House of Usher (1960)
House of Usher (1960), produced and directed by Roger Corman.
A young man tries to retrieve his fiancée from the ultimate decaying old mansion, but her brother isn't having it. Doomed, doomed, doomed, all are doomed in this life and the next.
The first of the long-running Corman Poe series was a huge success and put American International on the map. The action picks up in the second half, but the first is mostly gothic dialogue and situations.
Price's sensitive and blonde Roderick Usher is a worthy invention: morose to the point of mental illness, probably hereditary, but not a villain in his own eyes, or even in ours. He does what he must: extinguish the Usher blood line.
Corman's commentaries are always worth a listen, although I've heard some of this before from the other discs in the set:
These films do not take place in any sort of real world, but rather in a Freudian landscape of the unconscious mind.
He's always generous in his praise of the actors and crew. He enjoys recounting their later successes.
The crew he assembled stayed together as a unit and was often hired as such by other filmmakers.
His first Cinemascope film. It didn't need scope ratio but American International wanted it for marketing purposes and he used it as well as he could.
It was his idea to make one 15-day color film instead of two 10-day b&w films.
One day of rehearsal.
Instead of traditional story boards he would draw overhead diagrams on the blank facing pages of the script.
Richard Matheson screenplay, adapted from Poe.
Available on Blu-ray. Director's commentary track, plus a short second one giving a fluffy Price biography.
