Murders in the Rue Morgue
                                                                                                           
Director: Robert Florey
Year: 1931
Rating: 7.0
Though this horror film was made smack in the middle of Universal's classic run of that genre, it isn't nearly as well known as its neighbors Dracula, The Mummy, The Invisible Man and Frankenstein. In fact, the director of this film, Robert Florey, had initially been slated to direct Frankenstein and had begun the groundwork before he was taken off and the job given to James Whale. So Florey was handed this film as compensation along with Bela Lugosi. It is in some ways brilliant and in other ways quite awful.



Even for its time - 1932 - it feels antiquated, stilted, stogy and at 60 minutes rather rushed. It has all the trappings of a silent horror film with its overly expressive acting and make-up, the strongly influenced expressionistic sets, the myriad of close-ups of extras and lovely use of shadows and design. It should have been a silent film because the dialogue badly delivered is at times painful, especially the romantic scenes "You are like a yellow star in the morning" and Lugosi ranting on about evolution. This could have been a great silent film.



But the sets, designs and cinematography make this more than watchable - it is at times a real pleasure. The creation of Paris in the 1840's is weird and wonderful with background paintings of the city that are abstract and delirious. Houses seem to tilt. Streets seem to reek of evil. Fog is like a plague at night. The one set piece in which Lugosi and his Igoresque servant have kidnapped a street walker (Arlene Francis long before she was a regular panelist on What's My Line) and tied her to a crucifix in his laboratory as he experiments on her is stunning and especially how he gets rid of her. Even today it somehow feels sacrilegious.



Lugosi's character (Dr. Mirakle) who seems to have mutated caterpillars as eyebrows and a powdered white ghastly pallor is of the opinion that man was evolved from the ape. And he has an ape that he names Eric and that he can command. In order to prove his crazy theory he uses the newest scientific methods - kidnapping women and injecting them with gorilla blood to see if it meshes. When it doesn't and they die - into the Seine they go. An amateur detective, Pierre Dupin, notices all these dead woman showing up at the morgue and investigates. Dupin is played by Leon Waycoff who you are not likely to know but you may recognize his later stage name of Leon Ames who was in a ton of films in the 30's and 40's, generally as a slimy businessman - though his most famous role was probably as the kind father in Meet Me in St. Louis. His girlfriend who ends up in a wonderful roof top King Kong like scene at the end is Sidney Fox. Very cute and demur, she was to commit suicide ten years later.



Now if you go off to read the story this was "based" on, the Murders in the Rue Morgue written by Edgar Allan Poe in 1841, you may be disappointed. Like pretty much every film I have seen based on a Poe story or poem it has only a slight resemblance. One of the writers of this was none other than John Huston who said he wanted to inject more Poe like language into the script but it all got cut out by Florey. As does most of the Poe story. One problem in adapting Poe to film is that he wrote short stories and poetry - The Raven, The Haunted Palace, The City in the Sea - and trying to make a full length film out of them was a challenge - though often they took the title (public domain) and nothing else.



But Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue is a landmark short story. It basically created the detective novel and many of its characteristics for years to come. Auguste Dupin is nothing like our romantic action hero of this film. He is an aristocrat fallen on hard times and in three Poe stories (the other two being The Purloined Letter and The Mystery of Marie Roget) he solves cases simply through observation and thinking. The stories are told through a nameless narrator, Dupin is an eccentric easily bored, he makes fools of the police, the reader is given the same clues as Dupin and in Morgue it is a Locked Room Mystery - all these characteristics were used by many later mystery writers from Doyle to Christie to John Dickson Carr. At the same time as ground breaking as the story was - and it is such a shame he didn't write many more Dupin mysteries - it is rather silly. The guilty party is an orangutan - which is actually one of the few bits that this film keeps!