Phantom of the Rue Morgue (1954)

Phantom of the Rue Morgue (1954) was one of the first horror movies I ever saw and inevitably left quite an impression upon the young me.  Quite why I was allowed to stay up late and watch it, I don't recall, but, with its grotesque murders-by-trained-gorilla, (the image of the dead girl stuffed up the chimney stayed with me for years), chases across smoke wreathed rooftops and shadowy figures lurking menacingly in shadowy streets, it set the pattern for my expectations of what a horror film should be like.  While it entranced me and helped set me off on a lifelong love of the horror genre, Phantom of the Rue Morgue subsequently became a somewhat elusive film, with very few UK TV screenings over the years.  But, thanks to the magic of dodgy Roku channels, I was recently able to catch up with it again.  While films seen and enjoyed as children can often disappoint when seen again as an adult, Phantom of the Rue Morge remained as bizarre and macabre as I had always recalled it.  It's studio bound depiction of Paris, shot in garish 'Warner Color' (actually a licenced version of the Eastmancolor process), giving it a strange, claustrophobic, almost surreal feel as it moves, often at frenetic pace, through a series of bizarre murders of young women by an unseen and brutish assailant.  Atrocity piles upon atrocity as the Paris police bumble around, accusing the wrong man for the killings.

In large part, the pace and general onscreen mayhem was the result of the film having been shot in 3-D.  Warners had enjoyed a big success with the previous year's 3-D chiller House of Wax and were keen to follow it up with another melodramatic horror film.  Consequently, everything imaginable gets thrown or shoved into the camera lens (and the audience's laps when screened in 3-D) - if it isn't chairs, fists and even gorillas getting thrown into the audience in the fight scenes, then it is nightclub dancers kicking their legs into the viewer's face.  Edgar Allan Poe's short story 'Murders in the Rue Morgue' must have seemed an obvious starting point for a House of Wax follow up but, as in the previous film adaptation of the story, 1932's Murders in the Rue Morgue, it is only the story's basic idea of an ape trained to kill women, that survives intact into the screenplay.  Like the earlier film, the 1954 adaptation gives us a 'mad scientist' type character as the main villain, *played by Bela Lugosi in 1932vand Karl Malden in 1954) and rather sidelines the Dupin character, in both cases called 'Paul Dupin' rather than 'Auguste Dupin' and relegated from investigating detective to student and university lecturer respectively.  In neither film does Dupin take a central role in the investigation or demonstrate to any meaningful extent, his deductive powers.  It's also clear that the producers of the 1954 film also wanted to evoke memories of the 'Phantom of the Opera', not just in the altered title, but also in its deployment of top hat and cloak clad characters lurking on rooftops and alleyways and Malden's use of the sewers to spirit his gorilla way from the scenes of the crimes.

Far from perfect, Phantom of the Rue Morgue, even when shown 'flat' remains a hugely entertaining horror thriller in the Grand Guignol tradition, atmospheric  and at times even somewhat disturbing.  Veteran director Roy el Ruth, despite not being a horror specialist, delivers a well paced film that generates the sort of thrills and chills required by the genre.  (A couple of years later he directed another animal-themed horror film in The Alligator People which, while far less effective than Phantom, still has some points of interest).  All-in-all, Phantom of the Rue Morgue is well worth tracking down.  It's very much of its era, but nonetheless a highly professional piece of work with excellent production values and even some decent performances from some of the players.  With its misogynistic villain and apparently randomly selected female victims, it prefigures many of the recurring themes of the serial killer and slasher movies of the sixties and seventies.