RUN IT THROUGH THE HOLLYWOODIZER

Last night I enjoyed the absurd, and entertainingly brief, 1932 film inspired by Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue.  It inspired me, in turn, to re-read (after some forty years) the story to see just how wildly the movie varies from the source.  Poe's locked-room murder mystery (with notably grotesque details and circumstances) is enhanced by the addition of a romance and a madman.  Bela Lugosi is introduced as a bizarre charlatan devoted to proving evolution by injecting women with gorilla blood, from which they naturally die.  Here is Lugosi berating one of his victims:

Your blood is rotten!  Black as your sins!  Your beauty was a LIE!

Here is that victim, lovely Arlene Francis, years later, quizzing a mystery guest on the television game show What's My Line:

One of the first things one realizes upon reading Poe's story is that there is no morgue in it.  It's the name of a street in Paris. There might be a morgue in that street but there is not one in the story.  I can hear in my mind the gravelly voice of a cigar chomping studio dictocrat, "Where's the morgue?  If there is a morgue in the title people want to see a morgue."  So there is a morgue, and a carnival, and a romance, and a gorilla carrying an unconscious negligee-clad woman across the rooftops of Paris, and Poe's amateur detective C. Auguste Dupin is renamed Pierre, probably because Auguste doesn't sound French enough.  "What's a French name?  Pierre.  Change it to Pierre."

I enjoyed reading the story again, mainly because it is so refreshing, after what passes for writing nowadays, to read page after page without a single grammatical atrocity, to see the correct use of  "farther," to encounter quondam and pasquinade in the same paragraph.  I admit that I have never really gotten Poe; though I have read all his works it was more out of a sense of duty than affection.  He wrote clearly and succinctly, compared to the turgid style of many of his contemporaries.  His observations show a certain acuity and I especially liked his statement on the common error of mistaking complexity for profundity.

I also enjoyed seeing the movie - I can't remember if I ever saw it before, and it is not a real standout in any event.  Despite the good production  values and exotic details it is ultimately a bit flat in its effect.  It doesn't seem to horrify or thrill as it was intended.  I attribute some of its weakness to the abandoning or softening of some of the  most grotesque conceptions of the original - little is made of the bizarre circumstance of a corpse brutally thrust up a chimney, and the disturbing idea of an ape running amok with a razor (used with full intention by Dario Argento in his film Phenomena) was discarded.  At best it is a harmless hour of the bizarre which is unlikely to provoke in the average viewer as much thought as you have seen here today.