There’s precious little left of the original story in Universal’s first Edgar Alan Poe adaptation, just enough perhaps to warrant a “suggested by” credit for the author. It was a troubled production and there are times when the problems it faced both during shooting and in post-production are all too evident, though there’s still enough here of interest to mark it as one of the lesser but still  fascinating of that first wave of Universal horrors.

Paris, 1845 in Paris. The mad Dr Mirakle (Bela Lugosi) is abducting young women (scenes of Mirakle stalking prostitutes through foggy city streets were no doubt calculated to evoke Jack the Ripper) and experimenting by injecting them with ape blood in order to create a mate for his sideshow ape, Erik (Charles Gemora in one of his trademark ape suits). Medical student Pierre Dupin (Leon Ames, credited as Leon Waycoff), demoted from the story’s super-sleuth, his fiancée Camille L’Espanaye (Sidney Fox) and their friends Paul (Bert Roach) and Mignette (an uncredited Edna Marion), visit Mirakle’s sideshow and Mirakle becomes obsessed with Camille, as indeed does Erik. Dupin does some investigating of his own and finds a mysterious substance in the blood of a prostitute found dead in Seine. Later, Mirakle despatches Erik to kidnap Camille and Dupin is arrested on suspicion of her murder. Eventually, he’s able to prove to the police (thanks to a clump of ape hair in the hand of Camille’s murdered mother (Betty Ross Clarke), found in a chimney) that he’s innocent and they race to Mirakle’s lair where they shoot Mirakle’s brutish manservant Janos (Noble Johnson) while Erik strangles Mirakle and heads for the rooftops with a terrified Camille for an ending that anticipates the following year’s King Kong (1933).

Chief among the film’s assets is Bela Lugosi, very good as the despicable Mirakle despite being saddled with a terrible hairdo. He drips menace in every scene, his madness never more in evidence than during his infuriated rant about the “rotten” blood of a prostitute (Arlene Francis) he’s just injected Erik’s blood into. The rest of the cast are less impressive, far less memorable than the panoply of memorable supporting turns in Dracula (1931) or Frankenstein (1931). Ames and Fox (Bette Davis had auditioned for the latter’s role – just imagine…) are particularly bland, and the script’s insistence on foregrounding their romance threatens to bring the mid-section to a halt. And poor Noble Johnson, despite being billed as “Janos the black one,” is bizarrely, and to no good effect, subjected to “white face,” almost unrecognisable with a new skin tone that makes him look almost as pale as Mirakle.

The murder of the prostitute, tied to a cruciform in Mirakle’s lair, is strong stuff for 1932. Indeed, it fell foul of censors in some parts of the States who unceremoniously had the offending scene cut from the film entirely. Gone too were some of the more overt references to evolution, at the time still a hot potato in the most conservative corners of the country.

To its credit, Murders in the Rue Morgue is a good-looking film, thanks not only to Karl Freund’s customary top-notch photography, but the sets by Charles D. Hall, some of them repurposed from Frankenstein. Together with Florey they try – not entirely successfully – to bring something of Robert Wiene’s Das Cabinet des Dr Caligari/ The Cabinet of Dr Caligari (1920) to the proceedings. Florey brings some occasional pizzazz to the proceedings – there’s a remarkable shot from a camera strapped to a swing and Mirakle’s first presentation of Erik is beautifully lit and shot. He was clearly an inventive director, not as swashbuckling as Whale, perhaps, but clever and skilled, nonetheless.

But in the end, he was defeated by issues that were partly o his own creation, partly imposed on him by Universal. Murders in the Rue Morgue had a troubled production. Florey was given the film over Universal first choice, Drácula (1931) director George Melford, possibly as compensation for having been replaced as the original director of Frankenstein in favour of James Whale. It had been Florey who had suggested adapting the Poe story for Universal in the first place but the actual making of it proved frustrated. He battled the company over the period setting, didn’t like the script (which features “additional dialogue” from future director John Huston) and at one time walked out on the production completely.

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And his problems weren’t over when he turned the film over to Universal. The score, made of up library cues, proves to be needlessly overbearing but far more damaging was Universal’s decision to trim the film and to rearrange scenes here and there – as originally assembled by Florey, the scene with the murdered prostitute would have come right at the start of the film, getting to off to an incendiary start. Somewhere in all this post-production tinkering, the details of what Mirakle is actually up to have become a bit lost.

But Florey made enough mistakes of his own. Charles Gemora’s ape suit doesn’t match with the intercut close-ups of an angry chimpanzee, filmed at the Selig Zoo. No-one involved can agree on what type of ape it’s meant to – in the original story, it’s an orang-utan, Gemora’s suit looks more like a gorilla, the close ups are of a chimp and it’s referred to in dialogue as a baboon! Elsewhere, Florey’s apparent disinterest in the performances leads to uninspired turns that fail to engage and whoever came up with the final shooting script – several people are credited with Florey taking an adaption credit – the changes to Poe’s story are regrettable. Indeed, only the body stuffed up the chimney and a scene where characters give conflicting accounts of what they saw remain.

So very much the proverbial curate’s egg then. What it gets right, it does very well. There appears to have been a degree of subversiveness in the script that was diluted by cuts, edits and a week of additional shooting (no wonder it’s all a bit of mess) and the resulting film was subjected to harsh reviews from the critics. But if you watch it for Lugosi’s performance, it’s pleasingly off-kilter ambience and can get past the baggy mid-section, less than stellar supporting turns and the less than faithful adaptation of the story (Poe’s admirers were going to have to get used to that) there’s still a lot to enjoy here. Coming between two James Whale masterpieces – Frankenstein and The Old Dark House (1932) – has done it few favours historically but in its own right it’s a flawed, creaky but ultimately enjoyable enough second tier Universal horror.

Cast
Directed by: Robert Florey; Carl Laemmle presents; Produced by: Carl Laemmle Jr; Associate Producer: E.M. Asher; Adaptation: Robert Florey; Screen Play: Tom Reed, Dale Van Every; Based on the immortal classic by Edgar Allan Poe; Added Dialogue: John Huston; Cinematographer: Karl Freund; Supervising Film Editor: Maurice Pivar; Film Editor: Milton Carruth; Music: Heinz Roemheld [uncredited]; Recording Supervisor: C. Roy Hunter; Make Up: Jack P. Pierce [uncredited]; Special Effects: John Fulton; Art Director: Charles D. Hall

Crew
Sidney Fox (Mlle Camille L’Espanaye); Bela Lugosi (Doctor Mirakle); Leon Waycoff [real name: Leon Ames] (Pierre Dupin); Bert Roach (Paul); Betty Ross Clarke (Madame L’Espanaye); Brandon Hurst (prefect of police); D’Arcy Corrigan (morgue keeper); Noble Johnson (Janos, the black one); Arlene Francis (woman of the streets); Edna Marion [Mignette – uncredited]; Charlotte Henry, Polly Ann Young [girls – uncredited]; Herman Bing [Franz Odenheimer – uncredited]; Agostino Borgato [Alberto Montani – uncredited]; Harry Holman [landlord – uncredited]; Torben Meyer [the Dane – uncredited]; John T. Murray, Christian J. Frank [gendarmes – uncredited]; Dorothy Vernon [tenant – uncredited]; Michael Visaroff, Ted Billings [men – uncredited]; Charles T. Millsfield [bearded man at sideshow – uncredited]; Monte Montague [workman/gendarme – uncredited]; Charles Gemora [Erik the ape – uncredited]

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