Classic Films in Focus: MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE (1932)

On paper, Universal's 1932 Murders in the Rue Morgue sounds terrific; it adapts a chilling story from Edgar Allan Poe, stars Bela Lugosi, and offers Expressionist cinematography by Karl Freund, complete with all the lurid sensibility that Pre-Code horror can provide. Unfortunately, the movie doesn't work as well in practice, especially for viewers who know and appreciate Poe's original tale. While Lugosi is truly terrifying as the menacing Dr. Mirakle, the picture suffers from a weak leading man, creaky monster effects, and too much deviation from its source material that also leads it into some extremely thorny issues regarding racist tropes. Fans of Pre-Code horror and/or Edgar Allan Poe might be willing to forgive some of its failings for Lugosi's sake, but overall this is a far less successful picture than stand-out classics like The Black Cat (1934) and Roger Corman's Poe cycle.

Lugosi plays a character who doesn't exist in the original tale, a mad scientist obsessed with proving evolution by injecting the blood of his captive gorilla into beautiful young women. His experiments have inevitably proved fatal to the women, but Dr. Mirakle blames the failure on the women's "impure" blood instead of his own mad theory. When the gorilla takes a particular shine to lovely Camille L'Espanaye (Sidney Fox), Dr. Mirakle plans to kidnap her as his next test subject, but Camille's suitor, Pierre Dupin (Leon Ames), rightly suspects the doctor of having sinister motives.  

Deviations from the source create more problems than opportunities here. Poe's tale focuses on the murders of two women and the clever detective, C. Auguste Dupin, an important forerunner of and inspiration for Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. Weirdly, the Universal picture isn't a detective mystery at all, even though Poe's story is widely considered the original example of the genre. Instead, Leon Ames plays a medical student named Pierre Dupin, who already knows who did it when his sweetheart, Camille, disappears and her mother's corpse is found stuffed up a chimney. Ames is not particularly effective in this role, and the problems are all the more noticeable because Pierre is such a ho-hum hero compared to Poe's brilliant detective. The locked room mystery of the short story gives way to a bizarre mad scientist plot that draws on deeply racist imagery about gorillas as substitutes for Black men and their supposed desire for White women. Mirakle's experiment is a thinly veiled take on miscegenation that results in the deaths of the women whose blood has been "contaminated" by that of the gorilla. None of this comes from Poe's story, in which a pet orangutan gets loose from its owner and cannot really be held responsible for its actions. On a more practical level, the gorilla who replaces Poe's orangutan is very obviously a guy in a bad gorilla suit, except during closeups, when he transforms into an actual chimpanzee. It's a jarring and absurd switch every time it happens, but the movie does it repeatedly, even recycling the same shot of the chimp pressing against the bars of its cage.

All of these problems detract from a fine performance by Lugosi, who certainly knows how to leer menacingly at an audience and deliver a chilling monologue. His face is by far the scariest thing in the movie; its signature feature is an impressive monobrow that sprouts over his trademark burning gaze. The Expressionist influence reaches it high point during the experiment scene with Lugosi's only onscreen victim, a kidnapped streetwalker played by Arlene Francis. Tied to a huge wooden X like a martyr or a witch at the stake, Mirakle's victim exposes a lot of pretty flesh and casts a striking shadow on the laboratory wall. When she dies as a result of his injections, he seems surprised, even though he has her positioned over a convenient trapdoor that drops her body directly into the river. These effective scenes connect Murders in the Rue Morgue to German Expressionist classics like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) and Nosferatu (1922) as well as better Universal horrors like Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931), and The Mummy (1932), reflecting the influence of cinematographer and occasional director Karl Freund after his relocation from Germany to Hollywood.

Robert Florey, who directed Murders in the Rue Morgue, eventually moved to television work, but before that he directed the 1946 horror, The Beast with Five Fingers, starring Peter Lorre. Karl Freund also directed Lorre in another Expressionist horror feature, Mad Love (1935), and I would recommend either Lorre picture over Murders in the Rue Morgue. Leon Ames is much more in his element in Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), A Date with Judy (1948), and Little Women (1949); Murders in the Rue Morgue was one of his first screen appearances, and it's not really his fault that he's miscast. Poe adaptations and loose retellings abound, with the most recent being the 2023 Netflix miniseries, The Fall of the House of Usher. Roger Corman, however, still reigns as the king of Poe on film, with Vincent Price as his star of choice. Start with Corman's House of Usher (1960) and proceed to Tales of Terror (1962) and The Tomb of Ligeia (1964) for a sample of their best efforts.

Classic Films in Focus: THE BEAST WITH FIVE FINGERS (1946)

The Beast with Five Fingers (1946) is a surprisingly effective chiller from director Robert Florey and screenwriter Curt Siodmak, who also penned horror classics like The Wolf Man (1941) and I Walked with a Zombie (1943). For genre fans, the chief draw of the picture is Peter Lorre as an obsessed astrologist, but Lorre gets competition for our attention from the ambulatory human hand that gives the movie its title. Well-executed special effects, interesting characters, and a score by Max Steiner all contribute to the film's appeal, with J. Carrol Naish putting in a particularly entertaining appearance as the police commissioner in charge of unraveling the mystery of the murderous hand.

Lorre plays Hilary Cummins, the secretary to Francis Ingram (Victor Francen), a crippled pianist living in a lavish Italian villa. Ingram's obsessive attachment to his attractive nurse, Julie (Andrea King), makes her decide to leave, but before she can depart Ingram dies under somewhat suspicious circumstances. Strange events then begin to occur, and it appears that the dead man's hand may be on the loose. Julie and her friend, Bruce Conrad (Robert Alda), become pariahs to the locals because of the bad luck of the house, while Hilary claims to have seen the killer hand in action. Meanwhile, Ingram's greedy relatives try to undermine the validity of a will that leaves the entire estate to Julie, including the books vital to Hilary's astrological research.

While the cast is solid across the board, Lorre stands out for his portrayal of the decidedly weird astrologist, who lurks around the corners of the villa's many rooms and rapidly comes unglued once the hand starts wreaking havoc. It's never hard to believe in Lorre as a head case, but Hilary starts out as a more subtle example of the type and builds up to full blown insanity, when we find him wild-eyed and wielding a hammer against his dismembered nemesis. J. Carroll Naish also deserves special attention as the police chief, who brings some levity to the situation but is smart enough to figure out the case. Naish invests the character with so much personality that we aren't surprised when he gets the picture's closing scenes. The young couple played by Andrea King and Robert Alda are there for the romance and to give us someone to root for, with Alda's somewhat shifty character a nice change from the usual straight arrow types who fill this role. In contrast to them we get Charles Dingle and John Alvin as Ingram's obnoxious brother-in-law and  nephew, who are both so mercenary that the audience longs to see the hand get a grip on them. Victor Francen doesn't have many scenes before his character gets killed, but he does a fine job setting the stage for the vengeful hand with his virtuoso airs.

Two additional elements, special effects and music, make The Beast with Five Fingers memorable. Several techniques bring the hand to life, and we see it accomplish all kinds of strange feats, from playing the piano to crawling across the floor. It's very similar to Thing from The Addams Family, but instead of being played for laughs this hand gives us the creeps. Its escape from the pianist's tomb evokes a marvelous sense of dread, and the one-handed corpse gripping a knife in its remaining fingers suggests a gruesome act of post-mortem determination. Because the hand has to play by itself, piano music performed with one hand dominates the musical score, especially Bach's haunting "Chaconne in D Minor," as transcribed by Brahms. We first hear it played by Ingram; later, the restless hand performs the piece, with the intensity reaching its peak during the film's climax. Max Steiner, best remembered for creating the iconic theme for Gone with the Wind (1939), elevates this production by making us take the musical aspect seriously, with the score for the other scenes also heightening the charged atmosphere.

For more hand horror with Peter Lorre, see Mad Love (1935), in which the actor really gets to cut loose with his madman persona. Other horror movies featuring J. Carroll Naish include Dr. Renault's Secret (1942) and House of Frankenstein (1944), but you'll also find him playing Sitting Bull in Annie Get Your Gun (1950) and Sitting Bull (1954). Robert Florey directed The Marx Brothers in The Cocoanuts (1929) and Bela Lugosi in Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932).