I Bury
the Living

A low budget United Artists horror film from the late 50's, I Bury the Living is an interesting experiment that falls just short of greatness. An early directorial effort from Albert Band, it showcases some bizarre montages and experimental imagery. Despite a good performance from Richard Boone, a prosaic script keeps the chills from reaching full potential.

After a budget western he made with partner Louis Garfinkle fizzled in 1956, Albert Band moved on to horror territory for this United Artists offering. Prior to his involvement in his son's Empire Pictures and the later (just recently defunct) Full Moon Pictures, Albert made movies in Sweden, Italy and Spain. He is best known as a side-joke in Lillian Ross's book Picture,  ¹  in which she covered the production of the ill-fated The Red Badge of Courage with a savage honesty. As an assistant on the show Band was nailed by Ross as the original sycophantic wannabe, crowded among major players like Huston and Louis B.Mayer and getting nowhere.

To Gerald Fried's pounding music,  ² the map undergoes changes both subtle and gross. It's basically a pin-board. The lighting alters its appearance so that it at times resembles the creepy mosaics in Robert Altman's 3 Women. It really comes to life during the montages that cut frenetically between the map and the cemetary gravestones, to extreme macro close-ups of map pins and details. Curly ironwork in the cemetary gates plays a big part in these montages as well. The visual association between the hellish map and the gate makes both seem like living demonic entities, exactly the effect the montage maker was after.

I Bury the Living really comes to life whenever these mind-warping montages start up - the patterns and rhythms of images nail us to the screen, and along with the relentless beat of the music, give a good approximation of losing one's mind!  ³ The visuals introduce some elements paid off only tangentially in the film - the erupting earth that suggests that corpses may be coming back to life ultimately means nothing, unless it's part of the Bikel character's digging. What might have been an extension of the scary montage in Abel Gance's J'accuse (where the war dead return to accuse the living) doesn't materialize. We are left with some really arresting visuals, including a moment where Boone becomes a high-contrast figure silhouetted against the all-powerful map. It's very much like a graphic concept in the same year's Vertigo, put together by the famous designer Saul Bass. The film's credit for visual design goes to E. (Edward?) Vorkapich.  ⁴

Footnotes:

4. "E. Vorkapich" is apparently not the same person as Slavko Vorkapich, the famous montage designer and experimental filmmaker. Or is it a name Slavko Vorkapich used when not doing high-profile design work? Vorkapich was an interesting and witty film theoretician who received SRO attendance when he brought his multi-week seminar to the UCLA film school in the '70s. His hard-line ideas about what in movies was cinematic and what was not, were at the time out of fashion. Vorkapich was unconcerned about content and intensely critical about the visual properties of moving images and how they cut together. For Vorkapich, the Cut was King. He lectured that cutting between talking heads may facilitate drama but that it wasn't moviemaking. He had a wicked habit of showing classic film clips with the sound turned off, and pointing out the screwed-up dynamics of cutting from giant faces to giant faces. When he showed us the Herbert Lom tent scene in Spartacus, we saw that he was right; at every cut the actors just popped foolishly around the frame.