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Poe made his first movie
appearance as a character in a one-reel 1909
silent
film directed by the great D. W. Griffith. Griffith's Edgar Allen
[sic]
Poe starred Herbert Yost as Poe and liberally mixed Poe's life with
his writings. Although it was a failure as biography, it was happily
successful
at the box office and inspired a number of other silent films,
including
the The Raven (1912, American Eclair Company) and The
Avenging
Conscience (1914, another Griffith production). Poe continued to
appear
in the talkies, including The Man with a Cloak (1951, with
Joseph
Cotten as Poe) and The Torture Garden (1966).
Shown here is a black-and-white
advertisement from 20th
Century
Fox's The Loves of Edgar Allan Poe from 1942. This film,
starring John
Shepperd as Poe, was probably the most romanticized attempt at
providing
a life of Poe. To incite interest, the ad copy reads "What was the
private
life of the man who poured the deepest passions of his heart into 'The
Raven' . . . 'The Pit and the Pendulum' . . . 'Murders in the Rue
Morgue'
. . . and a hundred other wild and startling tales?"
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