Review: Fall of the House of Usher (1928)

This French Avant-Garde version of Edgar Allan Poe's famous short story is often pointed to by film historians as the best evocation of the gothic spirit of many of Poe's tales. And they have a valid point. Many movies named for Poe stories either pad the story out to the point of totally diluting the atmosphere of gloom and paranoia so essential to Poe, or they discard the story entirely and just retain the title, like any of the movies called The Black Cat or The Raven.

This House of Usher runs just over an hour long, and the only real filler comes in the form of details lifted from another Poe story, "The Oval Portrait." And director Jean Epstein (and assistant director Luis Bunuel, who reportedly quit the film over the usual "artistic differences") shows admirable restraint in many ways, setting his story in sparse sets populated only by flickering candles and dusty floors.

Like everybody else who's ever made a Poe movie, though, Epstein does wander away from the original story's details. In this version, Roderick Usher and Madelaine (who's played by Margeuritte Gance, wife of famous French director Abel Gance) are husband and wife; they were brother and sister in Poe's story. Madelaine is dying of some unknown, unnamed disease, and Roderick is obsessed with painting her portrait, which seems to be alive (it breathes and moves its eyes). Roderick asks his friend, Allen, to come for a visit, and Allen witnesses his friend's mental disintegration when Madelaine dies--or so it appears.

As with any experimental film, House of Usher has its peaks and valleys. Madelaine's "death" scene is really nightmarish, with effective use of slow motion and smashing, distorted close-ups driving home the despair and insanity washing over Roderick. And Madelaine's return from the grave, in which we see her long, flowing white gown long before we actually see her, is also finely hallucinatory.

But some of Epstein's touches are so bizarre as to be unintentionally funny: The procession with Madelaine's coffin is so exaggerated that it looks more like it belongs in a Monty Python skit, and the intercut images of penetration--nails being driven into the coffin lid and two frogs fucking (no, I'm not kidding)--is downright ridiculous.

And then there's the ending, in which everybody gets out of the obviously (intentionally?) fake house as it burns to the ground against a starry nighttime sky that has all kinds of symbols in it, including a crucifix--hey, wasn't Allen the only one to make it out alive in Poe's story? And why bother carefully building a sense of overwhelming doom, only to undercut it with a happy ending?

Epstein's Usher tries harder than most adaptations do to retain the heavy atmosphere of Poe's stories, and it succeeds better than most adaptations do. But it evokes as many unintended laughs as it does intended chills, so the experiment is not a wholly successful one.

Still, I'd rather watch this again than, say, Murders in the Rue Morgue, which has more Poe spirit in its title than it does in the film itself.