Leo McCarey | Liberty / 1929

getting it on

by Douglas Messerli

 

Leo McCarey (screenwriter and director) Liberty / 1929

 

Although Stan Laurel and Ollie Hardy have been far more involved in domestic relationships in other films such as That’s My Wife (1929) and Their First Mistake (1932), playing husband and wife in the former and fathers to a newborn child in the latter, and they share the same bed in numerous of their comedies, they have perhaps never been as physically intimate as they are in the film Liberty of 1929, written and directed by Leo McCarey.

     The film begins with them escaping from prison, obviously having been jailed for one of their numerous crimes that have brought them to the attention of authorities. With the prison guard chasing them with a shotgun, they run toward a getaway car where a friend throws them their clothes he’s removed from their apartment, as they proceed to disrobe, tossing away their prison garb from the back seat.

      They finally elude the chasing guard by standing outside an automobile in their street clothes as the police car speeds past. But just as suddenly they discover that they are wearing one another’s pants, Stan barely able to hold up Ollie’s britches, while it’s a wonder that Ollie has even been able to fit into Stan’s breeches. For the next 8 ½ minutes they attempt to change pants in alleyways, behind a basement storage lift, in the back seat of a waiting taxi, at the back door of a fish shop—when a crab sneaks into Stan’s trousers and continues to nip him in the butt from time to time, sending him into an involuntary leap of motion—and finally in a construction elevator site. 

     At each location they are interrupted by window-viewing neighbors (in one case the woman who leans out her window is a young Jean Harlow), shop owners, and various other passersby, including the suspicious policeman who’s on their case. To anyone who catches their act, one might imagine they are a new phenomenon of a duo of flashers.

      While changing clothes in the elevator they accidentally push the lever which sends the car up to the top floor of the unfinished 20-story building, where for the remainder of the film they attempt to make their way across the narrow girders to a ladder, holding on to each other’s legs, feet, arms, and other body parts and, at times, undressing each other in the process all over again. Now in his own pants again, Ollie is convinced that the crab whose claws grab him are Stan’s hands “nipping” him (“This is no time for nipping”) presumably suggesting that he imagines his friend is pinching his ass? 

      Their acrobatics are astounding, matching almost anything that Harold Lloyd did in his many high-wire building ascents and descents.

       But the important thing here that what saves them is simply one another’s bodies, who push, pull, lean-to and away from each other as if performing a highly abstract sexual act. Eddie Cantor briefly performs just such an intimate investigation of another man’s body a year later in his film, Whoopee!, but his and the other gentleman’s activities are performed mostly as bravado, an attempt to show off the various scars of their hospital operations; but here—given that they literally attempt to get into one another’s pants and save one another from falling to their deaths—their bodily maneuvers come as close to male on male sex as possible while pretending it is nothing more than silly physical slapstick. The liberties here taken are definitely just as seriously as those who fought for the cause—as the story suggests with its beginning narrative, Washington, Lincoln, and...even “Black Jack” Pershing (whose military actions led to the death of over 11,000 American soldiers in World War I).

      Liberty represents physical comedy at its very best.

 

Los Angeles, August 29, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2021). 

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).

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).

 

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).

James Sibley Watson, Jr. and Melville Webber | The Fall of the House of Usher / 1928

what was under that cover of the hotplate?

By Douglas Messerli

 

James Sibley Watson, Jr. and Melville Webber (screenplay and directors, based on the story of Edgar Allen Poe) The Fall of the House of Usher / 1928

 

As almost anyone, professional critic or amateur observer, commenting on James Sibley Watson, Jr. and Melville Webber’s The Fall of the House of Usher has noted, given the directors’ extensive—and wondrously original—use of experimental film effects, it is truly difficult to follow any narrative or to determine what Watson and Webber were attempting to say about Poe’s original story. As Donald Egan has nicely restated the issue:

 

“The final version had no explanatory intertitles, and made no attempt to provide a context for viewers, who were assumed to be familiar with the original story. As film historian Eileen Browser wrote, ‘Its sets and effects dominate over the actors and its atmosphere of doom is the whole meaning of the film.’ But even those who had read the story might not have understood what Watson and Webber meant by their shots and editing. ....The intent of the filmmakers here is often obscure. Is their representation of the narrative, founded as it is on artistic and intellectual principles, useless if viewers can’t comprehend it? This became the core dilemma in abstract filmmaking, and even Watson seemed to lean on a more accessible narrative approach in his subsequent work.”

    One might imagine that these amateur filmmakers were simply without the proper tools and lacked experience along with their necessarily hurried methods to explain the apparent lack of coherency in their version of Poe. But quite the opposite was true. The wealthy Watson, heir to the Western Union Telegraph fortune, devoted a great deal of time and money on this project, going so far as to build his own optical printer which allowed him to achieve the sophisticated wipes and dissolves employed in the 13-minute work of cinema. Webber, who was himself a painter, designed the costumes and sets, as well as performing as the Usher House visitor.

     Watson later recollected that the two of them shot the seventy scenes of the film each three or more times.

    Moreover, as the co-owner and major editor of the noted American literary magazine The Dial, publishing contemporary experimentalists such as E. E. Cummings, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Djuna Barnes, and numerous others, along with works of Poe, Watson and his cinema partner Webber clearly understood the psychological and sexual implications of Poe’s writing, and the two in 1933 would create an entire film devoted to the fall of Sodom and Gomorrah, Lot in Sodom, which dealt openly with homosexuality and featured male nudes.

     It’s interesting that Egan again brings up the issue of the audience and its ability and or inability to interpret their work as a core issue here. Although you might not describe it yet as “coding,” it is clear that Watson and Webber were focusing on viewers who might be able to interpret their photogénie.

     Since these directors shot their film over a period of two years, and Epstein’s Usher appeared later in 1928, it is doubtful that they would have seen La Chute de la maison Usher. But they certainly had seen Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and perhaps the films of F. W. Murnau both of whose influence is obvious in their work. Like Cabinet, their Usher sets are dislocated at trajectories that are disorienting and dizzying. The visitor knocking at the front door has a large, jagged line running down his face, in German expressionist style representing the crack that he observes in Poe’s version that follows down the roof to the ground of the Usher mansion.

     But other than that brief moment, we hardly ever see Roderick’s childhood friend again.

     From the film’s earliest scenes of the visitor traveling to the house, the film, entering the mansion through a cinematically-created crack of the image, begins at dinner with Madeline (Hildegarde Watson) kissing hydrangeas which, as she moves to the dinner table, she eventually adds to a vase of canna lilies at its center. Roderick (Herbert Stern), looking like a slightly finicky aesthete (read homosexual), pulls out her chair as she sits to the table, he joining her at its head. He pours her and then himself a class of wine as the black covered hands of a servant produces a covered hotplate of some dish which, when he opens it, sends Madeline into a faint resulting, even when soon after she stands to return to her bedroom, in what appears to be a catatonic fit. She moves away as a sleepwalker from the table with rows of caskets floating overhead, superimposed upon the image. Obviously, during all of this Roderick is concerned, coming over to her to check her after she faints, and rather horrified by the sight of her rising and moving off.

      We now see the visitor knocking at the front door, unable even to find a suitable bell or knocker but pounding the door instead with his fist. Madeline slowly descends the staircase a bit like Lucia di Lammermoor, clearly sleepwalking and certainly “out of  her mind,” if not mad. Numerous doorbells are superimposed upon the frame suggesting the intense ringing and hammer of the friend’s search for entry. We see him, with his high hat, once again waiting at the door, the crack of the mansion, as I suggested earlier, reflected upon his face, he himself becoming a blurred double-like image hinting at what soon will be the film’s interchange between the friend and Roderick, where they almost become one another.

     And so begins a series of maddeningly doublings, parallel staircases moving like escalators in opposite directions, piles of books that also serve as stairs spiraling almost endlessly out of sight. Madeline seems trapped between these parallel images, the shadow of a hammering pounding in shadows upon the walls.

      As more caskets fly through the air, Roderick checks on Madeline. She reaches out her hand toward him, but he does not fully respond and certainly does not attempt to embrace her in return or even visually offer her his sympathy.

     Now garbed in a black burial dress, Madeline lies in what appears to be a coffin, black gloved hands stroking her face as if attempting to readjust her features rather than warm hands proffered in love. The gloved hand trails slowly down her chest and mid-riff to her legs, slightly readjusting her dress by pulling it further down, a representation of proper closure and burial.

     The hammer, metallic we now discover, begins once more to ring out. Obviously, this time its sound disturbs only the remaining family member Roderick. We see multiple images of Madeline’s face, visions that Roderick surely cannot erase from his mind.

     In the disorienting landscape of his mansion, Roderick seems for a moment to wake up, the sun blinding his eyes as he moves forward. One might almost imagine a moment of rejuvenation, but images of Madeline keep reaching out toward him, the mallet again reappearing, and finally Roderick himself as he descends the stairs, begins making the movement of the pounding hammer with his arm and hand.

     Suddenly, in shadow and floating in mid-air, is his friend’s top hat, eventually doubling as everything else does in this film. He looks around the corner as if seeking out the visitor, and, for a moment he pauses, leaning against the wall, looking up, his face seemingly taking on a faint smile—almost as if his friend might offer some possible salvation.

     But in the very next moment his arm again takes up the gesture of the hammering man, as, around the next corner, he again encounters a layering of images of Madeline. He cannot escape her or what he may have done to her in burying her body while possibly alive.

     Even at his most quiet moments, her image stalks him, his own books piling up like the staircases between which previously Madeline was trapped.

      Again he spots the friend’s top hat, but our attention quickly shifts to a nearby book whose pages flip past as their former words break up into letters mid-air: beat, crack, ripped, scream, all suggesting the intertwined actions of Madeline and the house itself, the beat of her heart, the crack of fissure running down the side of the house...and, coinciding with a quick glimpse of Madeline opening her own coffin, the rip of the nails from where they have been pounded into place. 

      As Madeline moves toward the house from her grave, the directors provide a wonderous cacophony of abstract images from the pairs of rolling escalator-like rolling staircases—interspersed with her bare feet moving ever forward—to intersecting lines that interact like abstract swords clashing against one another. It is truly a stunning mix of brilliant experimental abstractions, cut by fragments of the human world about to be destroyed by the inevitable narrative Poe has set up.

      Only at this moment, with Roderick looking out the window (very much like he did during the storm scene in Epstein’s film) does his friend finally join him, the two coming together for the instant before they spot Madeline in the distance. It is somewhat suggestive of the delayed coitus of the separated Wagnerian figures of heroes such as Tristan and Isolde or Siegfried and Brünnhilde. But here they have only a moment to share the vision of the risen Madeline, who just as quickly appears, dominating the full screen in a mad Medea-like dance, charging at Roderick and landing them both on the floor, dead. Seeing the disaster, the friend quick races off, the house falling around him into the water.     

     In a great many respects, Watson and Webbers’s adaptation of the Poe story is not so very different from Jean Epstein’s. Even as a twin sister, Madeline is still a bore who Roderick is near desperate to get rid of so that he might have some quality time with the friend who he has summoned to his house. But things have simply gone too far before the visitor has arrived, and there is no way that he might ever be able to separate her from his own self and family involvement. Her death, in some respects, is mere pretense, a grand operatic gesture to ensure that her brother/husband might never be able to escape her for the arms of the old “friend” for whom he’s obviously been lusting for decades. Unlike Epstein’s work, which allowed that one moment to Roderick, Watson and Webber’s Roderick has no direct contact of flesh with his beloved visitor.

      There is no question that what I just wrote in the above paragraph a rather glib “gay oriented” assessment of the situation, for nothing of that sort is truly established in the film; but I do believe these directors strongly encourage such an interpretation, turning, as they have, what might appear to be a metaphysical tragedy into a story of incestual revenge. The house of cards in which they live only falls because they have been holding it up in self-delusion. Neither of the two survivors in this mansion seems to be very much enjoying life. Roderick and Madeline are clearly not a loving couple.

       Yet with regard to the Watson-Webber masterwork (which a few years back was added to the National Film Registry of US movies), I still have one question, even if it’s most definitely an unanswerable one: what was under the cover of that hotplate that sent poor Madeline into such a catatonic state?

        I’d like to imagine that these clever filmmakers secretly whipped up a cryptic subplot that involved something akin to Oscar Wilde’s Salome, that what she saw upon that hotplate that made her so recoil was the image of her own or her brother’s head. But here we have simply entered the world of pure imagination when I had hoped only to show that their film, despite the profusion of radical imagery, was not truly impossible to read if you looked at it slowly and carefully enough and were willing to enter the photogénie of the film.

 

Los Angeles, September 5, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (September 2021).