Format: Internet video on Fire!
I can find getting into silent movies difficult sometimes. I stand by the opinion that most silent dramas haven’t really translated to the modern day very well. It’s hard to take them too seriously, and even the truly great ones come across as strained and melodramatic. Comedy still works; a man falling on his ass is funny whether you can hear it or not, and a lot of that stunt work really holds up. Horror movies are a mixed bag. It really depends on what the film is going for. In the case of the 1928 French version of The Fall of the House of Usher (or, more properly, La Chute de la Maison Usher), the goal is purely atmosphere, and so it generally works.
If you don’t know the story, I’ll give you a quick run-through. An unnamed narrator (played in the film by Charles Lamy) is asked to visit his friend Roderick Usher (Jean Debucourt) in the crumbling Usher family mansion. The narrator discovers that Roderick is very much physically decrepit and is obsessed with the failing health of his sister Madeline (Marguerite Gance, who in this version of the story is Roderick’s wife rather than his sister). As they represent the end of the Usher line and there will be no heirs to whatever is left of the family and since the literal house is literally falling apart, by the time the story ends we’re going to experience both the literal and figurative fall of the literal and figurative House of Usher.
