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| Courtesy of Universal Pictures |
Edgar Allen Poe’s short story The Murders in the Rue
Morgue, regarded among bookworms as the first modern detective story, was one
among many renowned literary works to eventually make its way through the
Universal Monsters machine that generated Frankenstein and Dracula.
While Poe’s story involved serial murders
with bits of inhuman hair found at the crime scene, what became the 1932 film
version took those loose elements and ran away with them, conjuring up a tale
involving a carnival sideshow showman Doctor Mirakle (Bela Lugosi) who harbors
a secret mission to kidnap and mix the blood of female victims with that of his
pet gorilla. Although Bela Lugosi and the
Universal Monsters filmography is regularly celebrated, Murders in the Rue
Morgue is the black sheep of the family as a film that’s still debated over
and derided by Golden Age of Horror fans.
It wasn’t liked then and it is unclear if its liked now.
1845 Paris, carnival showman/mad scientist incognito Dr.
Mirakle (Bela Lugosi in a role he’d reprise in The Black Cat and Bride
of the Monster) has been secretly abducting women and injecting them with
ape blood to produce a mate for his pet gorilla. Meanwhile a young medical student and
fledgling detective Pierre Dupin (Leon Ames) attends one of Mirakle’s shows
which attracts the doctor’s unwanted attention when Pierre’s fiancée Camille
(Sidney Fox) inadvertently loses a bonnet to the gorilla. Soon after the doctor sends his servant Janos
(Noble Johnson) to track her down and retrieve her for his bestiality purposes. From here, the bodies start piling up as
prostitutes and even Camille’s mother meet violent ends at the hands of the
gorilla, leading to a grisly showdown between all involved including a death-defying
rooftop chase.
Shedding most of its Poe scales in the process while newer
more aberrant horrors were worked into the script by Tom Reed and Dale Van
Every, the film came at a time when the film’s director Robert Florey and actor
Bela Lugosi (Dracula) began working on Frankenstein before
producer Carl Laemmle Jr. replaced both the actor with Boris Karloff and the
director with James Whale and were subsequently reassigned to take over what
became Universal’s Murders in the Rue Morgue. While the film bared little to no resemblance
to Poe’s text, it did however serve up maybe one of the most controversial and
highly censored horror films to come out of the then-growing Universal Monsters
empire.
Inarguably the most violent and transgressive thing to come
out anywhere in 1932, the film was censored down from its eighty-minute running
time down to sixty-one minutes. Scenes of
a prostitute being stabbed were toned down as well as shots of the body being
tied up in a laboratory and scenes of scantily clad dancing girls and overtones
of bestiality were softened as well.
Moreover,
after the success of Frankenstein, the film was put back into production
with additional financing for reshoots after it was already completed. Much of the studio mandated reshoots were
contested unsuccessfully by Robert Florey who has long since signed off on the
picture expressing dismay with the end result.
In any case, critical and commercial reception of the film was
rough. Critics blasted the film’s
propensity to shock with sex and violence while audiences didn’t flock to the box
office with the same fervor that they did Frankenstein or Dracula.
Despite the negative reception upon release that damaged the
career of Bela Lugosi significantly, causing Universal to revise their contract
with the actor, the film nevertheless did have its supporters with praise
heaped on the film’s German Expressionist visual palette lensed by legendary Metropolis
cinematographer Karl Freund. Though
sets and costumes are on a tighter budget here than the other surrounding Universal
offerings, from a pure image standpoint Murders in the Rue Morgue doesn’t
have the same bright studio patina of Frankenstein. Though lacking music aside from Tchaikovsky’s
Swan Lake in the opening credits ala Dracula, it makes up for the
absence of that sonic component with frightful sounds of screams and ape roars.
It goes without saying this is top-to-bottom Lugosi’s
picture which sees the actor stepping outside of the reserved coolness of Dracula
into more hysterical and frenetic scene chewing. While Lugosi was a master of using his eyes
to penetrate the camera space, here the actor looks genuinely madcap and manic
like a caged animal. Equally
intimidating is Noble Johnson as the film’s Igor of sorts, hunched over with pulsating
eyes. The only somewhat silly element of
the piece (though twisted in context) is the sideshow ape Erik, clearly an
actor (Charles Gemora) in an ape costume.
Scenes like these while they haven’t necessarily aged well nevertheless
show an early period where Hollywood filmmakers began pushing boundaries of
acceptability in film.
Reportedly the film opened in New York to the audience
laughing up the proceedings before going wide eleven days later before censor
boards throughout the United States began scissoring away the offending bits in
the film. Though the film did reasonably
well within its first week, grosses dropped sharply thereafter and despite the
controversies and being rereleased over the years it never made the kind of
money or notoriety Dracula or Frankenstein did.
Still, the film generated a color 3D remake
in 1954 by Warner Brothers and another remake in 1971 which deviated much
further from the source than the 1932 film did.
In Lugosi’s legacy, the film is something of an outlier, a scare fest
that perhaps went too far in its day but represents the actor stepping outside
of his comfort zone to deliver a truly monstrous and reprehensible
character. Hard to believe the Universal
Monsters machine got away with it when they did.
--Andrew Kotwicki
