Richard Corman | House of Usher / 1960

only the house has any appetite for human flesh

by Douglas Messerli

 

Richard Matheson (screenplay, based on the story “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allen Poe), Richard Corman (director) House of Usher / 1960

 

Roger Corman’s 1960 technicolor spectacular-on-a-dime production House of Usher is not in any important respect an LGBTQ-related movie. His version is, in some respects, far more faithful to Poe’s original, while at the same time radically departing from his central characters and structures. You might say that its focus almost entirely on the force and power that Usher house itself holds over its character’s lives, at least in this version of Roderick’s telling, which pushes the work much more in the direction of the metaphysical. In fact, when producers, after reading Richard Matheson’s script asked, who’s the villain of this so-called horror film, Corman allegedly answered, “the house.”

      What’s fascinating about the film, in relation to the four gay-oriented works I describe above, is that in removing most the hidden sexuality from the story, and portraying the story’s plot machinations as a kind of familial curse, Corman removes almost everything of interest about Poe’s tale except the moans and groans of the house itself and its apparent appetite for human flesh.

     In this Usher, the “summoned” visitor is Madeline’s beau, not Roderick’s friend. The handsome Philip Winthrop (Mark Damon) rides from Boston to meet up with and pick up the girl he’s committed to marry, Madeline (Myrna Fahey), and bring her back from the isolated wasteland in which this Usher mansion is located to the city where she evidently had made friends and acquaintances during her time away from the family morgue.

      How she so quickly became the pale and fail girl he now discovers hidden away in her room is not thoroughly explained; but catalepsy, the disease she is evidently suffering from, can develop, so I read this morning in my medical dictionary, rather quickly, and in its acute stage is sometimes accompanied by psychosis or schizophrenia, either of which might explain her contradictory emotions about returning with her lover to Boston.

      Her brother, Roderick (Vincent Price), in this version, much older than she and not her twin, is not even particularly able to express any physical love for his sister. Price plays his character as if he were a permanently blood-drained, dressing-gown effete with no apparent object of or even desire for affection as if some long ago Dracula had left him without even a vague memory of his bite. In his hypersensitive condition, this Roderick asks nothing but to be left alone, cannot bear to be spoken to in any manner louder than a whimper, and will not permit himself be touched. He not only demonstrates utterly no attraction to the young knight come to carry away his sister, but demands, again and again, that he leave immediately.

      And, although, Corman has opened this story up to allow for a truly open heterosexual love affair, Madeline is so frail and indeterminate about whether she should stay or leave the house of bodies in which she he quite literally entombed, that other than a couple of passive kisses, she shows less signs of libido than her ready-to-die-at-any-moment brother. No wonder it takes her forever, it seems, for her to escape from her coffin!

     For a film that pretends to be a hetero-love story, this movie makes even the Hallmark movie pics seem X-rated. If there was little physical expression in Watson and Webber’s Usher tale, at least there was the reappearing top hat which Roderick chased whenever he had a free second. Here costume designer Marjorie Corso has put Fahey in a perfectly lovely gown that nicely reveals her breasts and dressed up Damon a bit like a blue-boy dandy for absolutely no reason.

     And there is certainly no deep love, despite Roderick’s declarations of his affection for Madeline, between brother and sister. While Roderick continues to insist that it is the house that keeps her from being able to return to Boston, the house and the Usher history which includes a family heritage of evil doers in the form of thieves, murderers, and sexual deviants—indeed, perhaps the most exciting scene in this movie is when the ghosts of Usher pasts appear to Philip in a nightmare—but even those far more interesting folk are represented in this film’s “reality” by a series of atrociously awful portraits by “artist” Burt Schoenberg.

       It appears that, despite Roderick’s constant chattering about the evil of his family and their reconstructed house brought to the US brick by brick from England, the real evil of this film can be read as patriarchal dominance. Roderick has convinced his sister that she is ill, incapable of doing anything but preparing to die, and that she is in no way able to marry and through her children introduce dreadful evil to the rest of the planet; and in order to maintain that control over her is willing even to bury her alive!

        Roderick himself has grown so utterly convinced of his own mumbo-jumbo that all he can do day after day, is play random notes upon his lute and passively wait to his old dark house to fall down on his head. If only he could get up the energy to even wink at the cute young man who has intruded upon his patriarchal domain or even quickly lick his lips in lust for his sister Corman might have lightened up this film enough to explain the great inferno he caught on camera as the naughty mansion’s beans come crashing down upon its bland inhabitants.

       It just goes to show you that a straight-forward normative heterosexual structure laid over even the darker psychological dramatics of Poe as mouthed by a perfectly closeted homosexual actor like Price can still be too good to be believed.

       It makes you truly wonder whether you do have be gay to understand Poe’s House of Usher.

 

Los Angeles, September 6, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2021).