Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932 film)
Murders in the Rue Morgue is a 1932 American pre-Code horror film, based on Edgar Allan Poe's 1841 short story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue". Bela Lugosi, one year after his performance as Dracula, portrays a lunatic scientist who abducts women and injects them with blood from his ill-tempered caged ape.
This film was produced as a compensatory package for Lugosi and Florey after both were dropped from 1931's Frankenstein. Initially booked with a lower budget, the film's budget increased after the success Universal had with Frankenstein which led to additional scenes shot and re-shoots to be done in December 1931. On the film's release it was not a huge financial success and received negative reviews from critics who commented variously on the acting and narrative.
Plot
In Paris in 1845, Dr. Mirakle, a mad scientist, abducts young women and injects them with ape blood in order to create a mate for his talking sideshow ape Erik.Young Pierre Dupin, a young naive medical student and detective, his fiancée Camille L'Espanaye, and their friends Paul and his girl Mignette visit carnival sideshows, including Mirakle's sideshow, where he exhibits Erik. Both master and servant are enchanted by Camille, whom Mirakle plans to become Erik's mate. He invites her to come and take a closer look at Erik, who grabs Camille's bonnet. Dupin tries to get it back, and Erik tries to strangle him. Mirakle backs him off and offers Camille to replace the bonnet. But Camille is reluctant and suspicious to give the doctor her address, so, when they leave, Mirakle orders his servant Janos to follow her.
One of Mirakle's victims, a prostitute, is found dead in a river, and is fished out and taken to the police station. Dupin wants to examine the girl's blood but the morgue keeper won't allow it. A bribe convinces him to draw some of the blood himself and deliver it to Dupin the next day. Dupin discovers in the blood a foreign substance, also found in the blood of other victims.
Mirakle visits Camille and asks her to visit Erik again, but when she refuses, he sends Erik to kidnap her. Dupin happens to be passing out of the flat, hears her screams, and tries to enter the room but it is locked. The police arrive when the ape has retreated, and Dupin is arrested. Neither Madame L'Espanaye nor her daughter are found. The police prefect interviews three witnesses: Italian Alberto Montani, German Franz Odenheimer and a Dane. All of them state that they had heard Camille screaming and someone else talking in a strange language. Camille's mother is found dead, stuffed in the chimney, and her hand clutching ape fur. Dupin points out from the fur that Erik may be involved.
The police, along with Dupin, run to Mirakle's hideout. Before they arrive, Erik turns against his master and strangles him. He grabs Camille when the police arrive and they chase him. The police shoot Janos in the back when he tries to keep them at bay. Erik, pursued, is cornered on the roof of a small dockside house. He confronts Dupin, who shoots the animal dead and eventually saves his fiancée from the peril.
Cast
Production
In early 1931 while the film Dracula was in release and Frankenstein was being prepared, Universal Pictures came up with the idea of adapting Murders in the Rue Morgue into a film. A story treatment was prepared by April 1931 with Bela Lugosi set to star and George Melford, the director of the Spanish-language version of Drácula to direct. Among the actresses tested for the part of Camille was Bette Davis who, according to Florey, was rejected by Carl Laemmle Jr. for a lack of sex appeal.Later, Robert Florey was decided as the director for the film and the initial budget of $130,000 was cut to $90,000. Florery at one point left production only to return to it.
Filming began on October 19 and finished on November 13, 1931. John Huston is credited in the film for writing additional dialogue in the credits. Huston was working for Universal during the period as a staff writer and commented on his role as trying "to bring Poe's prose style into the dialogue, but the director thought it sounded stilted, so he and his assistants rewrote scenes on the set. As a result, the picture was an odd mixture of nineteenth century grammarian prose and modern colloquialisms."
As Frankenstein was becoming a success in the box office, Universal put the film back into production in December and increased the budget to $186,090 after seven days of retakes and newly developed scenes were added. Further post-production editing involved reordering several scenes in the first half of the film.
Release
Murders in the Rue Morgue was distributed theatrically by Universal Pictures and released on February 21, 1932. Censor boards in the United States abbreviated the death scenes of the woman of the streets and eliminated shots of her stabbing and of her tied up in a laboratory. Other scenes cut by censor boards include scenes with dancing girls and elements of the plot where it suggests man evolved from apes. According to the American Film Institute, despite some sources listing the film having a 75-minute running time, the group could not find any proof it ran at this length. The entry on the films database states that nearly all sources gave the film a running time of 62 minutes except for Film Daily who gave it a running time of 75 minutes.The film was released on DVD as part of the Bela Lugosi Collection in 2005 along with The Black Cat, The Raven, The Invisible Ray, and Black Friday. The film was released by Shout! Factory on Blu-ray in 2019 with two audio commentaries as bonus extras.
Reception
According to the book Universal Horrors, the critical reception on the films release "was harsh". Among contemporary reviews, Andre Sennwarld of The New York Times found the film suffered from "an overzealous effort at terrorization" and the cast was overacting. Variety declared the film as "exed up to the limit" as "Sidney Fox overdraws the sweet ingenue to the point of nearly distracting any audience from any fear it may have for her." The National Board of Review Magazine commented that "the story holds one's interest throughout although the acting is not especially outstanding and the story does not take advantage of the full amount of horror that one would expect from Poe's work." Kate Cameron of the New York Daily News found the film to be an "artificial screen story" while praising the films ending sequence.Among the positive reviews, Bill Swigart of The Hollywood Herald proclaimed the film will "evoke loud praises from those who appreciate the beauty of soft artistic backgrounds in harmony with the beauty of the period and environment" and praised the characterization as "near perfect as one could expect." While reviews commented on the acting negatively, some reviews praised Lugosi in the role. Cameron noted that Lugosi "suggestion of the insanely criminal doctor is effective", while Today's Cinema in Great Britain declared Lugosi role of Dr. Mirakle was portrayed "in a most realistic fashion." The Washington Post declared Lugosi as "a great actor" who "can coin new thrills."
Members of the cast and crew commented on the film much later after release. Florey was hoping the film would jump-start his career and thought the film would have been better if the villain was written out of the script. Florey would leave Universal Pictures after the films release and signed to Warner Bros. where he maintained a four or five pictures a year work flow. Leon Ames also disliked the film, declaring in an interview in Famous Monsters of Filmland that it was "a perfectly awful film which still pops up on TV to haunt me!"