MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE (1932)

I'm almost always extremely happy to have spiffy, restored DVD copies of old movies, but once in a while, cleaning up a movie just exposes its shortcomings and that's the case with this film, one that was, in my memory, quite scary and atmospheric, but which when cleaned up proves to be a rather lame and colorless attempt at a shocker. I suspect that Universal thought that the mere presence of their vampire hero, Bela Lugosi, would make the movie creepy, and Lugosi does as well as he can given the weak script which is supposedly based on a Poe story but actually uses very little of his work. Lugosi plays a scientist, Dr. Mirakle, who performs with an ape at a Parisian side show, claiming he can speak to and understand the ape. (The ape in question is Erik, the Ape-Man, who looks mostly like Erik the Normal-Looking Ape, but is sometimes played by a man in an ape costume.) His behind-the-scene experiments, intended to prove the theory of evolution, involve mixing ape blood and human blood, specifically the blood of lovely young women. We see him kidnap a streetwalker (Arlene Francis), strap her to an X-shaped cross, and draw blood from her, but once he gets it under the microscope, he finds that it's "dirty blood' and useless to him, and he dumps her dead body, Sweeney Todd-fashion, right from the cross through a trap door into the river. At the side show, the ape takes a liking to Sidney Fox, a "pure" young woman, and Lugosi sends the ape to kidnap her, but when the ape realizes that Lugosi has nefarious purposes in mind, he kills the doctor and races across the rooftops of Paris with the girl until her boyfriend, Leon Ames, comes to the rescue. The plot is just as ridiculous as it sounds; the meager pleasures here are mostly in the atmosphere, conjured up with shadows and some expressionistic, Caligari-like sets. The movie is barely an hour long but it still drags in places, although the torture and murder of the prostitute is harrowing, and the rooftop chase is exciting. Fox and Ames (billed here as Leon Waycoff) are fairly bland; Francis doesn't have much to do (I don't even think she has more than one line of dialogue), but she writhes and screams effectively, and it was great fun to see my favorite "What's My Line" panelist away from the panel. During a non-horror scene, there's a disorienting shot of Fox in a swing, with the camera attached to the swing, as Ames pushes her up in the air. The shots of the real ape don't match up well with the shots of the man in the costume. Directed by Robert Florey, who also did the Marx Brothers first film, THE COCOANUTS, and who went on to do a slew of B-pictures through the 40's and a lot of TV in the 50's; the cinematography is by Karl Freund, who did great work on Lugosi's DRACULA. Overall, I'd have to say that, if you lower your expectations, you might enjoy this, but it's difficult to recommend. [DVD]