The Telltale Heart

Poe's narrator kills the old man for his eye, buries him under the floor, and receives the police with the body beneath their chairs, in painted, tilted rooms that owe an open debt to Caligari, lit so the shadows do the accusing. Charles Klein made it in Hollywood outside the studios in 1928, with Leon Shamroy on camera before his long career at Fox and Otto Matieson as the narrator. With the Watson and Webber Fall of the House of Usher of the same year, one of the first American films to take the European art picture as a model. Two reels.