Taking me completely by surprise, Ted Parmelee's 8-minute cartoon adaptation of Edgar Allen Poe's short story, 'The Tell-Tale Heart,' is a faithful, stylish, atmospheric, genuinely unsettling feat of clever animation, creepy sound effects and an excellent voice-over by James Mason. Produced by the UPA (United Productions of America), the film was nominated for a 1954 Best Short Subject Academy Award, and was, in 2001, selected for preservation by the National Film Registry at the United States Library of Congress. I basically stumbled upon this short completely by mistake, and my curiosity was immediately piqued by its being an adaptation of one of Poe's most famous works. Needless to say, I enjoyed it immensely.
'The Tell-Tale Heart' is the story of an insane man (who, voiced in the first-person by James Mason, acts as our narrator) who murders his elderly landlord because of his "strange eye" and is driven to madness by the continual hideous beating of the dead man's heart. The murderer himself, speaking from prison, does not acknowledge his own insanity; just like all of us, he considers himself to be quite sane. "What madman would wait could wait so patiently for so long?" he asks, of his waiting seven days before killing the old man. "True, I'm nervous. Very, very, dreadfully nervous," he confesses later, but still maintains his own sanity. "But why will you say that I'm mad?" He says this as we watch his hands press against the bars of his cell, the perfectly-chilling end to a film.
We never actually see the madman's face, restricted to glimpsing his shadow on the floor and his dirty, gnarled hands. The audience witnesses the events through the warped mind of the murderer, with even ordinary events and objects taking on a surrealistic, twisted, terrifying light. Mason's narration is perfect for the role, his voice lending his character the earnest, desperate, edgy feel of a man at the edge. His character claims to be calm and collected, but within his voice lies a ripple of fear, of a man brought to the very borders of sanity, of one frantically trying to reclaim his bearing on reality. This is a wonderful short film.
'The Tell-Tale Heart' is the story of an insane man (who, voiced in the first-person by James Mason, acts as our narrator) who murders his elderly landlord because of his "strange eye" and is driven to madness by the continual hideous beating of the dead man's heart. The murderer himself, speaking from prison, does not acknowledge his own insanity; just like all of us, he considers himself to be quite sane. "What madman would wait could wait so patiently for so long?" he asks, of his waiting seven days before killing the old man. "True, I'm nervous. Very, very, dreadfully nervous," he confesses later, but still maintains his own sanity. "But why will you say that I'm mad?" He says this as we watch his hands press against the bars of his cell, the perfectly-chilling end to a film.
We never actually see the madman's face, restricted to glimpsing his shadow on the floor and his dirty, gnarled hands. The audience witnesses the events through the warped mind of the murderer, with even ordinary events and objects taking on a surrealistic, twisted, terrifying light. Mason's narration is perfect for the role, his voice lending his character the earnest, desperate, edgy feel of a man at the edge. His character claims to be calm and collected, but within his voice lies a ripple of fear, of a man brought to the very borders of sanity, of one frantically trying to reclaim his bearing on reality. This is a wonderful short film.