Poe Film Poster #1

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?”