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3.0étoiles sur 5
Bela Lugosi Shines In Atmospheric Horror Tale, Mars 17 2004
While certainly not the best short story produced by the legendary Edgar Allan Poe the basic outline, although greatly altered in parts makes an ideal vehicle for the talents of horror veteran Bela Lugosi. Fresh from his triumph as "Dracula", the role of demented scientist Dr. Mirakle was a role Lugosi was ideally suited to and he makes the most of his screen time here in an otherwise partly weak production that is big on atmosphere and menace but lacking in real action to keep the story moving. The film compensates for its often slow pace with some splendid camerawork courtesy of Karl Frund who created an almost surreal Paris setting that was heavily influenced by the earlier German Expressionist filmmakers that brought the classic story of "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari", so memorably to life. Visually a treat for the viewers eye with its elongated architecture, dark lighting and rich attention to detail, the deficiences in the basic story can be often overlooked in this first of many versions of this famous Edgar Allan Poe story.Set in Paris in 1874 "Murders in the Rue Morgue", tells the unsettling story of a demented scientist and part time side show hypnotist Dr. Mirakle who has been conducting bizzare experiments to do with man's evolutionary process.He believes that he can prove the link that he feels links man's development from apes by the successful mixing of the two species blood. To find specimens for his experiments however Mirakle takes to roaming the mist shrouded streets of Paris at night preying on prostitutes who he then lures to his laboratory. Once they are in his grasp he conducts his sinister experiments whereby he mixes their blood with that of his caged ape Erik who is featured in his sideshow. When predictably the experiments fail Dr. Mirakle unceremoniously dumps the unfortunate women's bodies through a trapdoor into the river Seine below. Alarm starts to rise when the bodies begin to appear at the morgue with the same tell tale surgical marks on their bodies. After his failed attempts Dr. Mirakle chances upon a young girl Camille L'Espanaye (Sidney Fox), who with her fiancee Pierre Dupin (Leon Ames), happens to attend the Doctor's performance with Erik the ape one night at the sideshow. Dr. Mirakle is totally smitten by the young girl and sees her pure qualities as ideal in his experiments to become the "bride of the gorilla" which he believes have failed so far because of the tainted blood of the prostitutes he has been using. When his repeated attempts to make contact with Camille fail, even after he sends her a lavish new bonnet to replace the one Erik stole from her during the performance Dr. Mirakle takes matters into his own hands. After the sideshow moves on he remains in Paris and plots to kidnap Camille for his own use in his experiments. Employing Erik to kidnap the girl the ape breaks into Camille's apartment killing her mother and taking the unconscious girl back to Dr. Mirakle's Laboratory. Pierre in the meanwhile has suspected Mirakle of foul play all along and goes in pursuit of his fiancee's kidnapper. With the aid of the Paris police they manage to break into Dr. Mirakle's laboratory but not before Mirakle is himself killed by Erik who claiming Camille as his own climbs up onto the Paris rooftops in a futile attempt to escape with his prey. Pierre manages to follow him over the dangerously angled rooftops and in the thrilling climax that recalls the famous last scene of "King Kong", shoots Erik and is reunited with Camille. In many ways "Murders in the Rue Morgue", has a quite sordid and surprisingly sexual nature to it and at the time of release ran into a number of censorship problems that resulted in the story being edited and watered down in parts from its original form. The idea of blending the blood of young women with an ape was bound to be looked upon as quite depraved and unseemly and even today the scenes in Dr. Mirakle's lab where he has the young prostitute (Arlene Francis),tied to an "X" frame while he opens her veins is quite sexually charged and very disturbing. The scene of the girl screaming in pain is not minimalised at all and is without a doubt the most disturbing image from the film. Dr. Mirakle's complete lack of feeling or even sympathy for his unfortunate victims also lends this film a sinister edge as well. Bela Lugosi was horrifically made up for this role with curly ruffled hair and eyebrows that join in the middle and combined with his piercing eyes creates an unforgettable horror image. Director Robert Florey here works wonders with a slow moving story and in all their work together teams well with Bela Lugosi. Earlier deprived of helming the classic "Frankenstein", here he definately has a lesser story to work with but makes the most of projecting a sinister quality in particular with Lugosi's character. The film's great age is betrayed in its special effects with the disjointed shots of Erik the Ape who is obviously a man in a gorilla suit for the long shots and then in the closeups is a real ape of a lighter colour who bares no resemblance to the ape in the longshots. That aside it's a production strong on atmosphere and fairly low of suspense from Universal's golden age of horror that will still please film buffs. The basic story has proven popular with film makers and has been remade at least 3 times in later years. While Bela Lugosi will always be remembered for his more famous roles such as "Dracula", "The Raven", and "White Zombie", his work in this film given the characters limitations, is first rate and goes a long way towards explaining why he will always be considerd one of filmdom's horror greats. The premise of this story may surprise you with its very blatant sexual elements but all in all it is an enjoyable if not top rate horror effort from Universal Studios, the legendary home of Hollywood's unforgettable horror films and stars. Enjoy
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3.0étoiles sur 5
Dr. Mirakle's Monkey, Avril 18 2003
In comparison to such Universal Poe "adaptations" as The Black Cat or The Raven, Murders in the Rue Morgue is almost faithful to the original-almost! Poe used the story as a showcase to introduce C. Auguste Dupin, the first literary detective, to the public. A financially independent recluse and spiritual kinsman of Roderick Usher, Dupin, who solves crimes for his own disinterested ratiocinative pleasure, is called in by the Parisian police whenever it runs up against a brick wall in its investigations. In this case, a woman and her daughter have been brutally murdered under suspicious circumstances, and Dupin is able to show-to the consternation of the authorities-that the culprit was a runaway orangutan belonging to a sailor, and not a human agent.
The studio eliminated Dupin as a character altogether, but retained the Parisian setting, placing the story in the 1840s, as well as the idea of a woman who has been mysteriously killed by an unknown assailant. However, into the straightforward framework of the Poe story, Universal inserted the proverbial 500lb. gorilla in more than one sense of the word, since what the movie boils down to is a woman copulating with a great ape, if anyone stopped to think about it-as I am sure some audience members did, even back then.
The simian in question now belongs to Dr. Mirakle (Bela Lugosi), a mountebank and mad scientist evidently patterned after Dr. Caligari, although the name Mirakle has even deeper roots in the German past, reaching back to the stories of E.T.A. Hoffmann, as fans of Jacques Offenbach's great opera The Tales of Hoffmann will quickly realize. Mirakle's mad scheme is to prove a primitive evolutionary theory by "mating" Erik, his pet primate, with a human female. What would Peter Singer have said? Unfortunately, all of his attempts hitherto have been made with ladies of the street, and have failed when his subjects turned out to be sexually infected. But a light dawns after Mirakle encounters the beautiful, young, and presumably virginal Camille L'Espanaye (Sidney Fox) when she visits his sideshow at a carnival. Doesn't Erik seem attracted to her? Hmmmm...
Most of the great horror films of the early sound period had a latent sexual content all too evident today. But while the Universal productions were for the most part relatively straightlaced for the pre-Code days, Murders in the Rue Morgue is almost improbably scabrous. Not only does it feature interspecies coitus combined with side glances at prostitution and venereal disease, but it includes a scene in which Mirakle tortures a woman bound to a rack that could have come straight out of Sade. (If I am correct, the same prop rack reappears in The Black Cat.)
Here the movie ventures into the netherworld of exploitation subsequently populated by hacks like Dwayne Esper, although it may have been primarily influenced by Allan Dwan's stylishly lurid Paris after Midnight, produced by Fox the year before, which had encountered problems of its own with the Hays Office. In The Monster Show, David J. Skal even goes off on a tangent trying to make Dr. Mirakle into an avatar of the Nazi butcher Dr. Josef Mengele. But the principal resources of Murders in the Rue Morgue are the sadism and racism that already figure explicitly in the Poe story, the staple ingredients of many a production in those years, not crypto-fascism.
This louche little opus was the work of Robert Florey, a rather enigmatic figure in the history of American movies. French born, Florey had a career that extended over several decades in Hollywood, co-directing the Marx brothers' first movie, The Cocoanuts (1929), and assisting Charlie Chaplin in the shooting of Monsieur Verdoux, among other chores. Florey had originally been scheduled to direct Frankenstein with Bela Lugosi as the monster, and had even shot some tests, before Universal prudently handed over the picture to James Whale and Boris Karloff, giving Florey and Lugosi this assignment instead. But one of Florey's brainstorms made its way into the final version of Frankenstein: the windmill in which the monster burns to death.
Certainly Florey provides a very atmospheric recreation of Paris in the era of Louis Phillipe. With the photography of Karl Freund and the stylized décor of Charles D. Hall, the film almost seems a homage to Ufa at moments, especially in the fairground scenes whose indebtedness to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari movie buffs will easily recognize. Yet Murders in the Rue Morgue, in spite of a chase over the roofs of Paris in the last reel, is curiously low on suspense, as comparison with The Mummy, directed by Freund in the same year for the same studio, reveals. Nothing in the Florey even remotely approaches the electric excitement of the scene in the latter movie in which a young archaeologist inadvertently revives the mummy by translating the Scroll of Thoth. An even more interesting comparison would be with Edgar G. Ulmer's later Bluebeard (available on DVD), also with a nineteenth century Parisian setting, made on a much tighter budget than the Florey, but which gets far more imaginative mileage for its money.
Bela Lugosi is good as Dr. Mirakle, but the role does not afford him the opportunity to display his idiosyncratic talents to the extent that his parts in Dracula, White Zombie, or The Black Cat did. Otherwise, the cast is disappointingly bland for such a wildly overwrought subject. But the credits do contain one surprise: the name of John Huston, who shares credit with Tom Reed and Dale Van Every for writing the screenplay of this least Hustonian of movies. Talk about strange bedfellows!
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3.0étoiles sur 5
A VINTAGE CHILLER, Oct. 1 2002
Two young couples go to a Parisian carnival in 1845. There they are captivated by a self-proclaimed scientist who claims that evolution can be proven by the blending of human blood with that of apes. His pet ape - named Erik - seems to be attracted to one of the young ladies whose name is Camille...Based upon Edgar Allan Poe's 1843 novellette, this sometimes hokey and rather corny melodrama is an acceptable entry in Universal's world of vintage horror flicks. As Dr. Mirakle, Bela Lugosi plays his role with intense relish. The highly stylized sets are quite reminiscent of those which appeared in the 1919 silent classic THE CABINET OF DR. CALIGARI. Television's Arlene Francis had her brief bit of movie stardom in her playing of a partially clothed lady of the pavements who's murdered and strains of Tchaikovsky's SWAN LAKE can be heard by those who like Classical music. Among the young ingenues who were tested for the part of Mlle. Camille L'Espanaye was Bette Davis - the producers decided she lacked sex appeal - so the tiny (4'11") Sidney Fox was given the role. Fox and Davis both made their film debut in a forgotten 1931 Universal potboiler entitled BAD SISTER. Fox had the lead as the vixen, while Davis played the drab essence of sweet simplicity: in 1942 Fox, unsuccessful in films, committed suicide. Bette Davis was the Queen of Hollywood.
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