THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER (Webber & Watson, 1928)

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It was the midwinter of 1926, in Rochester, New York, when James Sibley Watson, Jr. and his friend Melville Webber first started filming their adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe’s 1839 short story, “The Fall of the House of Usher”. They had set up in an old stable; the cast was made up of Herbert Stern (a local architect), Sibley Watson’s wife Hildegard, and Webber himself. They only had twelve kilowatts of direct current for lighting, and very little heat, let alone room for sets...

... it was clear they could not make anything like The Phantom of the Opera (1925), the Gaston Leroux adaptation that had reconstructed the Grand Opera in Paris for its shocked audience the previous year. So instead, over the next two years, they created a thirteen-minute feature that has been called one of the first avant-garde films produced in the United States: a work that seeks to evoke not the plot or even characters of its source material but Poe’s claustrophobic, itchy energy

THE BLACK CAT (Edward G. Ulmer, 1934)

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(Directed by Edward G. Ulmer from a script by Peter Ruric "suggested by"* the story by Edgar Allan Poe; starring Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, David Manners, and Jaqueline Wells. Released 07 May 1934; watched 2023w41 via Criterion Channel)

"Suggested by" = not at all similar but the name is a nice touch.

While mostly forgettable until the last third, wanted to mention Lugosi's performance here: a rare turn as one of the good guys (ok, a vengeance-driven, cat-killing (via throwing knife, I believe), Karloff-flaying good guy but hey) that makes his Dracula typecasting all the more tragic. Sure, the accent could be limiting (something of a Schwarzenegger-before-Schwarzenegger situation), but he brought genuine presence and nuance to the role – unlike the good guy-good guy, David Manners, who, as in all of his appearances, made total lack of charisma a calling card.

Maybe this one was done a disservice by how closely I watched it to THE OLD DARK HOUSE, which - minus the Satanist cult angle that popped up in the rather excellent last third - delivered a similar narrative with far more panache and better performances all around.

A MYSTERY OF MYSTERIES: THE DEATH AND LIFE OF EDGAR ALLAN POE (Dawidziak, 2023)

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Like most possessed of a knowledge of Poe and his work "learned" in high school English classes with the since-then goal to read all of him for pleasure and not for credit, I knew the mythologized textbook basics: horror, mysterious death, wore black, booze-hound, mustache. Dawidziak's work here, a compulsively-readable synthesis of all of the best knowledge of Poe – his life, his work, his death – should be considered a public service, as it systematically dismantles the assumed (horseshit) myths and legends surrounding Poe to reveal him as not only the flawed and profoundly human human that he was, but as a genius of the first degree (who also, it would seem, knew it quite well): an artist at home with and who made high art of nearly every genre he touched (metaphysics seeming to be the exception – though I want to read EUREKA, too) and, while obviously beaten down (as evinced in the string of daguerrotypes included), endured a seemingly endless string of personal and professional – he was nothing if not his own worst enemy and, according to more than one contemporary, a pain in the ass – tragedies and setbacks yet somehow emerged with a sense of hope, humor, and belief intact – until there was no more to be had.

Reproducing a passage from Dawidziak's intro here because it perfectly sums up the remarkable portrait Dawidziak creates here:

"The real Poe considered himself first and foremost a poet. The real Poe was best known in his lifetime as first a tremendously tough critic, second a poet, and third as the author of tales of mystery and horror. Our perception of Poe has reversed that order. But Poe also wrote a substantial number of satires, hoaxes, and humorous pieces, and let's face it, nobody thinks of Edgar Allan Poe as a comedy writer. The man had quite a sense of humor, but that doesn't fit the myth. 'The popular image of Poe is so far off the mark that it borders on the ludicrous,' Poe and Twain scholar Dennis Eddings said. 'Poe had a delicious sense of humor. He loved cats, a true test of character, as Mark Twain recognized. And he took his art seriously at the same time he made fun of it, surely a sign of a well-balanced mind.'"

I want to believe that Poe would have had a hell of a blog.

Won't add more here, but yes, the book does postulate the most likely answer as to what caused his death at 40 though with the caveat that there's no way of truly knowing 174 years later. An essential work of biography.

My complete reading list, from 2013 to the present, lives here.

links/2023w07.1

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