Boris Sagal | The Fall of the House of Usher / 1956 [TV drama]

outside the normality of history

by Douglas Messerli

 

Robert Esson (screenplay and adaptation, devised by Albert McCleery from the story “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allen Poe), Boris Sagal (director) The Fall of the House of Usher / 1956 [TV drama]

 

Coincidence has always played a large part in my life, so I was not surprised that just as I was finishing up the essays I was gathering for my piece on film adaptations of Edgar Allen Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher that my friend Mark Wallace announced on Facebook that he was planning the next day to teach that work to his class of university students.

     I quickly wrote Wallace, sending him a rough draft of my writings. He wrote back that I might also want to take a look at the NBC Matinee Theater production, staring Tom Tryon as Roderick, that aired on August 6, 1956.

     I was able to find a copy online and viewed it over the past few days, and indeed I found it most revelatory, basically supporting my interpretations of the 1928 films by Jean Epstein and James Sibley Watson, Jr. and Melville Webber, and the later works by Curtis Harrington. This film also attended to some issues that helped to explain vague references in the other works which had made their way there via Poe but had not been fully explicated in the action of those films.

     Since by this time I have thoroughly established the outlines of the work’s action, let me begin by stating what might typically have been my summary: in Robert Esson’s adaptation of Poe as directed by Boris Sagal there is little doubt that Roderick is a gay man.

    No longer is the mansion’s invited guest unnamed. In this version he is a close school friend of a much younger Roderick than in the other version, who has specifically written David (Marshall Thompson) because he is lonely and needs help in bearing up with the intense hypersensitivity he is experiencing and the suffering of his own catatonically ill twin sister, Madeline (Joan Elan).

     When he first encounters David, who in his eagerness to see his friend has arrived early—a fact that is repeated throughout the film because Roderick had hoped that Madeline might have died and been buried before his friend arrived, thus saving him the necessary explanation of one aspect of his multiple sufferings—Roderick greets him with joy, the two showing open signs of affection.

     David is clearly someone he needs to be with, not simply a witness or a friend who, as the early parts of the Epstein work, Roderick wishes he hadn’t invited. As Roderick expresses it to David: “I had no right to write that letter, but I couldn’t help myself. I’ve been lonely for so long.”

     In Esson’s version—and here is more an issue of the script that the cinematic framing and staging—Roderick even hints at a reason why he can ask a friend to join him while he argues that Madeline cannot. In a long conversation with David during the process of attempting to explain the Usher family curse, Roderick argues that the family illnesses—which he believes have been brought on by his ancestors’ treachery, misdeeds, and madness—must be brought to an end with his and Madeline’s deaths and not permitted to spread to another generation. Madeline is a young woman of great beauty and heterosexual sexual desire (we even see that in her few moments of contact with the man who is a stranger to her, David, whom she begs to take her away, behaving almost the opposite of the Madeleine living under the patriarchal reign of Vincent Price’s Roderick). And it is for that very reason, he insists, that he needed to lock her away before she actually became ill. The implication here, very daring given the date of this work’s release, is that he is attempting to protect the family curse and diseases from being transmitted into further generations. He can implicitly invite David because his love his contact with others will not produce offspring. Without him even needing to fully express it, the situation makes clear that he is a homosexual who obviously will breed no further Ushers with his companion.

     This is made even more clear when, after Madeline dies and is buried, Roderick briefly believes he can now escape the Usher house with David and join him in a new life. The scene is essential to comprehending his and David’s relationship. It begins with him lamenting that his intense kinship with his sister has “been my life this past few years. I’ve shared her dying.”

     David responds with the hope for his friend’s ability to escape all that he has lived through:   “You were right to call me here. Now you can make that fight for your strength, and I can help you.”

    And for the first time in all the works, we see Roderick openly considering leaving everything else behind to lead a new life with his friend.   

 

                        I can, I want to now. I can.

                        I feel as if I have been buried deep and now I’m

                       coming into light and life again. I feel so free.

 

     David’s response, in fact, establishes a long term companionship, clearly as a couple responding to the world at large: “We’ll go to the city, to the theater and parties. You’ll meet my friends. Let’s lock the place and go....”

      This is much closer to the Roderick we know in Epstein as he is hugged and momentarily protected by his friend—also soon after Madeline’s burial in Epstein’s work—and the Roderick in the Watson and Webber’s film who briefly seeks out his visitor’s top hat. But here it is put much more literally rather than poetically expressed, even if, given the restrictions of television broadcasting in 1956, it still had to be muted and even coded at moments.

     Certainly, once Roderick begins to change his mind, to let his fear overcome his determination to take courage, and to resist leaving the house, we can truly begin to see Roderick and David’s homosexual linking, although here it is highly coded.

       For, on the hand, we have already been told by the doctor that Madeline is catatonic and may not be dead. And in Sagal’s literalization of the story, we actually observe Madeline attempting to reach out of the casket and remove the chains. So his change of heart can easily be explained simply as a recognition that he cannot escape his fate, that he must face the horrors he has long believed would come. In both of the 1928 version this is what happens to force him to break with the visitor, despite his one last attempt to make contact with him by entering his bedroom in the storm.

      But the writer of this adaptation overlays what at first appears to be simply an acceptance of his own guilt and punishment into something quite different. This internal struggle, played out in David’s presence, is truly coded and frankly would not be easily comprehended by those who have not experienced the endless gay “coming out movies” that have come into being as a genre since the late 1980s.

       Having now witnessed hundreds of films in which one figure is attempting to bring his weaker lover out of the closet, I immediately recognize the language and argumentation of David’s often bitter charges against Roderick as an attempt to demand his friend leave, not just a decaying ancestral house, but the closet and mindset in which he has once more become entrenched.

       From the beginning David has spoken to Roderick about the “courage” he will need to join him in the city. And when he finds his friend has retreated from his decision to leave, he is angry, as any lover might be. It is not lack of will or desire that keeps Roderick locked in again, but, as he himself admits, “Fear itself is what I am most afraid of, my deadliest poison.”

        David’s reprimand is that of a hurt lover: “You promised me you’d leave, and you haven’t even started.”

        Roderick expresses his decision to remain as accepting punishment for having been happy.

        But David puts it in the simple psychological terms that any gay lover might argue to his friend too terrified to admit his sexuality to the world. “There comes a time when we have to face things Roderick, a time when we grow up or just grow old.”

        “You make it sound so easy to just walk away.”

        “It is easy. You just need to do it.”

        “I wish I were a brave man.”

        “You won’t go.”

     And David’s final words are those of a spurned lover, not a man involved with a lover in a metaphysical struggle against the evils of history. Family is, of course, the most common reason why gay men are terrified of coming out, but there is no immediate family holding Roderick back.

        “There’s no more reason I should stay here.”

        Roderick’s answer is a simple “No.”

      This scene has absolutely nothing to do with Roderick’s hypersensitivity or his family legacy, his inevitable encounter, a short while later, with his now mad sister, or even the pending storm which will bring down the house. These are the words of two men arguing about the process of facing their sexual desires and the relationship they have developed between themselves. This is the language of gay soap opera, not Poe’s 19th century Romantic melodramatics.

       Yet, of course, Poe’s story totally overwhelms whatever other narratives the writer and director may be hinting at. In the end Roderick cannot leave because he is doomed, not by some vague curse, but by everything he has done previous to David’s arrival.*

        What he has done precisely is to not only to lock away but purposely kill off his sister. His hostility to the doctor—a hostility also expressed in Poe’s original tale out of his fear that medical people might try to remove Madeline’s body for research purposes, but which also shows up in Epstein’s film, where the doctor is seen as a menacing figure who keeps attempting to nail the lid of Madeline’s coffin to its lower half, whose actions bring about the notable “hugging scene” that Epstein’s Roderick and his guest share as they go to leave the crypt—arises in this case primarily because he knows that the doctor has linked Roderick’s mother’s disease with his sister, and that in burying her so quickly he is probably putting her into her grave alive. He purposely desires his sister’s death, accordingly, probably with the hope that he can run away with David and lead a life with him.

         What this TV version of The Fall of the House of Usher reveals, in short, is that like the Roderick of the two 1928 movies and Harrington’s two films, Tryon’s character is a gay man who purposely attempts to rid himself of Madeline so that he can join the world of the outsider. The fact that he fails is based not so much on the family curse and its dreadful history, but his own selfish actions and Madeline’s determination to survive, which is destined to failure as much as are Roderick’s own attempts to escape. Only in Corman’s totally heterosexual interpretation does Roderick remain passive, convinced of the family curse without even attempting to avert it. But then his young would-be savior, after all, has come for the sister not for the aging homosexual who Price represents. This movie, Epstein’s radically dream-like cinema, Watson and Webber’s expressionist-like condensed telling, and Harrington’s sly and humorous retellings are so much more interesting than the work by Corman because they insinuate an outsider sexual desire in Roderick’s actions. If destiny is carried out it is despite inevitability and against the real hidden longings of Roderick Usher, not because of the corruption of the family past. He wills it upon himself by desiring something that lays outside of the normality of history.

          

*Tom Tryon was himself a closeted gay actor, although to describe him as closeted given the notoriety of his two major lovers seems a bit far-fetched. In the early 1970s Tryon lived with actor-dancer Clive Clerk who was in the original cast of A Chorus Line and later became a noted Hollywood interior decorator who designed Tyron’s Central Park West New York apartment. During 1973-1977 Tryon lived in a relationship with the former male prostitute, later gay-porn icon Casey Donovan, star of Wakefield Poole’s Boys in the Sand. He broke up with Donovan allegedly because of the gay star’s increasing neck-craning fame, which made it Tryon’s sexuality all too apparent. Tryon’s early death in 1991 at age 65 was attributed to stomach cancer, but his literary executor, C. Thomas Holloway, later admitted that Tryon was HIV-positive, arguing that “I see it as Tom's selfish silence that helped the Dark Ages continue into the millennium."

 

Los Angeles, September 9, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2021).