In short: Phantom of the Rue Morgue (1954)

19th Century Paris. Women are killed under mysterious circumstances by a terribly violent killer who also appears to have the skills of a trapeze artist. No, the killer isn’t Batman or Robin. Inspector Bonnard (Claude Dauphin) is on the case, but he likes holding forth about the ear shape of killers (no earlobes, monsieur!), so might not be the best at actually catching the right man. Like a CSI character, he’ll accuse every man he meets of being the killer.

Among the men on his list for, put there for improbable reasons of illogic, will soon be Professor Paul Dupin (Steve Forrest), a guy rather better at the science of deduction than the actual police, and soon motivated to solve the murders himself. Why, do you think Dupin’s not at all shifty colleague Dr Marais (Karl Malden), who is clearly lusting after Dupin’s fiancée Jeanette (Patricia Medina), might actually be a serial killer whose murder weapon of choice is a trained gorilla?

It’ll come as little surprise to anyone who has watched enough of this sort of mystery/horror potboiler when Roy Del Ruth’s rather free Poe adaptation replaces the orang-utan with a gorilla, for in 1954, the dustiest corners of every movie studio warehouse had a handful of ratty gorilla suits mouldering away, whereas that other ape would have meant building a new one. That sort of thing clearly wasn’t in the budget; keeping close to the source probably wasn’t even the beginning of a thought in the mind of an old hired hand like Del Ruth, a place filled with a lot of straightforward technical chops, and the will and ability to make cheap movies on time and on budget.

Seen as a movie working inside of these strictures, Phantom of the Rue Morgue is a rather entertaining time. Its mystery elements are joyfully contrived, with Bonnard’s wild theories and attempts at proving them providing an actual chuckle or three. The murder scenes are surprisingly effective and dramatic, and if you squint at them from just the right angle, Del Ruth’s use of colour and some of the editing actually can be said to prefigure certain giallo techniques. At the very least, the do look somewhat exciting. The general implausible weirdness of the plot in combination with some suggested psychosexual problems of our killer certainly seems to point in the giallo direction as well, even though it really needed the Italians to truly bring these things together into an aesthetic whole.

Other classic low budget movie joys on display are scenes of a spiritedly ranting villain – Karl Malden makes a much more enjoyable mad scientist than I would have expected –, as well as gorilla suit action that even finishes on the thing throwing Jeannette over its shoulder and climbing a tree, in lieu of the Empire State Building, with her until it is shot by the police.

I certainly can’t argue with that.