The House of the Seven Gables (1940) on Netflix
Approved19401h 29mDramaThriller
The Pyncheons must sell Seven Gables, their home, to pay the family's debts. Jaffrey hunts the treasure he believes hides inside, Clifford wants the sale, and Hepzibah waits to marry Clifford.
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- Netflix3.8/5
- IMDb7.0/101,739 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes80%
Trailer
Plot summary
The Pyncheon mansion, Seven Gables, stands on land their ancestor Colonel Jaffrey Pyncheon took from the carpenter Matthew Maule, who was hanged and cursed the family. The colonel and many of his male descendants died suddenly, choking on their own blood. The present Jaffrey Pyncheon, a Boston lawyer, is summoned home by his father Gerald, and Hepzibah Pyncheon, a cousin engaged to Jaffrey's brother Clifford, greets him. Gerald tells the family the estate must be sold the next day; his poor management has left him deeply in debt. Clifford agrees to the sale, planning to marry Hepzibah on his share and settle in New York. That night Jaffrey searches the attic for a land grant signed by King Charles II.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The House of the Seven Gables (1940)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Studio carpenters built the Seven Gables sets to suit an average actor's height of 5 ft, but leads Vincent Price and George Sanders were both 6 ft, so doorway lintels and ceilings had to be raised.
- Robert Cummings was originally cast as Clifford Pyncheon, but he fell ill a day later and had to leave the production; Vincent Price took over, most likely because he had worked with Burt Kelly and Joe May on The Invisible Man Returns.
- Screenwriter Lester Cole deliberately injected left-wing politics into his adaptation, making Matthew Maule/Holgrave an abolitionist and depicting capitalists like Jaffrey Pyncheon and Arnold Foster as illegal slave-traders.
- Universal kept pre-production secret because it feared better-funded studios would rush their own version of The House of the Seven Gables into production before Universal could finish its version.
- Director Joe May's heavy German accent made him hard to understand in English and hampered his direction of the actors, so the studio ordered screenwriter Lester Cole to act as dialogue director.
- Production designer Jack Otterson went to Salem, Massachusetts, to photograph and measure the Turner-Ingersoll Mansion that inspired Hawthorne's house, and a facade was built on Universal's Colonial Street backlot, where it remained standing into the 21st century.
- The film's reputation suffered in the 1950s when Universal executives criticized it during the Second Red Scare, saying Burt Kelly and Lester Cole had injected radical politics into the script and the directing.
