The Fall of the House of Usher (1979)

Architect Jonathan (Robert Hays), is asked by his old school friend Roderick Usher (Martin Landau) to visit the Usher family mansion, situated in a dismal swamp, as quickly as he can possibly make it. Jonathan’s a pretty obliging character, so she packs in his new wife Jennifer (Charlene Tilton) and goes on a very peculiar version of a honeymoon with her.

As you can probably guess, Roderick and his sister Madeline (Dimitra Arliss) are the last of their line, and both are suffering from a curious hereditary illness that increases their senses so much, they will eventually lose their minds from exposure of the outside world and even die from it.

Roderick, the saner of the two siblings, has developed a curious idea. He believes that the decaying state of the Usher family is intimately connected to that of the family mansion, a place so dilapidated, it’s a wonder it is still standing. But, thinks Roderick, if Jonathan were to find a way to save and strengthen the house, this would in turn save and strengthen the Usher family, saving himself and Madeline.

Strangely enough, Jonathan’s early attempts at humouring is friend and strengthening the foundations of the building do indeed appear to begin to influence Roderick’s health for the better. However, Madeline seems to be beyond the point of anything but an increasingly murderous madness, and she has taken a bit of a dislike to Jennifer. There is also more to the connection between the Ushers and their house than Roderick lets on.

Though I wouldn’t exactly call James L. Conway’s TV version of Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher” a completely successful movie, it does go in interesting directions to turn the very short story into a feature length film. Stephen Lord’s idea of turning the connection between the Ushers and the House that is mostly metaphorical in Poe into more of a concrete element of the plot is rather wonderful, and enables the kind of actual Gothic horror plot Poe had no need for, while also giving proceedings, at least to my tastes and eyes, the kind of weird turn you could imagine Poe using if he’d been a 1930s or 40s pulp writer. It’s a clever and effective turn that at once makes some of the metaphorical construction of the film more obvious to the slower members of the audience, and enables the rest of the film to not just be a worse looking retelling of the Corman version.

Visually, the film isn’t great shakes – there are a couple of effective enough looking sets, and Conway is nothing if not professional, but only a very few scenes tell us much through forms, colours and movement instead of dialogue and performances. Fortunately, the performances are generally pretty strong. Sure, Jonathan isn’t terribly interesting a character, and Hays performance is on the bland side, but when has it ever been any other way with the romantic male lead in a gothic horror movie? Tilton, whom I mostly know from her Dallas days, on the other hand, is rather effective at looking increasingly frightened and freaked out by her surroundings and her rather threatening encounters with Madeline; Arliss is pretty great at making mad eyes, which really is all she needs to do here. And Landau, probably not the obvious choice for Roderick, is actually rather fantastic. He makes much out of the strangeness of his character’s regaining of vitality and mental fortitude later on in the movie, but his time as dramatically nervous wreck with age make-up is just as convincing.

All of which turns this into a rather more interesting movie than I expected going in. I still think more visual flair would have done it a world of good (a world of sickliness?), but I do appreciate it for having some actual ideas about what it is adapting, and having a good crack at doing something with these ideas on a TV movie budget.