User Reviews

In 19th century Paris, a series of gruesome murders baffles the police. In each case a woman is found beaten to death inside a locked room. Suspicion soon falls on innocent Professor Pierre Dupin (Steve Forrest). Maybe somebody should look at his colleague Dr. Marais (Karl Malden), who has a caged gorilla and bad luck with the ladies.

Warner Bros. Horror-thriller, originally released in 3D. It's essentially a color remake of the 1932 Murders in the Rue Morgue, but with more ties to Poe than Universal bothered to have. Despite improving in some areas, it's not as good overall. Roy Del Ruth's direction is flat and Karl Malden can't match Lugosi's manic performance in that earlier film. Also, Lugosi's Dr. Mirakle had a far more interesting motivation than Malden's Dr. Marais. But the lack of chimpanzee close-ups and Steve Forrest making a better hero than Leon Ames are both pluses in favor of this over the 1932 film. Comparisons aside, this is a nice time-passer that you'll probably enjoy. Anthony Caruso is creepy as Malden's one-eyed henchman. It's not scary (it doesn't really try to be) but it is entertaining. Look for Merv Griffin in a tiny role as a college student.

If you've read the Edgar Allen Poe story THE MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE, be prepared to be wildly disappointed in this unexciting, awkwardly produced film version. Roy Del Ruth directs with such inertia it's impossible to recommend anything here. Poe's story of some sort of beast roaming the streets of Paris killing young women is transferred to the screen with all the excitement of a soggy croissant. In casting that is silly rather than intriguing, Karl Malden has the lead role and Steve Forrest is a professor who cracks the case. B-movie goddess Patricia Medina (later Mrs. Joseph Cotten in real life) and French acting legend Claude Dauphin add very little. Merv Griffin is in cast list but good luck spotting him. Creepy Anthony Caruso plays creepy Jacques, Malden's cycloptic assistant. The obvious music score is by David Buttolph and the cinematography is by J. Peverell Marley, who shot the much better HOUSE OF WAX a year earlier. Director Del Ruth followed this with the equally unscary horror film THE ALLIGATOR PEOPLE.

***SPOILERS*** Remake of the original "Murders in the Rue Mourge" both in color and 3-D with the added attraction of Charles Gemora repeating his role as the gorilla, he was an over-sized chimpanzee in the original, Sultan. Gemore does an excellent job swinging on fire escapes and rooftops despite being 22 years older and having a touch of arthritis in his arms and legs.

It's when there's a series of brutal murders at the Rue Mourge district in Paris that the bumbling Paris police inspector Bonnard, Claude Daphin, feels that the murders were committed by psychology professor Paul Dupin, Steve Forrest! That's only because he happened to be on the scene of one of them. It's when one of Paul's fellow tenants Camille,Dolores Dorn, is found murdered in his apartment house and stuffed up the chimney that Inspt. Bonnard has him arrested for her as well as the two other Rue Morgue murders. While Inspt. Bonnard and the Paris Police are barking up the wrong tree or chimney the real killer, the gorilla, escapes the scenes of his crimes through the Paris sewer system.

The gorilla who was a baby when he was caught by one-eyed Jacques, Anthony Caruso, in far off Madagascar was raised by Jacques' boss Dr.Marals, Karl Malden, back at his zoological center outside of Paris. It's Dr.Marals in is his experimenting on the nature of both man and beasts has come up with a way to turn on or off a person's or gorilla's aggressive behaviors. And most of all what makes them violent and how to control that violence. Dr. Marals who's wife left him by killing herself is obsessed with pretty Jeanette, Patricia Medina, who just happens to be Paul Dupin's fiancée! It's in trying to frame Paul in the Rue Morgue murders that the crazed and love sick Dr. Marals thinks he can win Jeanette over! That's if he keeps on fooling the police and Inspt. Bonnard that it's Paul and not him and his pet gorilla-Saltan-who's been doing all the killing!

It takes a while and a number of murders for Paul to convince the somewhat muddled headed Paris Police Insector Bonnard to realize what's reallying going on in the Rue Morgue but by then Dr. Marals had kidnapped Jeanette and locked her up, with the gorilla standing guard, in his mansion. With the police hot on his tail Dr. Marals releases his zoo animals, lion tigers and leopards, to distract them with the gorilla climbing up to his secret study room where he's holding Jeanette hostage!

***SPOILERS**** Trapped on a tree, after dropping Jeanette to safety below, with nowhere to go the gorilla in refusing to give himself up is then shot down to the ground by a barrage of fire by some half dozen police sharpshooters. But before he finally expires he gets his hands on the handcuffed Dr.Marals who ordered sultan not to surrender but to kill everything in sight and ends up ringing his neck thus killing him instead! The gorilla like we in the audience had realized what a total nut case his master Dr.Marals really was. It's when he started to mess around with Jeanette, whom the gorilla was madly in love with, that Sultan went totally bananas! And it was Dr. Marals as well as his assistant the one-eyed Jacques, whom the big monkey killed earlier in the movie, who ended up paying with his life for it!

"Murders in the Rue Morgue" by Edgar Allen Poe is considered to be one of the first detective stories. While it's been made and remade several times for the big screen, I've yet to see a version that sticks very closely to the original. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as the Poe story lacks the excitement of many of the films and the story is a bit brief. So, I can cut the makers of "Phantom of the Rue Morgue" some slack for taking some rather large liberties with the story. And overall, it's a decent film.

Before I talk about the plot and my feelings, I should point out that this film must have either been 3-D originally or they planned on releasing that way in theaters. This is because again and again, the camera points directly at things as they are tossed at the camera---cheap 3-D tricks which were common in these films. It is also a color film...a bit unusual for 50s movies but not for 3-D pictures.

As for the story, several women have been horribly murdered-- mutilated by a killer with immense strength and acrobatic abilities. The Inspector is a total idiot and comes up with a theory and then attempts to make the facts fit it--a common theme in B-mystery movies. The unlucky guy who gets arrested for the crimes (Steve Forrest) obviously didn't commit the murders and couldn't have if he'd wanted to do so. The only logical solution to the problem is an ape. Oddly, while it's an orangutan in the Poe story, here it's a gorilla and I assume it's simply because they had a gorilla suit handy! The mystery isn't just the ape, however, it's also who is behind all this and why--elements that simply weren't in the original tale....but were entertaining nevertheless.

Not a brilliant horror/mystery film but an enjoyable time passer. It's also fun just to watch it and count the cheap 3-D moments where things are aimed at the audience...making this an excellent movie to be used as a drinking game with friends.

By the way, it doesn't harm the film in any way, but Karl Malden's character was described throughout the film as a psychologist. At this point in history, they were not called that nor were folks doing conditioning experiments like you see in the film. No biggie, however.

A middling adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe short story The Murders in the Rue Morgue, this is no better nor worse than a hundred other old-fashioned horror films. In the typical crime thriller mould of American cinema in the '40s and '50s, the plot has a police force investigating various brutal murders. The police in this film appear even dumber than many of their contemporaries, using various haphazard contrivances to question and nearly arrest a number of innocent people. After noticing that the killer may have escaped by swinging from various flagpoles, they immediately visit a travelling circus and question the trapeze artists there. In other instances, they visit people living close to the crime scene - it's obvious that they don't have a clue what they're doing. When the actual killer falls into their hands in the final reel, they still don't believe in him, instead preferring to make up a confession and nearly hang some poor chap who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time!

What spoiled this film for me was the fact that I'd already read Poe's short story - so I knew the identity of the killer all along, of course. For those who don't know, the killer is an ape - trained by (in this case) a hypnotist to attack and kill various women. What made this film interesting is the psychology used - like Pavlov and his dogs, the killer trains the ape to kill when it hears the tinkle of a bracelet - a bracelet worn by the intended victims. Other than this clever spin, it's a well-worn story with a nicely-choreographed ending which seems to have come straight from KING KONG. The ape decides not to kill the screaming heroine, and instead climbs up a tall building with her. There's no particular reason for this apart from the sheer spectacle of having a woman in peril and giving the police ample opportunity to gun the ape down and kill it (they also slaughter an escaped lion, obviously there was no animal protection in these days!).

The film lacks having a big-name "star" to add glamour to the proceedings - in the '30s version they had a sinister-looking Bela Lugosi, while in the '80s television movie veteran George C Scott played the detective Dupin. Karl Malden is the killer here, and to be honest he's not much cop - neither menacing nor convincing in his role, more laughable really. The monkey suit is also pretty fake-looking. The film does benefit from some surprisingly nasty murder scenes (in one, a man is violently thrown out of a window and down a flight of steps), giving us glimpses of bloody legs which make us imagine a lot worse. Although there is little atmosphere or suspense built up, PHANTOM OF THE RUE MORGUE does have that colourful look about it, all full of vivid (sometimes garish) yellows and reds, much like in HOUSE OF WAX from the same period. They also manage to thrown in a few can-can dancers and a sinister eye-patched foreigner for good measure.

While not a particularly bad film by any means, there are just no original distinguishing features which would really make this movie stand out from the crowd or become a minor classic. It simply goes through the well-trodden motions and lacks a vital spark or pace to it. And, to tell the truth, there were so many ape movies made beforehand (THE APE MAN, THE GORILLA, etc.) that this has an air of familiarity about it which destroys a lot of the fun. Check it out for the colourful photography and grandiose look, but you'll realise why this has been all but forgotten in the annals of horror.

I recall the first time I read Edgar Allen Poe's 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' how ludicrous it felt that he would have come up with a plot in which an orangutan was a murderer. I still can't get over it.

Anyway, here's the story put to film and it seems almost as ludicrous all over again. That's not to say I didn't find it entertaining enough, although I don't think I would have cast Karl Malden as the principal heavy. His character, Dr. Marais, was working on a theory that all living things have a latent killer instinct, while his experimentation in conditioned reflex reaction resulted in using bells to trigger a gorilla's response to kill victims at his command. One of the more comical elements of the story occurred when he pulled out some trinket to hypnotize old Sultan; can you really hypnotize a gorilla?

Inspector Bonnard (Claude Dauphin) also struck me as somewhat comical in the exercise of his police duties. It seemed he was always looking for the easy way out to find the guilty party, on the basis that "it's so much easier to find a criminal who looks like a criminal". That reminded me of a line Benson Fong used in the 1945 film "The Scarlet Clue" when he remarks to Sidney Toler's Charlie Chan - "That's easy Pop, the murderer will be the one with the guilty look". If only it should be so easy.

At least by researching this picture I'm now aware of the Bela Lugosi version of "Murders in the Rue Morgue" from 1932. I didn't know about that one so I'll have to be on the lookout for it. Lugosi strikes me more of the mad scientist type than Malden, who nevertheless got kind of spooky himself when he eventually turned on the girl who jilted him (Patricia Medina).

There are more than just a few moments that scream "spoof", such as the shape of a gorilla being seen in the crashed through sun roof since it's obvious with the shadow and size of the gorilla that the window would have been greatly smashed. The second version of the Edgar Allan Poe short story is beautifully photographed in color, its 3D gimmick obvious in the flat print, and almost looking 3D without glasses.

A bunch of young women are being brutally murdered in the fictional Parisian neighborhood known as the Rue Morgue and an inspector almost as dumb as Clouseau (played by Claude Dauphin) is investigating. Victims pop out everywhere, from floating in the river to being stuffed in a chimney.

The suspects and victims all somehow seem connected to local entertainments, from carnivals and dance groups, to acrobatic acts and as first seen in the opening, a knife thrower. Karl Malden headlines as a psychologist involved in narrowing down the suspects who include Steve Forrest, Anthony Caruso and Paul Richards. There's even Merv Griffin in a small role.

Patrice Wymore and Allyn Ann McLearie are beautiful window dressing. Stunning visually, but I felt no surprises. My favorite moment comes from the suspected Italian neighbor downstairs. But why an intermission an hour in with only 20 minutes left? To give the audience a moment to rest their eyes?