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Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932)
Sep. 22nd, 2005 09:24 amSome 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.
( Rhapsody in black-and-white )
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.
( Rhapsody in black-and-white )
