Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Fall of the House of Usher" has been filmed a number of times; the best-known version is probably the one from 1960 made by Roger Corman as the first entry in his Poe cycle. Poe never explicitly states where the action of his story takes place, but his references to the house being many centuries old suggest a location somewhere in Britain. (In his lifetime few American houses would have been older than a century, and none older than two centuries). Corman's film, however, is explicitly set in New England, with the explanation that the house was dismantled and re-erected across the Atlantic when the Ushers emigrated.
This British version of the tale, made in 1948 but not released until 1950, keeps a British setting. It uses a framing device with a member of a gentlemen's club reading Poe's story to his friends. Poe's narrator (nameless in the original, but here given the name Jonathan) is invited to a country mansion as a boyhood friend of its owner, Lord Roderick Usher. He finds that both Roderick and his twin sister Madeline are both suffering from a mysterious illness.
In some ways this film keeps closer to the original story than does Corman's. (Corman, for example, makes the narrator, called Philip in that version, Madeline's fiancé, an idea not found in Poe). It does, however, have one thing in common with Corman's film in that both try and find a moral reason for the mysterious curse that overhangs the Usher family. Poe's Ushers were a distinguished family, noted for their charity and their patronage of the arts; there is nothing to suggest that the decline in their fortunes is in any way connected with their moral character. In Corman's version, Roderick and Madeline are the last survivors of a family notorious for wickedness, cruelty and vice, many of whom went mad, and it is implied that their evil has blighted the surrounding countryside and suffused the very walls of the house itself.
In Ivan Barnett's film the act which brought a curse upon the Ushers is more recent; we learn that Roderick and Madeline's father, discovering that his beautiful young wife was unfaithful to him, murdered her lover, who cursed the entire family with his dying breath. The father has since died but the mother lives on in the family home as an evil and demented old hag. (That clubman reading to his friends must have picked up a seriously corrupt edition of Poe's works).
I had never come across Barnett's work before; this was the first of only four films which he directed. Of those four only two were feature films; the others were shorts. Yet he clearly had some talent as a director. Although he was working to a very small budget, he was able to conjure up a genuinely eerie atmosphere by the skilful use of black-and-white photography and suitable music.
The film is, however, weak in other respects, particularly the acting. Barnett seems to have made the film with an all-amateur cast, none of whom had any previous experience. The only name that will be familiar is Gwen Watford, here billed as Gwendoline, as Madeline. She went on to have a long career, but even she was making her acting debut here, and would not make her next film until 1956. (Incidentally, although Roderick and Madeline are supposed to be twins, Watford was more than twenty years younger than Kaye Tendeter, who plays Roderick). As for the rest of the cast, they did not make a single movie between them apart from this one. This lack of experience shows itself in some particularly wooden acting, the worst offenders being Tendeter and Irving Steen as Jonathan.
Perhaps not surprisingly given the low budget, the special effects and make-up are also poor, the mad old mother being seriously unconvincing. Corman's version is not the best of his Poe cycle, compared to something like "The Masque of the Red Death", but I would still rate it more highly than Barnett's adaptation. 5/10.
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