The Fall of the House of Usher (Melville Webber Productions, 1928)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The movie I ultimately ended up showing to my husband Charles and I last night was The Fall of the House of Usher, a 13-minute avant-garde silent short from Melville Webber based on the short story of that title by Edgar Allan Poe. It was made in 1928, and just to confuse things more there’s also an hour-long feature made of the same Poe story the same year in France. Neither Charles nor I had read the Poe story in years, so it was difficult if not impossible to tell how closely this film followed the text. The imdb.com page for the 1928 U.S. short The Fall of the House of Usher lists James Sibley Watson and Melville Webber as co-directors, co-cinematographers and joint art directors. (It’s not clear who wrote the script for this film because the only writer credited is Poe.) Webber is also credited with playing “The Traveller,” whose arrival at the house of Usher kicks off the catastrophe. Herbert Stern played Roderick Usher and Hildegarde Watson, presumably James Sibley Watson’s real-life wife, played Roderick Usher’s sister Madeline. There’s another film from the James Sibley Watson-Melville Webber duo, Lot in Sodom (1933), a longer (28 minutes) but equally abstract and elliptical film based, at least nominally, on a famous tale: in that case, the Bible story of Lot and his wife and the destruction at God’s hands of Sodom and Gomorrah. In that film Hildegarde Watson plays Lot’s wife and Lot is played by Friedrich Haak, while Dorthea House plays their daughter – and Haak and House are listed on the imdb.com page for The Fall of the House of Usher, too, albeit in unidentified roles.

The Fall of the House of Usher looks like the work of people who’d seen The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari on its initial release and practically had orgasms in the theatre over it; the Usher house is a series of severe, geometrical sets and the actors’ costumes and movements are similarly stylized. It’s a fascinating movie for what it is but also the kind of avant-garde film which makes you think, “I’m glad all movies aren’t like this.” The imdb.com page for The Fall of the House of Usher lists Alec Wilder as composer for a 1959 sound reissue print, but I doubt whether Wilder had anything to do with the music we heard on this version, a download from archive.org. It’s your usual noodling on piano and synthesizer, and the only part that sounded familiar is the three-note Leitmotif that opens the Dawn Duet from the prologue to Wagner’s Götterdämmerung. I remember in my moviemagg blog post on James Whale’s 1932 horror-comedy masterpiece The Old Dark House that the Femms, the residents of Whale’s, novelist J. B. Priestley’s and screenwriter Benn W. Levy’s titular old dark house, were “the most relentlessly dysfunctional fictional family since Edgar Allan Poe made up the Ushers.” I stand by that even though Herbert Stern, handicapped by silence and a stylized acting style that makes him seem neurasthenic, hardly makes Roderick Usher as diabolical a figure as Vincent Price did in the 1960 American-International film that remains the most famous screen adaptation of Poe’s tale.