Re: Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932-Robert Florey)
Posted: January 28th, 2013, 9:18 am
A very thoughtful post, intotheNitrate.
The terrific book "American Gothic" by Jonathan Rigby looks at American horror films from 1896 to 1956. The big surprise to me from the book was how often apes appeared in American horror movies of that (pre-Civil Rights) era. They were far more common than vampires or werewolves. Indeed, while Rigby doesn't explicitly say this, I got the impression that vampires and werewolves were largely the monsters of choice for emigre filmmakers while the more "American" filmmakers tended to go for the apes.
How this works out for "Murders in the Rue Morgue" is that it was directed by Robert Florey, an emigre, and written by John Huston, an American. So while the very Weimarish look of the film can be attributed to Florey, the speech came from Huston. Huston has a reputation of being both a liberal and a practical joker. Maybe the speech was Huston's way of twitting the audience? Certainly, as some writers have pointed out, it is not a speech you expect to find in a movie less than a decade after the Scopes trial. Most books on Huston act as if his brief stint with Universal never happened, (He also wrote an excellent Wyatt Earp-themed western, "Law and Order" at that time.) so I don't know if Huston ever said what he was up to with this movie. Certainly he never really returned to the horror genre (although I guess he made one around 1980, "Phobia," that was considered so bad it was never released.) so he may have been happy to put this behind him.
And, as I understand it, "Murders in the Rue Morgue" did provoke some harmful controversy and was not a box office success, to the extent that Universal cut a lot of talk about reincarnation from "The Mummy" which came out later in 1932 trying to make that film less controversial.
The terrific book "American Gothic" by Jonathan Rigby looks at American horror films from 1896 to 1956. The big surprise to me from the book was how often apes appeared in American horror movies of that (pre-Civil Rights) era. They were far more common than vampires or werewolves. Indeed, while Rigby doesn't explicitly say this, I got the impression that vampires and werewolves were largely the monsters of choice for emigre filmmakers while the more "American" filmmakers tended to go for the apes.
How this works out for "Murders in the Rue Morgue" is that it was directed by Robert Florey, an emigre, and written by John Huston, an American. So while the very Weimarish look of the film can be attributed to Florey, the speech came from Huston. Huston has a reputation of being both a liberal and a practical joker. Maybe the speech was Huston's way of twitting the audience? Certainly, as some writers have pointed out, it is not a speech you expect to find in a movie less than a decade after the Scopes trial. Most books on Huston act as if his brief stint with Universal never happened, (He also wrote an excellent Wyatt Earp-themed western, "Law and Order" at that time.) so I don't know if Huston ever said what he was up to with this movie. Certainly he never really returned to the horror genre (although I guess he made one around 1980, "Phobia," that was considered so bad it was never released.) so he may have been happy to put this behind him.
And, as I understand it, "Murders in the Rue Morgue" did provoke some harmful controversy and was not a box office success, to the extent that Universal cut a lot of talk about reincarnation from "The Mummy" which came out later in 1932 trying to make that film less controversial.