Film Review
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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Next Robert Florey film:
Adventures of Captain Fabian (1951)
Film Synopsis
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...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.