The Fall of the House of Usher
Overshadowed by both the Jean Epstein silent 1928 version and Roger Corman’s one from 1960, 1948’s The Fall of the House of Usher isn’t exactly a good film but it is a hellishly interesting one. Directed by Ivan Barnett, it was shot mostly at GIB Studios in Hastings on the south coast of England, a town not exactly bristling with movie production facilities and people. GIB stands for George Ivan Bennett, the director’s full name. The studio was an offshoot of a film society Barnett had formed in 1944 when he was about 19. When Sight and Sound magazine did a report on the Hastings film scene in the mid-1940s they declared the … Read more