Hallo-Watch: Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932)

Watched:  10/09/2023

Format:  Criterion

Viewing:  First

Director:  Robert Florey

I'd heard Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932) mentioned a lot as part of Universal's early offerings in their Dracula and Frankenstein adjacent period.  It's considered part of that first wave and thus foundational as horror was being created on the fly for talkies.  Lugosi had turned down the part of the monster in Frankenstein and was looking for actory roles, and up popped this adaptation of an Edgar Allen Poe tale.

Carl Laemmle, who ran Universal at the time, didn't actually think much of horror, so basing his movies on known literature probably eased his conscience a bit.

Poe's original short story is credited as the first modern detective story.  The lead, Dupin, uses logic and reason to deduce what occurred, not something common to the literary world in most stories of the time.  This form of detective fiction would quickly become mastered by others, and you get Sherlock Holmes and how we think of a *lot* of modern fiction - pretty much anything with a central mystery.

Here, we get a promising med student who likes to hang around (a) the morgue in his Parisian neighborhood, and (b) his girlfriend's apartments she shares with her mother, conveniently located on the Rue Morgue.  One hopes he washes his hands before heading over the girlfriend's place.  He's become intrigued by a series of deaths of younger women and similar wounds appearing on their arms, though the women seem to have been drowned.

The movie opens with Dupin (Leon Ames, going hear by Leon Waycoff) taking his girlfriend to the carnival where they see an act by a Dr. Mirakle (Bela Lugosi) where he shows off his pet ape, claiming to speak with it in its own tongue.  There's a bit about evolution, etc... reminding the modern viewer this was released just 7 years after the Scopes Monkey Trial.  

Well, Dr. Mirakle is trying to inject human women with gorilla blood for some reason, but because he keeps picking up hookers as his experimental subjects, he thinks their blood is "rotten".  Not super-woke, my man.  Also, by the third sex worker, maybe the problem is YOU, Doctor.  

He sets his sights on Camille, the girlfriend of Dupin.  

Meanwhile, Dupin is messing around with the corpses trying to figure out what the story is when he comes across a comparison of human and gorilla blood in a text (as one does) and realizes someone put gorilla blood in these women and it killed them. 

Realizing this, Dupin runs to Camille, but she's in the process of getting kidnapped by Mirakle and his ape, Erik.

Anyway, the movie uses parts of the story, but changes significant chunks, adding in the whole circus angle and Dr. Mirakle instead of a random sailor who thought having an orangutan around was a neat idea.  

The movie is worth seeing mostly as a curiosity of the early horror era, and what the studios didn't look to repeat on.  While Poe would become fertile territory for Corman and Vincent Price in the coming decades, those movies would become "yes, also..." in comparison to the key Universal Monsters and their many sequels.  Instead, the detective angle of Dupin's sleuthing and dealing with maybe the literally dumbest cops you will ever see in a movie that did not arrive from Keystone is what carried forward.

No one is going to accuse Leon Ames of stealing the show in a movie where he's paired with a vamping Lugosi but he's fine as our lead, and makes a buyable detective/ doctor, chasing an ape across the Parisian rooftops.  Lugosi is in Grand Guignol mode, and it's... something.  Dude cannot play small.  Everyone is getting their money's worth.  

The ape is a guy in a suit in wide shots - a convincing-ish ape suit at that - in that it looks inhuman.  And they insert shots of a chimpanzee in close-ups.  So, not a gorilla or orangutan in the film, but generic "ape".  And it sorta works in a "this will play fine if the audience has never been to a zoo."  It's actually not that crazy to assume an ape might accidentally kill some people, if by accident.  Apes tend to not get that humans snap like twigs.

Clearly Universal had great faith in the movie as they built gigantic sets for the thing.  Paris is multiple, multi-story sets with balconies.  I assume they planned to use and re-use them, and perhaps they did.  But the look also borrows heavily from German Expressionism, not just in lighting but in wonky angles and dreamlike looks at the city.  

But the movie's pacing is... wild.  As near as I can tell, at the twist to the third act (this movie is only an hour) the movie goes from the made-up portion to what's in the short story, including a protracted convo about a voice heard in the apartment that we already know is the ape, but the people reading the story don't know... so it's not great.  Further, the cops help Dupin break down a locked door he's clearly desperate to get into, and then hold *him* on suspicion of the murder of Camille's mother - when you can still hear Camille being absconded with off frame.  

It makes no sense.  It's like they built a bride from both sides, realized they weren't lining up and just slapped down some boards between and said "well, people can get there".  

Anyway - not my favorite movie, but I'm glad to have seen it and can mark it off my list of Halloween screenings.