Post by Salzmank on Dec 26, 2017 5:28:57 GMT
Ah, sorry to hear you didn’t take to this one. While your criticisms are well-taken, I think this Murders in the Rue Morgue has a lot going for it.
Robert Florey, who directed, was an intriguing talent; he got to manage this flick without much involvement from the studio during filming as compensation for having been removed from Frankenstein (which ended up with a far better director in Jimmy Whale). Florey directed a lot of stinkers in his career, to be sure, but some real little gems too: this, The Cocoanuts, The Florentine Dagger, The Beast with Five Fingers.
Rue Morgue displays some of Florey’s surprising similarities with Lugosi’s Dracula director, Tod Browning; indeed, the opening at the circus/sideshow and the lack of supernaturalism all bespeak Browning. That opening manages to evoke both Browning’s The Unholy Three and Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and Caligari is the major plot-influence throughout, with Dr. Mirakle and Dr. Caligari not only resembling each other but also having similar murder methods.
Like Browning, Florey was an old-fashioned director who believed more in cutting than in camera movement to move around in-scene; one simply has to get used to the style, I suppose. (I’ve been watching a good deal of Browning’s films recently, so I’ve been thinking about it for a while now.) The plot, I am perfectly willing to state, is weak, but, as with Dracula, the fun is in the performances and the mise-en-scène: there are some wonderful images here, some genuinely spooky evocations. I love that Poe-esque Paris that never was, that expressionism (Lord, the use of shadows!) with which Florey and cinematographer Karl Freund fill in their frame, that operatic quality (La bohème in particular) to the sets, that haunting fog in which murder is done…
With Dracula and The Mummy (both also involving Freund—the former as cinematographer, the latter as director), this is horror-as-painting, or even as poetry, whereas Whale’s films are horror-as-theatre and Hillyer’s, Lee’s, or Waggner’s horror-as-prose. I do not particularly care about the plot here, but I remember the images—and that, I think, is the point.
Robert Florey, who directed, was an intriguing talent; he got to manage this flick without much involvement from the studio during filming as compensation for having been removed from Frankenstein (which ended up with a far better director in Jimmy Whale). Florey directed a lot of stinkers in his career, to be sure, but some real little gems too: this, The Cocoanuts, The Florentine Dagger, The Beast with Five Fingers.
Rue Morgue displays some of Florey’s surprising similarities with Lugosi’s Dracula director, Tod Browning; indeed, the opening at the circus/sideshow and the lack of supernaturalism all bespeak Browning. That opening manages to evoke both Browning’s The Unholy Three and Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, and Caligari is the major plot-influence throughout, with Dr. Mirakle and Dr. Caligari not only resembling each other but also having similar murder methods.
Like Browning, Florey was an old-fashioned director who believed more in cutting than in camera movement to move around in-scene; one simply has to get used to the style, I suppose. (I’ve been watching a good deal of Browning’s films recently, so I’ve been thinking about it for a while now.) The plot, I am perfectly willing to state, is weak, but, as with Dracula, the fun is in the performances and the mise-en-scène: there are some wonderful images here, some genuinely spooky evocations. I love that Poe-esque Paris that never was, that expressionism (Lord, the use of shadows!) with which Florey and cinematographer Karl Freund fill in their frame, that operatic quality (La bohème in particular) to the sets, that haunting fog in which murder is done…
With Dracula and The Mummy (both also involving Freund—the former as cinematographer, the latter as director), this is horror-as-painting, or even as poetry, whereas Whale’s films are horror-as-theatre and Hillyer’s, Lee’s, or Waggner’s horror-as-prose. I do not particularly care about the plot here, but I remember the images—and that, I think, is the point.