People with funeral fetishes, I have got the movie for you, and it is Roger Corman’s “House of Usher.” (Yes, I am beaming affectionately at you, my dear goth friends.) The first in a rash of Corman films taken from titles by Edgar Allan Poe, “Usher” is one of the most faithful that I have seen and also, alas, just about the least fun. But if you have a thing for funerals, it’s great! And for the rest of us, there’s Vincent Price in a blond wig.
The plot makes a bit free with Poe’s story, although it’s nothing like the deranged embellishments of, say, “The Raven,” in which Vincent Price and Boris Karloff cast spells on each other over dinner while Peter Lorre flaps around in a man-sized raven suit. In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” an unnamed friend comes to visit Roderick Usher in his big creepy old family mansion; Roderick’s sister Madeline swans around being sickly and eventually gets buried alive. That’s pretty much the plot here, except that the friend has been named Philip Winthrop and he arrives as Madeline’s fiance. It’s a short story (my copy runs 19 pages) so there’s a lot of standing around.
But hey, we’re standing around with Vincent Price, and he’s got a blond wig on! Check him out after the jump: He looks like Captain Von Trapp. Price plays Roderick Usher, who is not at all happy to see Winthrop (Mark Damon) on his doorstep. The “Winthrop, you must leave!” starts right off the bat. But apparently Winthrop met Madeline (Myrna Fahey) back in Boston and got engaged to her and is determined to visit her at home, even though all she does is put on nightgowns and swan around being sickly. Winthrop mostly interacts with the hostile Roderick and with the butler, Bristol (Harry Ellerbe), who is useful for providing expository details such as the family inclination toward catalepsy.
