MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*
I don't think most Edgar Allan Poe stories lend themselves to feature-film adaptation. Thus, I'd usually rather see an adaptor "juice up" an adaptation of a problematic work like Poe's USHER in order to make the film work according to the necessities of cinematic storytelling, rather than plod his way through a script with absolute fidelity to the prose source.
Of course, there are good deviations and bad deviations. Alan Birkenshaw's 1989 HOUSE doesn't even make a token effort toward keeping faith, and so it's just rubbish, consisting of all sorts of junk, including the kitchen sink. However, when Richard Matheson adapted USHER for Corman in the 1960 film, he apparently realized that the audience would need some reason for the house to be so malefic. And so Matheson imported, possibly from Hawthorne, the idea that the house was pervaded with the degeneracy of the Usher ancestors-- which works dramatically, even if it doesn't have much to do with Poe.
TV-scribe Stephen Lord does something similar to Matheson in working out a new scenario for this TV-film. After the principals have lurked about for the first hour of the movie, Roderick Usher (Martin Landau) reveals to the viewpoint character Jonathan (Robert Hays) that the reason the house constantly shifts and shakes is because Roderick's ancestors performed rites of devil-worship there. I don't think this was a particularly good idea. However, as long as we don't see cartoon devils running around, Usher's superstititon can be relegated to his own demented fantasies.
Somewhat better is Lord's alteration of the viewpoint character. Whereas Roderick's visitor in the story is just an old school chum, Jonathan is an architect who knew Roderick in school, and Roderick summons him to attempt shoring up the unstable edifice. Jonathan, having no idea what he's getting into, brings along his new bride Jennifer (Charlene Tilton).
Though it takes a while for Jonathan to learn the history of the house, Lord immediately lets the POV character in on Lord's big change about the last two surviving Ushers. In the prose story, Roderick is afflicted with an illness that makes him hypersensitive to loud sounds and other sensory impacts, while his sister Madeleine suffers from catalepsy-- which situation leads Roderick to entomb his sibling, maybe not quite innocently. In the movie, both Roderick and Madeleine suffer from the same disease, and Madeleine (Dimitra Arliss), rather than going mad after getting buried alive, is the epitome of that trope known as "the madwoman in the attic." Indeed, the first time Jonathan meets the crazy lady, she tries to kill him with an axe.
If in the story the crumbling house is the objective correlate to Roderick's disintegrating mind, here monstrous Madeleine lines up with the self-destructive house. Roderick and his servant Thaddeus (Ray Walston) confine her in a room, but she gets loose again, menacing poor confused Jennifer. Oddly, the house itself "kills" the madwoman with one of its tremors, dropping some masonry on Madeleine. This gives Roderick the justification to nail his sister into a coffin. But she gets better and breaks free, pushing the nails out of their holes with her bare fingers. She kills the servant and menaces both of the innocent bystanders, and frankly, Arliss makes one of the better cinematic Madeleines, her eyes weeping tears of blood. She seems okay with just killing everyone in her path. Roderick belatedly decides he's doomed to die by her hands (and by the evil will of the House, I guess), though that begs the question as to why he imagined he could triumph over the cursed house by working on its supports. Anyway, at least the filmmakers got that part of the Poe story more or less right, since Roderick dies fighting with Madeleine, allowing the two innocents to escape. I gather the budget didn't allow for a model-house sinking into a tarn, so lightning hits the house and the vile dwelling goes up in flames.
Apparently the production was somehow linked to the Classics Illustrated comics-line, since there's a quick shot of CI's cover of their USHER adaptation before credits roll. I don't know how good the comic was, but I've seen far worse USHER films than this one.
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