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Fall of the House of Usher: Collector's Edition (The)
R1 - America - All Day Entertainment Review written by and copyright: Jeremiah Chin (17th February 2009). |
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The Film
 Early film history is somewhat of a grey area for me; I’ve never done the film-major thing in college or even pretended to know early movies, especially the silent ones. Sure, there are a few areas that just get brought up from being a fan of different genres, like “Vampyr” (1932) or “Nosferatu” (1922) for horror, “Metropolis” (1927) for science fiction, but honestly I don’t start keeping track until you get to talkies. What’s interesting about silent films and their releases, is that each producer or whoever decides to bring the film to the public eye can choose their own soundtrack or compose something new, making the interaction of film and music that much more interesting, like the 1984 cut of “Metropolis” that uses the likes of Queen and Pat Benetar to really spice things up. Sure it’s not really preserving the original intent of the director, but had Fritz Lang heard Freddy Mercury, I’m sure they would have gotten along. So when “The Fall of the Houses of Usher” (1928) comes along, my interest is a little piqued by this fairly recent release of the silent film based on the Edgar Allen Poe story, especially since I’ve never heard of this film adaptation or even read the book. The film begins with Allan (Charles Lamy) going to visit the home of Roderick Usher (Jean Debucourt), a fairly reserved man who lives away from the small town who apparently scorns him for his oddities. Upon arriving at the home of Usher, Allan discovers Roderick and his sister Madeleine (Margurite Gance) have an odd relationship that’s caring, but Roderick seems compelled to paint his sister as many of the men of Usher have done with their female relatives. Yet as Roderick continues to paint his portrait, Madeleine soon becomes sickly and ill with the closer the painting comes to completion. Honestly it’s hard to pin down the story points without a little help from the synopsis or going through some of the dialogue cards interspersed through the film, as director Jean Epstein seems to focus more on setting a more old-school horror tone. Visually the film has impressive effects that were fairly unexpected for me, considering the time was produced at, and honestly had parts that reminded me a lot of “Vampyr” in terms of their use of Gothic tones in the way characters interact, the haunted and bizarre location with some off-kilter characters (I knew there was no way I was getting out of reviewing a silent movie without sounding a little bit pretentious). Though the story may be hard to follow, at an hour long it’s worth the time to see some of the cool visual styling that get brought into the film. Perhaps the oddest part of the film though came mostly out of the transfer itself, I’ll get to the technical points in a minute, but for some reason All Day Entertainment decided to have the titlecards read by a narrator. For the most part I’m fine with it, but there are times when it’s a bit hard to understand what the narrator is saying and it gets distracting from the actual dialogue cards, especially since the dialogue cards are in French and the narrator is the only way of comprehending the film outside of knowing French. It would have been nice to see some optional subtitles or even replacement cue cards. I understand they may have been going for authenticity, but using a narrator feels just as inauthentic as throwing up some English subtitles to read as well. Overall it’s a stylish and interesting film whose plot is a little thin, which may be a combination of my occasional difficulty understanding the narrator and just some pieces of the storytelling that I may have missed out on, but visually it’s an interesting look at early cinema.
Video
Presented in the original 1.33:1 full screen, the transfer itself is hard to judge considering that it's fairly hard to find film from the 20’s. For the most part it feels well preserved, though from the digital transfer there are a couple of moments where you can see some interlacing problems, but the film is fairly clear for such an old film.
Audio
The sound is presented in a Dolby Digital 1.0 sound transfer, which sounds fine for what music here is with an interesting score that adds to the tone. Most of the time I respect films that keep to their original audio settings by going with stereo, but with a silent film transfer it seems like there’s a bit more wiggle room since you don’t have the original recording of an orchestra or dialogue to worry about and can go a bit further with the audio, bringing it up to a 5.1 recording transfer since the music has to be re-recorded to be put on the DVD. The film includes the original French title cards, no optional subtitles are included and the cards are translated with use of an English narration.
Extras
There are no special features on the disc.
Overall
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