Murders in the Rue Morgue

ATMOSPHERIC BUT FLAWED UNIVERSAL HORROR
As the story goes, Director Robert Florey was all set to direct Frankenstein. But James Whale who had directed the critically acclaimed films Journey's End and Waterloo was allowed to choose any film he wanted for his next project and he chose Frankenstein, leaving Florey the door prize of Murders in the Rue Morgue. It wasn't all a booby prize however. Florey got a solid cast with Lugosi playing the bushy-haired, uni-browed Dr. Mirakle and Leon Ames playing medical student Pierre Dupin. Ames was a credible actor who made over 100 films and worked in TV including a three year stint on "Mr. Ed." Also in the cast was a young Arlene Francis who plays one of Mirakles early, tortured victims.

Set in Paris of the 1800's, The plot surrounds the Crazy Mirakle's plan to inject females with the blood of a gorilla to prove his theory that man evolved from the ape. While never specifically mentioned, he needs the subject to be a virgin. After one female doesn't work out Mirakle...

A Classic of the Genre
Showing a strong hommage to the silent "Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" and strangely anticipating "King Kong" in certain sequences, "Murders in the Rue Morgue" is an atmospheric thriller which remains surprisingly gruesome some sixty years after it was made. At the time of its release, the film was considered so grotesque that it ran into considerable censorship trouble in Europe, particularly in England. A very tight running running time (just over an hour) keeps the action flowing, and the laboratory scenes are particularly shuddery. A classic of the genre.

Dr. Mirakle's Monkey
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...

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