Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932)
Sep. 22nd, 2005 09:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
randy_byersSome movies are best watched when intoxicated. These are movies that are visually ravishing but with lousy scripts and bad acting. One of my favorite movies of this type is Legend, Ridley Scott's botched Faerie follow-up to Blade Runner. It is a visual feast that builds off of Fritz Lang's Die Nibelungen and Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast but suffers horribly from an uneven, over-ripe script and a miscast Tom Cruise. But late at night, deep in my cups, it is a treasure of twinkling, gleaming, glowing imagery and wonderfully weird, fierce fairies -- the script and Tom Cruise be damned.
Murders in the Rue Morgue appears to be another candidate for Best When Drunk. I saw it once on late-night TV as an adolescent, and I found it ploddingly slow and dull and stupid, but creepy enough to keep me watching through the dumb stuff. Coming to it again thirty years later -- on the recently released Bela Lugosi Collection from Universal -- after having become more familiar with German silent films and the pre-Code sound films in the meantime, I can see that if you can ignore the banal love story and horrific comic relief (nothing says "American melting pot" like red-faced, jowl-shuddering ethnic humor), this is actually quite a fascinating movie both visually (even the painfully bad scenes are beautifully lit and photographed) and in the murky, hysterical subtext of the story. If you can just ignore the bad dialog and bad acting ... and that's where the alcohol comes in.
Both visually and narratively, Murders in the Rue Morgue owes a lot to the 1920 silent horror film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The set designs for mid-19th-century Paris have that teetering, dark German expressionist look, and trouble comes to town in the form of mad doctor who has a sideshow in a carnival. Bela Lugosi plays Dr. Mirakle, and his sidehow is an ape named Eric whose language the good doctor can understand and translate. There is much threatening talk about evolution and humanity's relation to apes. There is much talk of mixing ape and human blood, and there is torture of scantily clad women hung on crosses, all for the purposes of science. The idea of mixed blood and the sight of scantily clad women (not to mention Eric's interest in Our Heroine and violent antipathy toward Our Hero) certainly suggests that the next step is cross-species sex, but the suggestion remains buried in the feverish subtext. The story is incoherent, but considering how badly written it is, it's probably best that some things are left to our imagination.
There are some terrific scenes, and one of my favorites is the one where Noble Johnson, as Mirakle's servant, Janos, cuts a corpse loose from some restraints and drops it in the river. Noble Johnson was a black actor who started up an African-American acting troupe and film company and played bit parts in a zillion movies and a zillion ethnicities. In 1932 alone, he was an Apache in Mystery Ranch, a Nubian in The Mummy, and a white Russian (in white-face!) in The Most Dangerous Game. In 1933 he would play the chief of the village in King Kong, where he actually gets to speak, even if it is only gibberish. As Janos, he makes an impression with three efficient strokes of the axe and a knowing look after the splash.
Mostly, however, what will bring me back to this movie when it's late and the brain is woozy is the look of the thing. Cinematographer Karl Freund learned his craft in Germany on films by Lang and Murnau. If you turn off the soundtrack to this movie, you are looking at an amazingly sophisticated and atmospheric world of deep shadows and silvery light, fluid pockets of light around gaslamps in foggy streets, dim outlines of figures scurrying across peaked rooftops in the moonlight. There is something incredibly erotic about the look of films from this era -- particularly the thrillers -- as glowing skin emerges from the thickening darkness and sinks back again, and swelling shadows are swallowed by the night. Turn off your brain, ignore the words and stilted voices, and drink the shadows in. It's intoxicating.
Murders in the Rue Morgue appears to be another candidate for Best When Drunk. I saw it once on late-night TV as an adolescent, and I found it ploddingly slow and dull and stupid, but creepy enough to keep me watching through the dumb stuff. Coming to it again thirty years later -- on the recently released Bela Lugosi Collection from Universal -- after having become more familiar with German silent films and the pre-Code sound films in the meantime, I can see that if you can ignore the banal love story and horrific comic relief (nothing says "American melting pot" like red-faced, jowl-shuddering ethnic humor), this is actually quite a fascinating movie both visually (even the painfully bad scenes are beautifully lit and photographed) and in the murky, hysterical subtext of the story. If you can just ignore the bad dialog and bad acting ... and that's where the alcohol comes in.
Both visually and narratively, Murders in the Rue Morgue owes a lot to the 1920 silent horror film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The set designs for mid-19th-century Paris have that teetering, dark German expressionist look, and trouble comes to town in the form of mad doctor who has a sideshow in a carnival. Bela Lugosi plays Dr. Mirakle, and his sidehow is an ape named Eric whose language the good doctor can understand and translate. There is much threatening talk about evolution and humanity's relation to apes. There is much talk of mixing ape and human blood, and there is torture of scantily clad women hung on crosses, all for the purposes of science. The idea of mixed blood and the sight of scantily clad women (not to mention Eric's interest in Our Heroine and violent antipathy toward Our Hero) certainly suggests that the next step is cross-species sex, but the suggestion remains buried in the feverish subtext. The story is incoherent, but considering how badly written it is, it's probably best that some things are left to our imagination.
There are some terrific scenes, and one of my favorites is the one where Noble Johnson, as Mirakle's servant, Janos, cuts a corpse loose from some restraints and drops it in the river. Noble Johnson was a black actor who started up an African-American acting troupe and film company and played bit parts in a zillion movies and a zillion ethnicities. In 1932 alone, he was an Apache in Mystery Ranch, a Nubian in The Mummy, and a white Russian (in white-face!) in The Most Dangerous Game. In 1933 he would play the chief of the village in King Kong, where he actually gets to speak, even if it is only gibberish. As Janos, he makes an impression with three efficient strokes of the axe and a knowing look after the splash.
Mostly, however, what will bring me back to this movie when it's late and the brain is woozy is the look of the thing. Cinematographer Karl Freund learned his craft in Germany on films by Lang and Murnau. If you turn off the soundtrack to this movie, you are looking at an amazingly sophisticated and atmospheric world of deep shadows and silvery light, fluid pockets of light around gaslamps in foggy streets, dim outlines of figures scurrying across peaked rooftops in the moonlight. There is something incredibly erotic about the look of films from this era -- particularly the thrillers -- as glowing skin emerges from the thickening darkness and sinks back again, and swelling shadows are swallowed by the night. Turn off your brain, ignore the words and stilted voices, and drink the shadows in. It's intoxicating.
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Date: 2005-09-23 12:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-23 03:43 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-09-23 04:30 pm (UTC)Didn't he do that on Oprah already?
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Date: 2005-09-23 11:03 am (UTC)Keep the reviews coming, they make me want to watch more films. I hate to think how long it's been since I saw this one.
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Date: 2005-09-23 03:49 pm (UTC)The new Lugosi collection also has The Black Cat, which is another visually fascinating, perverse Universal thriller with drippy romantic leads (which you've probably already seen). Somehow art deco and Satanism make an odd combination. Of the other three movies, I've only watched The Raven so far, and there wasn't much there to keep me interested. The two I haven't watched yet are The Invisible Ray and Black Friday.