Brief Notes: Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932)

I remembered this one as being better than it was when I watched it today. Let me reel that in some, I didn’t actually dislike Murders in the Rue Morgue, but I had a hard time with the gorilla.

The shadow of Erik looms over Sidney Fox

For background on the ape I turned to Universal Horrors: The Studio’s Classic Films, 1931-1946 by Tom Weaver, Michael Brunas and John Brunas and pretty quickly discovered why I believed sometimes I was looking at a gorilla and other times a chimp. While Charles Gemora played Erik the Ape throughout most of the picture, Universal head Carl Laemmle, Jr. ordered reshoots using close-ups of a real monkey during post-production. While the original players and the entry in the book mourn the loss of the original version featuring Gemora, I’m not so sure. The monkey looked poor enough from a distance that I can only imagine the close-ups would have been terrible. Who knows, I wasn’t a big fan of either version of Erik.

Number two problem: Sydney Fox. My other experience with poor Sydney, who died of an overdose in 1942, was as the ingenue in The Mouthpiece starring Warren William, which I talked about over on my Warren William fan site. She’s terrible there and she ain’t so good here, and with her limited resume I’m not so sure I’m going to have the opportunity to run into Miss Fox again.

But Bela Lugosi is fantastic here, absolutely perfect for this part. Despite the distracting unibrow, there is no more menacing site in 1930’s film than a Lugosi close-up, especially if there’s fog somewhat obscuring the picture, and there’s apparently lots of fog in 1845 Paris. And what more chilling sound is there than Lugosi’s delivery of his lines, filled with short pauses and a little tough to understand, but often delivered with such fury and always a certainty that elevates him from a curiosity into a star. If there were a way to transport Bela Lugosi, circa 1931-32 to 2009 then I say remake this that way, but, otherwise despite its failings I’ll stick with this version of Murders in the Rue Morgue.

Some of Bela’s beliefs which are the basis behind the plot of Murders in the Rue Morgue seem pretty controversial for 1932! When he first presents Erik to a carnival crowd including Fox and her beau played by Leon Waycoff (later Leon Ames) he tells the shocked crowd that Erik is the first man. He has an gigantic evolutionary chart behind him as he explains the process to a group largely silenced and shaking their heads and left me wondering what year the Scopes Monkey Trial was (1925).

But that’s Bela the showman, then, of course, we have Bela the mad scientist. His goal is to combine the blood of Ape and human to prove that man evolved from ape. You can have a look at his methods immediately below:

That’s actually Arlene Francis as a prostitute who’s blood is being tested by Lugosi’s Dr. Mirakle here. Poor gal failed the test. What Murders in the Rue Morgue never gets to is what happens after a young lady, always a young lady, passes the test as Sydney Fox’s character, who Erik the Ape has a great attraction too, later does. Despite being a pre-code film I don’t think Murders in the Rue Morgue could have alluded any more to this fate than it already does!

Stand-out scenes include the brutal knife fight witnessed by Lugosi just before he picks up Francis; the discovery of the body of the Fox character’s mother, shoved feet first up a chimney, after Erik’s rampage; and the rooftop climax with Waycoff/Ames, who really doesn’t rate much mention here otherwise.

Murders in the Rue Morgue is a bargain on Amazon where it’s included with 4 other Universal horror classics all starring Bela Lugosi: The Bela Lugosi Collection (Murders in the Rue Morgue / The Black Cat / The Raven / The Invisible Ray / Black Friday)

Note to my magazine collecting friends, the first publication of Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue can be found inside the April 1841 issue of Graham’s Magazine.

About “Brief Notes” – Falling somewhere in between a Tweet and an Article, Brief Notes are basically a record of my stream of conscious thoughts soon after viewing a classic film. They are opinion and observation … Read more on the About page

Tags: Bela Lugosi, Edgar Allan Poe, Leon Ames, Leon Waycoff, Murders in the Rue Morgue, Robert Florey, Sydney Fox, Universal Horror