Though this welcome Scream Factory issue marks the first
time Murders in the Rue Morgue (1971)
and The Dunwich Horror (1969) have
been made available on domestic Blu-ray, both films enjoyed a previous release
on DVD as part of MGM’s long-suspended “Midnite Movies†series. Rue
Morgue was first paired with Cry of
the Banshee (1970) in 2003, with Dunwich
and Die Monster Die! (1965) following
in 2005. Though both of these earlier sets
are now technically out-of-print, copies remain generally available. Regardless, the more discerning horror-film
aficionado would be well advised to seek out this new Blu edition. Not only does Scream Factory’s HD master
offer a significant upgrade in visual presentation, the studio has also
restored bits of censored footage missing from the Y2K releases.
H.P. Lovecraft’s short story The Dunwich Horror was written in the summer of 1928 and first
published in the April 1929 issue of the appropriately titled Weird Tales magazine. It’s likely the best known of the celebrated author’s
horror tales, having been recollected and reissued throughout the 20th and 21st
century in any number of literary horror anthologies. Though A.I.P. and director Daniel Haller (a
well-tested art director on many previous films for the company) have taken a
number of liberties bringing Lovecraft’s original tale to the screen, the author’s
basic premise is mostly preserved.
Wilbur Whateley (Dean Stockwell) is the great-grandson of
Oliver Whateley. The elder Whateley was
a practitioner of the black arts who, two generations earlier, had been hanged for
his heresy by vigilantes in the otherwise sleepy village of Dunwich. The Whateley’s have long been a bane to the frightened
residents of the ocean-side community, shunned and ostracized as devil-worshippers. Technically, this is a misunderstanding as the
family worships neither God nor Satan. They spend most of their nights secluded in a creepy cliff-side home on an
otherwise postcard-pretty coastline. The
Whateley’s mostly putter about the old house trying to summon the “Old Ones†who,
we are told, are an amorphous super-race of beings from another dimension that will
bring an end to mankind.
Wilbur’s grandfather (Sam Jaffee) has actually backed-off
a bit on the family’s over-zealous determination in this regard. He’s understandably wary as his own quarter-century
old attempt at summation – one which involved Wilbur’s mother, Lavinia –had
gone horribly wrong. The strange and
dangerous rumblings of a creature still imprisoned behind a locked closet door
will attest to that. But Lavinia’s surviving twenty-five year old progeny,
Wilbur, has not gone soft; he’s determined to succeed where his ancestors have failed. The young man needs only two components to
achieve his goal. He first requires
access to the Necronomicom, an
ancient and priceless book of which only two copies survive. Conveniently, one copy sits in a not terribly
protected glass display case in the University library in Arkham, only a mere forty
miles up the road.
More problematically, Wilbur requires a female virgin; and
good luck trying to find one in the summer of 1969. This is where Bayonne, New Jersey’s own Sandra
Dee, best known for her healthful and morally salutary screen-image, comes
in. It seems only a pure virgin can
serve as the conduit through which the “Old Ones†can, at long last,
emerge. With her post-Gidget acting career stagnant, Dee was desperate
to hone a new screen image at decade’s end. Here she is effectively cast both with and against type as the
beleaguered Nancy Wagner. Not all of the
former teenage star’s innocent ways were so easily expunged. The actress had her limits and was modestly body-doubled
in a number of brief nude scenes. Her
antagonist is the wild-eyed, nearly non-blinking Wilbur Whateley, and Stockwell
plays him as a complete nutcase, mysterious, emotionally remote, and not
particularly charming. It’s somewhat
difficult to believe that Nancy would fall for him so hard though it’s
suggested a combination of hypnotism and drug-laced tea keep the young woman in
tow. The drugging would also explain the
trippy, psychedelic dreams she suffers following her first share of the teapot
with weird Wilbur.
It’s actually the addition of this central
damsel-in-distress element that causes Haller’s film to deviate wildly from the
original Lovecraft tale. With the
exception of the aforementioned Lavinia, there’s nary a central-character
female present in the original short story. The movie’s climatic birthing of the “Old Ones†on a sacred altar atop
the cliff-side “Devil’s Hop Yard†is a near complete invention of the
filmmakers. In what was an already a customary
A.I.P. tradition, executive producer Roger Corman, and producers Samuel J.
Arkoff and James H. Nicholson were no doubt hoping to exploitatively piggy-back
off of the surprising success of Polanski’s classic Rosemary’s Baby (1968).
As was the studio’s modus
operandi, A.I.P. rolled out The
Dunwich Horror in a sweeping west-to-east geographic fashion, supporting
this new release at drive-ins and theaters with one or two other fiendish films
from the company catalog: The Tomb of the Cat (a more pronounceable
re-title of Roger Corman’s The Tomb of
Ligeia), The Oblong Box (1969),
and even Destroy All Monsters (the
legendary 1968 production of Japan’s Toho Productions, but issued in the U.S. by
A.I.P. in the late summer of 1969.)
Interestingly, when The Dunwich Horror eventually made its way in the summer of 1970 to screens in the New York City area, the film was paired with Gordon Hessler’s sci-fi thriller Scream and Scream Again. A veteran producer-writer for the Alfred Hitchcock Presents television program from 1962, Hessler later signed on with American-International, directing a number of films within a half-decade’s interval. Most of these films were within in the horror-fantasy film realm: The Oblong Box (1969), Scream and Scream Again (1970), Cry of the Banshee (1970), Murders in the Rue Morgue (1971) and, most successfully, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973). He was also the helmsman for two thrillers during this period: Embassy (1972, with Richard Roundtree) and Medusa (1973). Afterwards, Hessler would return successfully to television.
Shortly after completing work with Vincent Price on Cry of the Banshee, the British-born Hessler was tapped to direct Murders in the Rue Morgue. The Edgar Allan Poe classic was hardly a new film property; there was at least one celluloid adaptation dating back to the days of the silent screen. It’s uncertain if this silent curiosity, shot in 1914 by the Paragon Photoplays, was ever screened theatrically. It’s believed that the nitrate was consumed in a November 1914 fire at the Paragon offices in New York City. The most famous film adaptation of Poe’s 1841 tale is undoubtedly the Universal Studios version of 1932, directed by Robert Florey and featuring Bela Lugosi (just coming off his iconic turn as the preeminent Count Dracula) as the fiendish Dr. Mirakle. Decades before Roger Corman and American-International would lens their cycle of lavish Poe adaptations, Universal had already made a good go of it in the early 1930s, cranking out Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932), The Black Cat (1934), and The Raven (1935) in a four year period. The one constant element in these disparate set of productions – the bleak atmosphere of Universal’s monochrome productions certainly contrast sharply with A.I.P’s colorfully costumed psychological-melodramas - is that neither studio’s writing teams would give more than a passing faithfulness to the source material. There was yet another not-terribly-faithful-to–the-original-story reworking of the tale during the 1950s 3-D craze:The Phantom of the Rue Morgue (1954), featuring a miscast (but still wonderful) Karl Malden as principal antagonist.
The twist in the original Poe tale is that an orangutan from Borneo, surreptitiously brought to the City of Lights by a merchant seaman, is found to be the mysterious, if accidental, murderer sought by Parisian detectives. Lugosi’s sinister Dr. Mirakle, on the other hand, summons Erik, his more conventional simian-henchman to do his most evil bidding. Mirakle’s ape is usually commanded to kidnap prostitutes for the not-so-good Dr.’s experimentations. For better or worse, Lugosi’s attempts to synthesis human and simian flesh are unsuccessful; the bodies of any number of lifeless street-walkers are invariably dropped through a floorboard trapdoor for a cold plunge into the Seine. It’s the sort of unsettling 1930s film that could have only been made in the Pre-Code era.
Hessler would confide that a conventional re-telling of Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue was simply not possible. He found the original tale a well-dated mystery. He was likely correct in this assessment, but it must be said his subsequent reimagining of the scenario wasn’t terribly original. The most original invention of the new story was the decision of screenwriters Christopher Wicking and Henry Slesar to use a cursed repertory theater’s Grand Guignol production of Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue as a mere backdrop to their new scenario. As it stands the finished film bears little resemblance to Poe, but borrows not-so-subtlety from Gaston Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera, The Lodger (1944), and Blood Fiend (aka Theatre of Death (1967).
Though it had been announced in the trades that A.I.P. had planned that go-to-ghoul Vincent Price would assume the role of impresario Cesar Charron, pre-production delays caused the studio’s venerable horror maestro to bow out. Though Murders in the Rue Morgue would have surely have benefitted with a dash of Price’s twinkle-in-the-eye mix of malevolence and whimsy, one should not grieve his absence. By foregoing his casting in the Hessler film, Price was now free to assume the titular role as Robert Fuest’s The Abominable Dr. Phibes.
The esteemed actor Jason Robards, in a rare genre role, was brought on as a replacement. Regardless of his many past accolades – Robards was, after all, a deserved recipient of any number of Tony, Emmy, New York Drama Critics Circle and Academy award nominations – the actor delivers a mostly workmanlike turn as protagonist Cesar Charron. There’s no question that Robards found the role well below his station. He would later reminisce in one curmudgeonly interview: “I had an agent who saw that British horror movies of a certain style were making money. So, when I was offered the part, he suggested it might be a good career move.†The belief that a mid-life appearance in a modestly-budgeted horror film would be a career boon would leave the bitter Robards exasperated.
The truth is that in 1971, the forty-eight year old was finding offers not plentiful. Robards had a well deserved reputation amongst industry insiders as a heavy drinker. The actor also made no secret of the fact that he much preferred to perform on stage before an audience of warm bodies. He was less pleased to work before a camera, bored and impatient by the slow machinations of movie-making. His descent into alcoholism was a terrible misuse of his gift, a slow real-life transformation mirroring that of an intemperate character of a Eugene O’Neill play. This was terribly ironic as the actor had partly established his professional reputation in any number of successful productions drawn by the famed Irish playwright. In December 1972 would hit rock bottom when Robards would crash his car into a cliff on the Malibu coastline. That collision would leave the actor with multiple injuries and nearly cost him his life. He would enjoy a career Renaissance, however, winning back-to-back Best Supporting Actor Oscars for All the President’s Menand Julia in 1977 and 1978, respectively.
Robards’ Rue Morgue character is more than a bit of a cad. For starters, he coldly sways a lovely actress (Lilli Palmer) from the loving arms of his theatrical business and creative associate Rene Marot (Herbert Lom). Following her untimely demise, he marries his deceased wife’s troubled but beautiful daughter from an earlier marriage, Madeleine (Christine Kauffman). He’s also known to frequent the swanky bordellos of Paris for extra-marital assignations. His troubled wife Madeleine happens to be the featured actress in his company’s staging of Poe’s Murders in the Rue Morgue. This nepotism is a great boon to her understudy as the psychologically tortured Madeleine is often unable to perform: the poor girl suffers from nightmares involving an axe-wielding black-cloaked masked man and a dead soul who cyclically plummets at rope’s end from the rafters of the stage. The fact that this particular repertory company has been plagued by any number of unsolved murders - old and new - causes one police inspector (Adolfo Celi) to suspect the duplicitous Charron is involved in the grisly murders.
The second most reasonable suspect at the center of the mayhem is the (presumably) late actor, Rene Marot (as played by Herbert Lom). It was likely through his memorable turn as The Phantom of the Opera in the Hammer Films remake of 1962, that Lom found himself a second-tier horror-maestro by decade’s end. A recognizable screen presence in horror films of the 1970s, Lom’s name simply didn’t carry the import or marquee value of such first-team members as Price, Christopher Lee, or Peter Cushing. Regardless, Lom is suitably mysterious in the role of Marot, though his performance is not too dissimilar to his own portrayal of Professor Petrie in the Phantom of the Opera.
Though his speaking role is virtually non-existent, Lom plays Marot as a betrayed, tortured soul. He might even be a good guy, as suggested by one early scene in the film. Upon his escape from a team of pursuing policemen through the winding streets of Paris, the masked Marot kindly drops a coin into the tin cup of a blind street beggar. Conversely, Marot has a nasty habit of splashing bottles of acid on the faces of those he believes wronged him. The real mystery is not why Marot is carrying on so ghoulishly, but how can he carry on in such a manner? Following his own acid-disfigurement and subsequent suicide, pallbearers watched as he was buried under six feet of soil some twelve years earlier.
Fans of 1960s/1970s horror will enjoy this new release though, truth be told, neither film is particularly frightening. Though both films are often hobbled by lapses in taste, logic and budget, they’re also reasonably entertaining popcorn programmers. Scream Factory’s Blu-Ray edition of Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Dunwich Horror is offered here in 1080p High-Definition Widescreen ratio of 1.78.1 and with a DTS-HD Master Audio mono soundtrack. Supplements include optional commentaries of both films by historian Steve Haberman, chapter selections, and the original theatrical trailers of both films. Welcomingly ported over from the earlier MGM set, the Blue-ray also features the very informative supplement Stage Tricks & Screen Frights which features an exclusive behind-the-scenes interview with Rue Morgue director Gordon Hessler.