Edgar Allan Poe gets the Hollywood treatment in The Raven, out this Friday.
And good for him. At that great author’s lunch club in Heaven, Poe can finally hand Sir Arthur Conan Doyle a glass of brandy and say:
“You may have Robert Downey playing your boy Holmes, but now I’ve got John Cusack playing ME. Take that, Doyley!”
Downey vs. Cusack — both smart actors, both dark, both reluctant stars. It’s a tie.
Also a tie on the distaff side, with Poe’s Alice Eve vs. Holmes’s Rachel McAdams. But Poe gets to kiss the girl while Doyle can only participate vicariously. And Holmes doesn’t really dig women anyway. Advantage: Poe.
The real question is: can you buy Edgar Allan Poe as a gun-toting and black-clad stud-muffin, drawing down on a serial killer in Olde Baltimore? He wasn’t exactly an intimidating figure in real life.
“Unhand that woman, sir, or I will go to my room and write something distinctly creepy about you.”
(Or is that unfair? He did go to West Point, after all.)
The Raven is a reimagining of Poe’s last days in Baltimore before his demise at the tender age of 40. In this version he battles a serial killer to the death. In real life, of course, he died of alcohol, brain congestion, cholera, rabies, drugs, heart disease, epilepsy, syphilis, meningeal inflammation, tuberculosis and suicide.
Bottom line: it’s John Cusack. We’ll be there. (If they promise it’s not too grisly.)
See our biography of Edgar Allan Poe »