"The Fall of the House of Usher" was the first in a cycle of films based on the works of Edgar Allen Poe and made by Roger Corman between 1960 and 1964. (All but one of these starred Vincent Price). As with some of the later entries in the series, Corman makes a number of changes to Poe's story. 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). The 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.
Poe's nameless narrator is invited to the house as a boyhood friend of its owner, Roderick Usher. Here he is given the name Philip Winthrop and is the fiancé of Roderick's sister Madeline. In the story Roderick and Madeline are twins, but here Roderick is a middle-aged man considerably older than either his sister or Philip. In the original Madeline only appears briefly before her death, but here she is given a more important role. Most importantly, Corman introduces a moral theme not found in Poe. (He was to do something similar in a later Poe film "The Masque of the Red Death", where the innocent young girl Francesca is introduced so that her goodness can act as a foil to the villainy of Duke Prospero).
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. Here, 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. Poe used the phrase "fall of the house" in a double sense, referring to both the decline of the family and the physical collapse of their home. The film does the same, but with the implication that this "fall" is the natural result of, and a just reward for, centuries of evil living.
Despite its divergences from Poe's plot, however, the film still keeps an essential feature of his story, namely the atmosphere of psychological terror which pervades it. Much of this is due to the performance of Vincent Price (Neither Mark Damon as Philip nor Myrna Fahey as Madeline makes much of an impression). Like Poe's character, Price's Roderick is a man prey to all sorts of fears- he is hypersensitive, a hypochondriac, obsessed with the evil deeds of his ancestors and tormented by the idea that, like them, he is doomed to madness. He believes firmly that if Philip succeeds in his intention of taking Madeline away from the house some unspecified evil will follow. The Madeline we see in this film, unlike her counterpart in the original story, initially seems physically and mentally healthier than her brother, but it quickly becomes clear that she has health problems of her own, and that she may also be in danger from another source.
This was the first film which the studio, American International Pictures, made in colour. AIP had only been founded six years earlier, and had hitherto specialised in low-budget black-and-white movies, often aimed at the teenage market. "The Fall of the House of Usher" was made on a rather higher budget than most earlier AIP films (although still lower than the average film of this period) and was clearly aimed at a more prestigious market. In some of his later Poe adaptations, such as "The Masque of the Red Death", Corman was to reveal himself as a master colorist, but here the use of colour does not really add anything, and it struck me that this is a film which might have been better had it been made in black-and-white. Certainly, monochrome photography was becoming unfashionable in the American cinema in the early sixties, but films like "The Haunting" from three years later show that it was still possible to make effective black-and-white horror movies during this period, and Poe's story might have benefited from a similar expressionist treatment. The exterior scenes of the old house might also have seemed more convincing in black-and-white. Another visual element I disliked was those curious paintings of Roderick's ancestors, as their crude, modernistic style seemed very inappropriate given that the action is supposed to take place during the 1830s or 1840s.
"The Fall of the House of Usher" has some similarities with the last film in the Poe-Corman cycle, "The Tomb of Ligeia"; in both films there is a certain ambiguity as to whether the characters really are threatened by supernatural evils or whether these evils only exist as fears in the mind of the Vincent Price character (called Verden Fell in the later film). I would not rate it quite as highly as "The Masque of the Red Death", but overall, it is a pretty good film, a good example of the "understated" style of horror. ("The Haunting" is another such). The actual horrors which we see on screen are less important than the unnamed horrors which are hinted at but not shown directly. 7/10
