The first film we ran last night was Murders in the Rue Morgue, a 1932 production that was essentially a consolation prize for Bela Lugosi and director Robert Florey after they lost out on Frankenstein — Lugosi because he turned it down as lacking dialogue and Florey because he was taken off as director when James Whale was assigned to it (the Universal Horror documentary on Turner Classic Movies suggested that Whale was unwilling to do Frankenstein and had to be forced to take the assignment, but my other sources indicated that he was offered it along with two other scripts and accepted it because he wanted the challenge of doing a story that was physically impossible and making it believable). Rue Morgue was ostensibly based on a story by Edgar Allan Poe, but the only elements retained were one murder (in which the heroine’s mother is stuffed up the chimney by a murderous ape) and a grimly amusing bit of dialogue in which three witnesses mistake the ape’s chattering for Italian, Danish and German, respectively. The rest of it was a newly minted tale of Dr. Mirakle (Lugosi), a sideshow entertainer who’s worked out the theory of evolution 22 years before Darwin published The Origin of Species, and who wants to prove his theory by mixing the blood of his pet ape (it’s really an orangutan — or, rather, an actor in an orangutan suit — but it’s referred to in the dialogue as a gorilla) with that of a human female. His first on-screen attempt to try this involves a prostitute (played by Arlene Francis, a startling credit indeed to anyone who knew her as that nice middle-aged woman on the What’s My Line? panel all those years!) who dies from the operation because her blood is already tainted (with syphilis, presumably; we’re not told that, but we can guess). Later a medical student named Dupin (he’s from the Poe story, but both his first name and his profession have been changed) — played by a beefy actor billed as Leon Waycoff, but who was later (and better) known as Leon Ames — figures it out just in time to save his virginal girlfriend (Sidney Fox) from being the latest guinea pig in Lugosi’s sinister experiment. Though a bit slow and suffering from the absence of a musical score, Murders in the Rue Morgue is a fine, atmospheric horror film, giving Lugosi a better showcase than Dracula did, with beautiful expressionistic sets (at times the buildings of Paris seem about to cave in on the characters!) obviously influenced by The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari — and though the overall script is by Dale Van Every, Tom Reed and Richard Schayer, John Huston (of all people) gets an “additional dialogue” credit. It’s a neat movie, and surprisingly sexy for the period (the middle of Hollywood glasnost). — 10/26/98
•••••
Charles and I ran another from the classic Universal horror
collections: Murders in the Rue Morgue,
one of the unsung masterpieces of the Universal cycle and one of Bela Lugosi’s
two best-ever starring vehicles (along with White Zombie, made the same year, also filmed at Universal but for
an independent producer who was just renting the space). Oddly, the film began
as a consolation prize for its star, Lugosi, and its director, Robert Florey
(an actual Frenchman directing a story about Paris — what a novelty!) because
Lugosi had turned down the original Frankenstein (supposedly because he didn’t want to play a part
without any actual dialogue — a claim supported by the fact that when he
finally did play the Frankenstein
monster, in Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, he signed for the film on the basis of a script in
which the monster does speak,
though the monster’s lines were erased from the final release) and Florey had
been taken off the project in favor of James Whale, the British wunderkind who had had hits with Journey’s End (which he’d previously directed on stage) and the
1931 version of Waterloo Bridge. Florey
originally wrote a script for the film that stuck closely to the original 1843
story by Edgar Allan Poe (which was actually an episode in his
detective-mystery series featuring the hero, C. Auguste Dupin — called “Pierre
Dupin” in the film and played by Leon Waycoff, later known as Leon Ames, who as
I once joked to Charles was the one degree of separation between Lugosi and
Judy Garland!), but the “suits” at Universal turned it down because they wanted
a horror film rather than a mystery, so Florey and his credited writers, Tom
Reed, Dale Van Every, Richard Schayer and John Huston (credited with
“additional dialogue” — he’d got a screenwriting job at Universal because his
father, Walter Huston, was making two films there and wanted him on the writing
staff, and this was the first film on which John Huston was credited that did not involve his dad), came up with a mélange of Dracula, Frankenstein and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Dr. Mirakle (Lugosi) is operating a concession in a carnival
sideshow that features an ape called “Erik” (Charles Gemorra, doubled in some
scenes by Joe Bonomo and in others by a real chimpanzee, even though the
character is supposed to be a gorilla), whom he is exhibiting as proof positive
of the theory of evolution. (The setting is 1845, two years after Poe published
the original story and 14 years before Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species.)
Mirakle wants to mingle Erik’s blood with that of a
human woman in order to prove his theory, but so far he’s experimented with two
women, unsuccessfully, and disposed of their corpses via a Sweeney
Todd-ish trap door under his experimental
setup — which actually involves chaining the unfortunate women to an X-shaped
cross that looks more like something you’d find in an S/M dungeon than in a
scientific laboratory. The film opens with a series of traveling shots through
a Caligari-esque Paris (this film
is probably the closest a mainstream Hollywood producer ever came to the Caligari look; the art directors, Charles D. Hall and an
uncredited Herman Rosse, went all-out to suggest the Expressionist sets of Caligari), with buildings that slant and hang uncomfortably
over the people who walk by them, before we discover the carnival and see Dupin
there with his girlfriend, Camille L’Esplanaye (Sidney Fox, top-billed —
according to Bette Davis, she and studio head Carl Laemmle, Jr. were having an
affair, which meant she got quite a few parts that were beyond her abilities,
including the lead in Strictly Dishonorable for which Davis had been brought to Hollywood and
Universal in the first place), his comic-relief roommate Paul (Bert Roach, who
unlike most of the “comic relief” figures in these movies is actually genuinely
funny) and his girlfriend
Mignette (Edna Marion). Not surprisingly, when Dupin and Camille see the
gorilla, the beast takes a shine to Camille (even taking the bonnet off her
head and cradling it) and an instant aversion to Dupin, “planting” a Beauty
and the Beast-like attraction between the
two that almost exactly mirrors the plot of the as-yet-unmade King
Kong.
In the next scene, Mirakle picks up a character identified
only as “Woman of the Streets” (a truly bizarre credit for Arlene Francis —
and, aside from a part in Orson Welles’ never-released filmed inserts for the
play Too Much Johnson in 1938, she
didn’t make another movie until All My Sons, also for Universal, in 1948!) and, right after two
men have killed each other over her (it’s that kind of movie, getting its shocks as much from the
amorality of the overall setting as from any specific scene), Mirakle takes her
to his dungeon, straps her to the S/M cross and gets ready to perform his
experiment, only first he looks at her blood under his microscope and declares
it unsuitable: “Your BLOOD is as BLACK as your SINS!” Lugosi thunders in his
most hysterically anguished tones (obviously, in this “pre-Code” film, we’re
supposed to read this as an infection with syphilis or some other similarly
intractable STD), and just then the “Woman of the Streets” expires and Lugosi’s
manservant Janos (Noble Johnson) throws the switch on the trap door and pitches
her body into the Seine. In this version, Pierre Dupin is a medical student who
bribes the coroner to get interesting specimens from the morgue so he can study
them, and he’s the one who makes the connection between the latest victim and
the previous two; he sees the injection marks (which serve the same purpose in
this film as the throat punctures in Dracula) and realizes, once he examines the victims’ blood
under his microscope, that they died from a reaction from the ape’s blood
injected into them.
Meanwhile, Camille receives a replacement bonnet from
Mirakle — indicating, since she’d refused to tell him where she lived, that
he’s been stalking her — and one night Mirakle sends Erik to kill Camille’s
mother (Betsy Ross Clarke) and abduct her. In the one major incident of the
film actually taken from Poe’s story, Camille’s mother is shoved up the chimney
of her room and three witnesses, having heard the chatter of an ape, insist
that the killer spoke Italian, Danish and German, respectively. Dupin has to
fight off a stupid police prefect (Brandon Hurst) who wants to arrest him, but eventually he figures out that Camille has been
kidnapped and taken to Mirakle’s redoubt in the Rue Morgue, whereupon he chases
him there with a squad of gendarmes in tow, and Dupin rescues Camille just
before Mirakle can inject her with the ape serum, Erik kills Mirakle, Dupin
kills Janos and Erik and, in the end, Mirakle’s body is received by the
coroner. Murders in the Rue Morgue
is notable not only for its audacity — its links of sexual perversion and
murder are pretty strong stuff now
and an indication of some of the things Hollywood’s kinkier directors could get
away with in the early 1930’s — but also the other, later films it influenced: King
Kong (in this one the ape is normal-sized,
but certainly the theme of an ape who runs wild through a city and can only be
tamed by a woman is common to both films!), The Mummy and Mystery of the Wax Museum (also about demented geniuses who kidnap women and
not only put them through procedures that will kill them but seem convinced
that they’re doing these women a favor by doing so!), as well as all those
dreary mad-scientist movies Lugosi would ultimately make at PRC, Monogram and
even cheaper studios. Though somewhat hamstrung by the lack of a music score, Murders
in the Rue Morgue is a far better film than
Dracula: the writing is sharper
and wittier, the direction more assured (Florey keeps the camera in almost
constant motion, propelling us into the action instead of forcing us to watch
it at a distance) and Lugosi’s performance — perhaps because he wasn’t playing a part he’d done on stage for two years —
fresher and more vital. — 10/20/08
•••••
Charles happened to have mentioned
while we were in Balboa Park that yesterday was the anniversary of the birth of
Edgar Allan Poe — which gave me an idea for our movie night: instead of making
him sit through a typical Lifetime modern-day melodrama like last night’s
“Premiere,” Murder in the Suburbs a.k.a.
Secrets by the Lake, I’d dig out
the back files of Universal’s classic 1930’s horror movies and show him two
films at least nominally inspired by Poe. I got out the Universal boxed set The
Bela Lugosi Collection and noted that not
only did four of the five films in this box also feature Boris Karloff (thereby
encompassing half of the eight films Karloff and Lugosi both appeared in) but
at least three of them had nominal bases in Poe: Murders in the Rue
Morgue (1932), The Black Cat (1934) and The Raven (1935). I ran Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Black Cat, both of which I’ve seen many times before, both of
which had interesting commonalities — though neither have much to do with the
Poe stories they were nominally based on, they were both made by highly
talented non-American directors (Robert Florey and Edgar G. Ulmer,
respectively) who made “B” movies so well they got pretty much stuck in the “B”
realms and didn’t get the chance to strike out into “A” features with “A”-list
casts the way other “B” directors like Joseph H. Lewis and John Brahm did. I’ve
long thought Murders in the Rue Morgue is one of Lugosi’s two best starring vehicles (White Zombie, produced by an independent company but actually
filmed at Universal, is the other), largely because — unlike the surprisingly
dull 1930 Dracula, which is of
interest only for the performances of Lugosi and Dwight Frye — it’s a
brilliantly made movie.
Director Robert Florey was actually French, but he
couldn’t have been less interested in realistically depicting 1845 Paris, where
the story is nominally set (later, working as Chaplin’s assistant and technical
advisor on the 1947 film Monsieur Verdoux, he had long, frustrating arguments with Chaplin trying to get him to
make the film, nominally set in France, look more “French”). Instead, he,
cinematographer Karl Freund (the German genius who’d worked on some of the
Weimar-era classics and had got a brilliant tracking shot of Dracula’s coffin
collection, including his three vampire brides, into the otherwise surprisingly
static 1930 Dracula movie) and
art director Charles D. Hall went all-out to copy the look of the famous
Expressionist 1919 German film The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, down to and including the fantastically “bent”
buildings in the slum parts of Paris. Oddly, the star billing in this film went
to Sidney Fox — a girl named Sidney and apparently the mistress of Carl
Laemmle, Jr., whose father had founded Universal and who put “Junior” (as he
was ubiquitously known) in charge of it at age 20 — as “Madame Camille
L’Espanaye,” girlfriend of aspiring medical student Pierre Dupin (played by an
actor billed here as “Leon Waycoff” but far better known later as Leon Ames —
he was the father of the family in Meet Me in St. Louis and is therefore the one degree of separation
between Bela Lugosi and Judy Garland!), who encounters sideshow exhibitor Dr.
Mirakle (Bela Lugosi) and his pet ape Erik (we’re told he’s a gorilla but
sometimes he’s played by Charles Gemora in his fabled gorilla suit and
sometimes, especially in his close-ups, by a real chimpanzee even though chimps
are considerably smaller than gorillas). Dr. Mirakle is an early believer (14
years before Charles Darwin!) in the theory of evolution — his sideshow act
includes a lecture on it, and when Mirakle is challenged on it by a heckler
from the audience who accuses him of heresy, he replies, “Heresy? Do they still
burn men for heresy? Then burn me
monsieur, light the fire! Do you think your little candle will outshine the
flame of truth?” — which reminds one (well, me anyway) that this film was made just seven years
after the 1925 Scopes trial, when the debate over evolution was still very much
a public concern (as it still is, incredibly, today!)
The rich, fruity dialogue
(the credited writers are Dale Van Every, Tom Reed and “additional dialogue” by
the young John Huston, who got a job at famously nepotistic Universal because
his dad Walter Huston was a star there), beautifully delivered by Lugosi in his
stylized version of English (he never learned more than the most basic English
and learned his scripts phonetically — though one imdb.com “Trivia” contributor
noted that on the rare occasions when Lugosi speaks French in this nominally
French-set film he speaks it perfectly; apparently Lugosi had learned quite good French as a second language
even though he never troubled to learn English despite living and working for
over 30 years as an actor in an English-speaking country), is thrilling.
Forrest J. Ackerman recalled that a year or so before Lugosi died he dug up a
copy of the Vitaphone soundtrack records for Murders in the Rue
Morgue and played them for Lugosi
(Universal actually issued their first sound films with Movietone sound-on-film
soundtracks but they may have made Vitaphone versions available for the
theatres that had gone with Vitaphone instead of Movietone or the system that
eventually became standard, Photophone), and Lugosi’s whole face lit up on
hearing the performance he’d delivered a quarter-century earlier. Dr. Mirakle
intends to prove his theory of evolution by infusing a human woman with the
blood of Erik the ape, and his first research subject (at least the first one
we see) is a “Woman of the Streets” played by, of all people, the young Arlene
Francis, who had just signed a starlet contract with Universal and, as her
first assignment, played the role of a prostitute who’s rescued from a pimp
intent on beating her by Mirakle and his sidekick — only to be given a worse
fate: she’s tied to the sort of sideways cross favored by S/M practitioners and
readied to become the bride of Erik when Mirakle, looking at her blood through
a microscope, declares that “your blood is as black as your sins!”
and leaves her to die on the tilted cross. (Even for a movie made during the
nominally “pre-Code” era of 1930-1934, the clear implication that Francis’s
character is a prostitute suffering from at least one STD, and possibly more,
is surprisingly daring.) He has his sidekick cut a rope that drops her body into
the waters of the Seine below the building he’s using as a live-work space —
and later we learn that he’s disposed of at least three other would-be subjects
that way. Dupin has become interested in these bizarre murders and has realized
that the victims did not die of
drowning, as the police had originally assumed, but from a foreign substance
introduced into their blood.
Meanwhile, when Dupin and Camille visited the
carnival at which Mirakle was exhibiting, Erik the ape had got a crush on
Camille and stolen her bonnet. Mirakle had asked her where she lived so he
could send her a replacement; she refused to tell him but he sent his sidekick
after her to follow her, and later he has Erik kidnap her — though the ape is
discovered by Camille’s mother (Betsy Ross Clarke) and kills mom by shoving her
up a chimney. This, and the following scene in which three other tenants in
Camille’s building insist that the chattering of the ape was actually a foreign
language — a German insists it was Italian, an Italian insists it was Danish,
and a Dane insists it was German (and when the German, played by German
character actor Herman Bing, takes umbrage at this he starts speaking angry
rapid-fire German that anticipates Adolf Hitler’s speaking style) — are the
only parts of the film that actually derive from Poe’s story, in which the
central character was called “C. Auguste Dupin” and was a quite obvious
precursor of Sherlock Holmes. It ends with Mirakle about to subject Camille to
the ape-to-human blood transfusion (and possibly worse) — since she’s a virgin
her blood is “perfect!” — when Dupin arrives, the ape kills Mirakle and then
flees with Camille’s body. Though the ape isn’t giant-sized, this part of the
film oddly parallels King Kong —
the ape fleeing across the roofs of a cityscape holding the human woman he has
a crush on, and the hero waiting for him to put her down so he can shoot the
ape and the ape can do a picturesque fall off the top of a building into the
Seine. The two films were actually in production at the same time so it’s an
open guess as to whether the similarities were coincidental or, if they
weren’t, who influenced whom. Murders in the Rue Morgue is a quite good film, powered by Lugosi’s
supercharged performance, Florey’s evocative direction and Freund’s almost
constantly moving camera. It was also rather ironic viewing after we’d just
been to see the William-Adolphe Bougereau exhibit at the San Diego Museum of
Art, since Sidney Fox’s makeup (by Jack P. Pierce) and costuming were clearly
meant to make her look like one of Bougereau’s idealized proletariennes. — 1/20/20
