There's no stories like Poe stories...

LCShackley

...but unfortunately, you won't find much Poe in this minor Lugosi horror pic. A few names from the story remain, and a great scene in which ear-witnesses to the murder debate what language they heard being spoken (pure Poe). Dupin, the central character in Poe's story, is relegated to the background so that Bela Lugosi can do a star turn as "Dr. Mirakle," a mad scientist (what other kind is there?) created by the screenwriter. (The writer also felt impelled to add an actual morgue into the plot; Poe just used that word as the name of a street.)

The point of Poe's story is to show how Dupin figured out that the murder was committed by an orang-outang owned by a visiting sailor. The movie creates an entirely new back-story about Dr. Mirakle's quest to unite apes and humans (through some sort of blood transfusion, not in the way you might think). After seeing Lugosi's make-up in this movie, you might wonder why the doctor didn't spend his life trying to find a cure for the uni-brow.

Stilted acting and slow pacing hamper this film, but somehow the cinematography of Karl Freund and the sets by Charles D. Hall outweigh these negatives to create a reasonably satisfactory Gothic horror pic. There is some very nice camera work and editing, including a brief sequence on the staircase as the crowd chases the murderer: gradually closer cuts until we finally focus on one face. (Spielberg used this technique on single characters in NIGHT GALLERY and JAWS.) And there are some truly gruesome sequences, which would have been shocking in 1932.

Trivia buffs will enjoy seeing game-show stalwart Arlene Francis in her first credited role (the "girl of the streets"), and D'Arcy Corrigan as the morgue keeper (he played the Ghost of Christmas Future in the Reginald Owen "Christmas Carol," and I've always wanted to see his face). You'll also enjoy a lecture on evolution, supposedly given over a decade before Darwin's "Origin of Species," but probably of interest to Americans who had been through the Scopes trial only a few years before the release.

score 5/10

LCShackley 2 March 2009

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw2031221/