The House of the Seven Gables

In 1828 the bankrupt Pyncheon family cannot agree over the ancestral mansion. To take the house for himself, Jaffrey Pyncheon has his brother Clifford wrongly convicted of murder. Clifford's fiancée Hepzibah waits twenty years in the house, keeping it standing on her own. When Clifford gets out he has his former cellmate Matthew with him, and the two of them have a plan. Joe May directed it from Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel. The curse, the ghost and the dark atmosphere of the book turn here into something closer to a family reckoning; the real horror is not supernatural but what property does to people. George Sanders plays the man who did this to his own brother with complete coolness. It is one of Vincent Price's early roles, and you can see him before he was associated with horror.