I Watch Films: The Fall Of The House Of Ussher

The Fall Of The House Of Usher (1950)

At the start of this film a man walks into the “Gresham Club” to discover that his friends are exchanging spooky stories. He then pulls out a copy of Edgar Allen Poe and tells this tale.

Or a version of it, there are bits of this that are altered and adapted. It’s worst sins are simply the problems that are created when you take a story and place it on screen without reworking the ideas. So the story is told by Jonathan, who is the friend of Roderick Usher, but he sees almost none of the events, and doesn’t seem to be told them either. Everyone who does see them – Richard the stablehand, Madeline Usher, the Doctor, and eventually Roderick himself – they none of them end in a place able to tell the tale.

As it approaches its climax Jonathan finds himself standing and watching, supposedly frozen in terror, but when the camera does bother to linger on him he looks mildly surprised. At the end we find ourselves back in the club and all the listeners have questions. But not my questions (why is the old temple fitted out like a torture chamber? Why do they abandon one of the party there and not come back with guns and reinforcements?) but instead things they would have known if they’d watched the film, which of course makes the one-to-one correspondence between the film and the guy reading, the premise of the framing story, a nonsense. 

Anyway a couple of good scares, some strangeness and an atmosphere of doom, I like Madeline Usher who got to do some exciting things, also extremely frustrating.

Watch This: For a creepy old black and white B-movie
Don’t Watch This: if you want any of it to hang together or make sense from top to bottom
Classified: As an "H" for "Horrific" at the time, so not suitable for under 16s, it's complete on the Youtube.