Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932) - film review

Paris, 1845.  One day, medical student Pierre Dupin takes his girlfriend Camille to a street carnival where the main attraction is Dr Mirakle and his giant ape Erik.  Mirakle has devoted his life to proving that man evolved from the savage ape, and to this end he intends to find a mate for Erik.  So far, his experiments have been a failure.  He has abducted several prostitutes and injected them with Erik’s blood, but on each occasion the human and ape blood fail to mingle and Mirakle’s victims die.  The bodies of the dead women are fished out of the Seine and arouse the curiosity of Dupin, who makes the bizarre discovery that they died not from drowning but from a kind of blood poisoning.  Mirakle is not to be deterred by these failures.  Instead, he pays a call on Camille and invites her to visit Erik, who appears to have taken a liking to her.  Naturally, the young woman declines the scientist’s invitation, so Mirakle has to resort to more extreme measures.  One night, Erik breaks into Camille’s apartment and, having murdered her mother, hauls her up onto the roof.  Pierre must act fast and risk his own life if he is to save the woman he loves from a fate worse than death...

One of the most highly thought of adaptations of an Edgar Allan Poe story, Murders in the Rue Morgue is a classic of the 1930s horror genre which still has the power to chill the blood with its atmospheric expressionist design and utterly creepy central premise.  Whilst the film is a fairly blatant remake of Robert Wiene’s Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari (1920) and is marred by some unspeakably wooden acting and unbelievably corny dialogue, it has long been regarded as one of Universal’s more inspired horror flicks, a worthy cobweb-encrusted bedfellow to the studio’s better known Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), The Mummy (1932) and so forth.

The film was originally to have been directed by George Melford, who had recently proven his worth on his Spanish adaptation of Universal’s Dracula (1931), which is now considered vastly superior to the English-language version directed by Tod Browning.  The project was snatched away from Melford and given to Robert Florey as a consolation prize after the studio executives had decided not to allow him to direct their prestige production of Frankenstein and instead conferred that honour on the new golden boy James Whale.  Having completed his screenplay for Murders in the Rue Morgue, Florey then faced the further humiliation of a substantial cut in his budget and a studio directive to set the film in the present day rather than 19th century France.  Florey stood his ground and managed to convince his paymasters that it was essential for the film’s credibility that it be a period piece, although the budget he ended up with was still only a third of what Universal had committed to Frankenstein.  Once the film was completed, the studio was so concerned by its horror content that they inflicted on it a last minute re-edit, which effectively butchered Florey’s original conception and may have contributed to the film’s failure at the box office.

The other bruised ego the film was intended to assuage was that of actor Bela Lugosi, who had originally been slated as the star of Frankenstein.  Owing to a misunderstanding, Lugosi had led himself to believe that he would play Dr Frankenstein and felt slighted when he was offered the part of the monster.  Refusing to take on a non-speaking role and be rendered unrecognisable by make-up, Lugosi walked away from the film (allowing the unknown Boris Karloff to put his stamp on film history), and had to be consoled with the part of the mad scientist in a lesser film, Murders in the Rue Morgue.  It was a serendipitous outcome that served both films, allowing each of them to become an important classic of the horror genre.  Whereas Lugosi’s ham acting and manic leers would have ruined Whale’s near-realist Frankenstein film, these work perfectly in the expressionistic nightmare world of Murders in the Rue Morgue.  Some regard this as Lugosi’s finest hour in front of the camera - here he delivers a far more sinister and engaging performance than his earlier Dracula and plethora of subsequent horror roles.

The main strength of this film is its arresting visual design, which lies between the extreme expressionism of Caligari and the sinister modern Gothic aura of Universal’s early Frankenstein films.  Karl Freund’s cinematography brings a haunting poetic quality to the film whilst accentuating the blood curdling horror content to truly terrifying proportions in a few notable scenes.  The sequence in which Lugosi advances menacingly out of the fog towards an unsuspecting woman of the street, the scenes in which the mad scientist skulks in his secret laboratory performing his diabolical art, the famous rooftop denouement (a precursor to that of R.K.O.’s subsequent King Kong) and the inspired use of shadow play to subtly ramp up the terror quotient - these are what make Murders in the Rue Morgue one of Universal’s most memorable and nightmare-inducing horror offerings.

© James Travers 2011

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