray Milland, Boris Karloff, Peter Lorre, and Basil Rathbone, not to mention a very young Jack Nicholson. But it was the female co-stars who drew much of my interest, even as a boy. They were, in a word, beautiful, voluptuous and powerfully feminine in a way that today’s emaciated and generally plain-jane starlets simply cannot match. And one of the most memorable of these unsung heroines was the lady who appears in the photo above, Hazel Court. She appeared in three of the Poe films: The Premature Burial, The Masque of the Red Death, and, most impressively, as a conniving and very bitchy Lenore in The Raven. (The still above, with a sleepy-looking Boris Karloff, is from The Raven.)
Hazel, unlike some of the younger actresses who appeared in these movies, was more than a pretty face and nice cleavage, though; she had real presence and was more than capable of shining alongside the Hollywood legends with whom she shared the screen. She’s as much fun in The Raven as any of the “triad of terror” (Price, Karloff, and Lorre).
Hazel Court passed away last week at her home in Lake Tahoe; she was 82.
