The Tell-Tale Heart

"The Tell-Tale Heart" is probably the most popular and famous of all of Edgar Allan Poe's tales. It's a very simple, quick, and easy to read tale that has a great plot, wonderful style, and a memorable ending. It is the perfect Poe tale!

This film is a brief adaptation of this beloved classic, and it captures its mood and suspense gloriously. The narration by the great James Mason is pitch perfect, and the animation style is creepy and superb! The film is genuinely intense, too. The atmosphere is heavy, and it makes for a great experience. My heart was practically pounding as I watched it-which is interesting to note due to the title and subject of the story.

An English teacher whose taste I generally respected despised this film. As a word person, she was no doubt bothered by the compression and elimination of so much of Poe's carefully wrought language.

But she overlooked one thing, in my estimation. Poe said everything in a short story should be toward one effect, and certainly, there has been no better attempt on film to achieve the kind of formal and emotional control Poe suggested was the story teller's goal than this animated short. She should have appreciated that.

The control of tone, light and color palette here is complete; the actors are hand-crafted; the voices and music are expertly orchestrated as in great radio drama; best of all, nothing extraneous or distracting seeps through at any point. (We clearly see only one face during this short. We never see the narrator, but see all that happens through a subjective camera.) While there is a ton of ham bone melodrama and story padding in Corman's Poe films, this film achieves just the right pitch, delicate and disturbing, maintains it, and then finishes simply. In today's context, UPA's Tell-Tale seems slightly dry, if not downright academic; Corman's films evoke not only Hollywood, with all that means, but low budget film making and drive-in culture as well.

I believe Poe would have appreciated UPA's effort and encouraged them to try others, like Cask of Amontillado and Masque. Given the chance, I think he'd have liked to tell Corman to just quit it.

10 stars. One of the great cartoons, ever.

A madman (voiced by James Mason) tells his tale of murder, and how a strange beating sound haunted him afterward.

The animation of this short is pretty decent and fits the material well without being too grisly. But, of course, the real joy is in the narration. When it comes to telling a story so well-known and often repeated, it pays to get just the right voice. And James Mason is the one for that (though Vincent Price would also work).

I remember this story being longer. Now, that might be my memory or it might be that they abridged it. But I have fond memories of the first time I ever heard the story in an elementary class. (I don't believe I actually read Poe's work until later.) The tape I heard was not Mason, but I wish it had been.

Whew. It's as spooky as ever, and James Mason's reading brings to it an hysterical drama that is absent from his movies.

Sometimes the stark images illustrate the events and sometimes they're surrealistic images of moons, branches, upright things draped in cloth.

I don't know how Poe could bring these stories off. Here, for instance, he begins with the otherwise nice old man whose filmy white eyeball the narrator simply can't stand and which eventually drives him to murder.

If I had written it, I'd have to have had to explain what the living arrangement was. Did they come to share a flat? How did they handle the rent? Who did the cooking and who washed the dishes? And how the hell did the unnamed narrator ever wind up in a situation like this? Poe dispenses with all this irrelevant details, a device in accord with his theory that everything could, and should, be thrown out the window in favor of effect.

Some effect!

This short, nominated for an Oscar, is very atmospheric and quite spooky. It's actually a perfect choice for the limited animation style that UPA frequently used and the choice of James Mason as the narrator was absolutely inspired! It captures the mood, tone and feel of Poe's story perfectly and is an incredible piece of work. Most highly recommended. It was released on one of the Columbia Classics series of videos. It's worth hunting down.