Murders in the Rue Morgue **** (1932, Bela Lugosi, Sidney Fox, Leon Ames, Bert Roach, Brandon Hurst) – Classic Movie Review 2681

Director Robert Florey’s vintage 1932 Universal Studios horror movie stars the studio’s great horror icon Bela Lugosi as a mad doctor called Dr Mirakle. After Dracula, Dr Mirakle is one of Lugosi’s most important and iconic other turns in the movies.

This bizarrely weird story distantly derived from Edgar Allan Poe sees Dr Mirakle travelling Paris looking for a girl to give his pet ape Erik (Charles Gemora is the man in the monkey suit) as a bride and injecting monkey blood into candidates.

Amazingly, the lovely 4′ 11″ Sidney Fox gets top billing over Lugosi in her best-remembered film as Mlle. Camille L’Espanaye. the girl Dr Mirakle and Eric choose. And Leon Ames (then billed as Leon Waycoff) plays medical student Pierre Dupin, her non-simian lover, who discovers what Mirakle is doing too late to prevent the abduction of his girlfriend and calls in the police.

Director Florey’s handling of the tale, which bears little resemblance to the Poe original, is remarkable. He films in a visually exciting expressionist style similar to that of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, with eye-catching cinematography by Karl Freund.

Like Dracula, the film’s pacing now seems slack, but there’s still enough imagination and excitement in the ideas, images, sets and performances to recommend it. A commanding Lugosi easily steals the show from the overly dramatic, silent-movie style performance of the top-billed ingénue star.

Also in the cast are Bert Roach, Brandon Hurst, Noble Johnson, Arlene Francis, Leon Waycoff, D’Arcy Corrigan and Betty Ross Clarke.

The screenplay is by Tom Reed, Dale Van Every and a young John Huston.

It was remade as Phantom of the Rue Morgue in 1954, and twice later under this title in 1971 and 1986.

When work offers suddenly stopped for Sidney Fox in 1934, illness and depression set in, not helped by her unhappy marriage. On the morning of November 15 1942, the 34-year-old actress was found dead in her Beverly Hills bedroom by her husband after consuming a fatal number of sleeping pills.

© Derek Winnert 2015 Classic Movie Review 2681

Check out more reviews on http://derekwinnert.com