Curtis Harrington | The Fall of the House of Usher / 1942 || Usher / 2000

home sweet home

by Douglas Messerli

Curtis Harrington (director, based on the story by Edgar Allen Poe) The Fall of the House of Usher / 1942

Curtis Harrington (screenwriter and director, based in the story “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allen Poe) Usher / 2000 (Criterion lists the date as 2002)

 

 

I have previously written about several of the US director Curtis Harrington’s films (Fragment of Seeking, Picnic, The Assignation, and Night Tide). In the late 1940s Harrington, along with his close friend Kenneth Anger, and other Los Angeles filmmakers Gregory Markopoulos, and John Schmitz along with San Francisco writer and filmmaker James Broughton all helped develop the first variety of coming out films, with Anger, Harrington, Markopoulos, and Broughton going on to make a wide range of important LGBTQ works through the years. Both Anger and Harrington, moreover, were highly involved in the occult, which runs particularly as a theme in Harrington’s oeuvre, an interest that he had evidently developed quite early in his life, since the film I write about here, Usher (2000), first appeared in different form as a high school project at age 14 in 1942.

     Harrington went on to direct some very strange commercial works, as well as two films, Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet (1965) and Queen of Blood (1966) for Roger Corman, whose own first major film was The House of Usher (1960).  Of his later films, the best is perhaps Night Tide (1961) which I discuss elsewhere in these pages.

     Although dedicated to Jean Epstein, Harrington’s Usher is a far stranger exercise in filmmaking that draws on the kind of Hollywood-like films of someone like Corman, extrapolates a strangely academic subplot involving this work’s visitor Truman Jones (Sean Napita) who travels from New Orleans to learn the art of poetry from poet Roderick Usher (Harrington himself), and applies some of the theatrics of camp comedies rather than any intense interaction with cinematic magic one might associate with Epstein’s photogénie.

     If this work can in any respect be described as an “art film,” it is simply due to its intentional amateurishness and in the fact that it is such a highly personal work of the director, not only representing a reincarnation of a childhood work, a film in which he plays the two major leads, and, perhaps most importantly—given the importance of the Usher house in Poe’s original—was filmed in Harrington’s own home, with few if any alterations in decor.

     But before fully discussing Usher, it may be useful to make a couple of observations about Harrington’s youthful version, particularly where they help to reveal his intentions through actions and scenes that are missing in the version he filmed just a few years before his death at the age of 81 in 2007. In the original, for example, a rather handsome young man is summoned by Roderick to his mansion via letter in which he clearly states that he seeks his company because he will soon be alone. Playing both Roderick and Madeline in 1942 The House of Usher, as he does in Usher, the two immediately join in conversation where the young visitor first encounters Madeline passing by through the halls. Soon after (the original film is only 10.17 minutes long) Madeline is laid into her coffin—when the friend first discovers that Roderick and Madeline are twins— Roderick bursts into the boy’s room in a manner that is actually quite homoerotic in a way that neither Epstein or Watson and Webber portrayed the incident, sexually-charged, in part, because the young man lies in bed evidently having difficulty in falling asleep. Yet as they stare together out the room at the storm we are very much reminded of both of the earlier versions of the Usher story. It ends rather traditionally, with Madeline appearing, declaring that Roderick has buried her alive, and attacking him, the visitor escaping the house in this case to watch from afar as it catches fire and burns (a scene that Roger Corman’s version would later repeat, surely without his knowledge of Harrington’s high school project) and which itself echoes the burning maquette in Epstein’s film.

      I point these aspects out simply to confirm what Harrington suggests in Usher as well, that Madeline, Roderick’s “other” self (in Harrington’s hands an “other” that is virtually the same) is “something” from the beginning that Roderick is determined to rid himself of. Although it is far less clear in Usher, in the earlier version Harrington makes it apparent—as did Epstein and Watson and Webber—that he much prefers the company of his friend and desires to be freed of his sickly sister, even though he knows that severing himself from her, particularly since he has in effect murdered her, is impossible. His female half destroys the possibility of a relationship, of whatever kind, with his summoned male friend.

      In large, Harrington deflates that relationship from the beginning in Usher by recasting Roderick’s visitor as a student of poetry who was not at all summoned, and—as it first appears in Epstein’s work—is made to feel a bit unwelcome. Not only does the poet Roderick Usher suggest that he is not a teacher, but that there is nothing to teach. As he tells the young would-be mentee:

 

                      The work of the artist comes from your heart. And the heart

                      is a secret place. There’s no way I could know the workings

                      of your heart.

 

     Secondly, the young student is not only less knowledgeable but is clearly intellectually inferior. He speaks no other languages than English, and throughout both Roderick and Madeline disabuse him of his standardized English-student enthusiasm for the works of T. S. Eliot (they prefer his early poetry over the “too dry” later writings) and W. H. Auden (whom they utterly dismiss as soon-to-be-forgettable). He has not even heard of their favorite Pierre Reverdy (who is equally unavailable to the young man since he cannot read French, a requirement for the Ushers to reading poetry in other languages). All of this satire of poetic hierarchy also helps, in turn, to downplay the preposterous arrival of a young would-be poet to sit at the feet of his idol, the way Robert Lowell did, in fact, camp out on the doorstep of Allen Tate. It is clear, moreover, that if Harrington completely removes any sexual insinuations, that the obviously homosexual Roderick—a man, through his own admission, who recognizes “that flesh that once gave so much pleasure,” enjoys having the companionship of this somewhat offish lug, if for other reason than it allows him a partner for his Ouija board sessions and chess games, replacing we must presume, his previous partner, his personal butler Pierre (Fabrice Uzan). His presence reminds us of the pleasure that fictional director James Whale (Ian McKellan) takes in the company of his gardener Clayton Boone (Brendan Fraser) in Bill Condon’s 1998 movie Gods and Monsters, a film for which Harrington served as advisor, having known Whale and long struggled for a restoration of his great film The Old Dark House. 

     The fact that both Roderick and Madeline are portrayed as LGBTQ figures, moreover, releases them from any incestuous associations: they are simply twins who are little tired of one another’s company, and the grand Guignol-like party they throw for the birthday becomes the center of this movie. Around them, for what he know will be their last major event, they gather a lesbian friend who demands Madeline dance first with her (Zeena Schreck), a priest (Nikolas Schreck)—both members of The Church of Satan in real life—a Viennese matron (Renate Druks), a rich woman (Ruth-Ellen Taylor), and a doctor (Robert Mundy) in what one commentator described as “a bizarre waxworks-like masked ball,” which reminds one a bit of Gloria Swanson as Norma Desmond playing bridge with her old friends Buster Keaton, Anna Q. Nilsson, and H. B. Warner in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950). Harrington directed Swanson in one of her very last films, Killer Bees (1974).  

      At the party, Madeline finally agrees to dance, despite her fragile health, with their guest student, but it is apparently far too strenuous, for she soon falls, crashing into the couch, blood issuing from her mouth, as the priest (a Satanist in real life) gives her the last rites. She’s buried, and for a few days the guest observes that Roderick seemed “more happy and carefree than I’d ever seen him.”

      The plot requires, as we now know, that Madeline dig her way out of the coffin. In Harrington’s far more campy telling, she telephones the student in his room—on a phone that the very first day of his visit he discovered was disconnected—to tell Roderick that she is on her way. Unlike all the other versions there is no horrendous storm, only a spot of rain (this is, after all, Los Angeles) and Roderick, who we hardly ever see in motion throughout the film, does not break into his friend’s room as tradition has established. The two of them simply play a game of chess during which the student spots Madeline outside the window. For the first time in the story, Roderick is check-mated, losing the game as Madeline enters, and attacks her brother for having buried her too soon, he having already warned his friend that his sister and he share the same soul, to which one might have added, heart, eyes, mouth, ears, and tongue. If the Ushers, a true plurality of one, fall, Harrington’s house remains intact. Indeed, a later documentary made by the editor of this film, Tyler Hubby with Jeffrey Schwarz was titled House of Harrington (2008).

      With great wit, Harrington has the guest rush out of the house only to have the always responsive Pierre already at the front door with the limousine, the guest’s bags safely packed within as he drives the neophyte poet back to LAX, the Los Angeles International airport.

      If at times this is a somewhat clumsy and certainly not a truly revelatory telling of Poe’s tale, it is nonetheless, a great deal of fun.

 

Los Angeles, September 6, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2021).