THE TELL-TALE HEART (1941)

Edgar Allan Poe's definition of a short story has remained something of a standard even today: it should be able to be read in one sitting and everything in it should build toward "a single effect." His famous story "The Tell-Tale Heart" fulfills this proclamation well. It's short (usually 5-8 pages) and has no extraneous material (with virtually no character development) to get in the way of its singular effect, to tell a story of a man driven mad by guilt. The bulk of Poe's fiction is of the short form and, because the short film genre never took off commercially in Hollywood, most Poe film adaptations have been fleshed out into full-length films (such as the American International Poe movies of the 60s) using added material—or, in the case of THE MASQUE OF THE RED DEATH, combining two stories—or in the cases of adapting Poe’s poetry, using just a title with little or none of the original work's content (see THE CONQUEROR WORM or THE HAUNTED PALACE which was actually based on a Lovecraft story despite the Poe title). I reviewed a full-length British version of this story last year, and it wasn't bad, but this 20-minute film is better at producing and maintaining that famous "single effect."

A young man (Joseph Schildkraut, pictured) lives with an old man (Roman Bohnen) as his general caretaker, but the old man, who has a creepy looking milky eye, is cranky and abusive, and one night, the young man plots the old man's murder. He carries it out, burying the body beneath some floorboards in the living room, but the next day when two policemen come looking for the old man, the young man is suddenly aware of the loud beating of a heart under the floor and can't figure out why the police don't seem to hear it. When I read this story as a kid, I imagined the ending to be quite literal, with [Spoiler] the young man ripping open the floor and tearing a beating heart out of the old man's body. Of course, it's actually the story of a killer caught by his own guilty conscience. This film is practically nothing but atmosphere—there is little dialogue and no character details except the old man's foul personality (which incidentally is the opposite of the story in which the narrator admits that the old man was harmless and claims it was that milky eye than unnerved him so). Close-ups of water dripping, a clock ticking, and footsteps are used to indicate the young man’s sudden sensitivity to sound, and the dead man's heartbeat is accentuated by thumping musical chords that get louder and louder. Because there is no narration, we lose practically all of the young man's motivation, so a deeper psychological reading is impossible to do here, but Schildkraut is quite good as the central character, getting across his madness with his eyes. I saw this on TCM, which shows older short films quite a bit, but it's also available as an extra on the DVD of Shadow of the Thin Man. [TCM]