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.

THE SANEST MAN WHO EVER LIVED

"I'll soon be rid of my torture... 

then I'll be the sanest man who ever lived!"

Bela Lugosi in The Raven (1935)