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.

The Alligator People (1959)

Warning: I'm pretty sure various alligators were hurt for our entertainment during the making of this movie, so if you're sensitive about these things, this might be a film to avoid. It was a borderline case for me

Under hypnosis, nurse Jane Marvin (Beverly Garland), tells her psychiatrist boss a peculiar tale about a time when she was the freshly married Joyce Webster.
The honeymoon trip with her new husband Paul (Richard Crane) was rudely interrupted by a telegraph whose content convinced Paul to jump the train and disappear out of his wife's sight. Before the wedding night. Her husband's sudden and inexplicable flight wasn't something Joyce was willing to tolerate, but her attempts at finding out where her wayward husband got to were less than successful. It's not as if Joyce had much to go on anyway. Paul never did talk about his life before he met her except for mentioning a plane crash he shouldn't have survived and his belongings are strangely devoid of any hints towards his past.

Some off-screen sleuthing eventually led Joyce to Paul's former college fraternity and from there to the place he gave as his home address - a creepy mansion deep down in the swamps of Louisiana. Of course, Joyce made her way there as soon as she was able, finding a certain Mrs Hawthorne (Frieda Inescort) living there with two black servants and hook-handed, gator-hating, alcoholic handyman Manon (Lon Chaney Jr.) in the swamps nearby. Mrs Hawthorne purported not to know anything about Paul, but Joyce easily enough understood the old lady was lying for some reason, and would not be moved until she found out what truly was going on.
One suspects our heroine didn't exactly expect the truth had something to do with a friendly mad scientist (George Macready), the pituitary glands of alligators, and a husband with a very bad case of psoriasis.

Despite pretending to be a horror movie in its marketing material, The Alligator People is a SF melodrama with a slight influence of Southern Gothic for all but the final five minutes of its running time. As expected, it's also patently ridiculous in its set-up - so Paul is absenting himself from his new wife because he might start to look ugly, despite the way his face looks anyhow? -, silly in its science - did you know the best hope against curing the unpleasant aftereffects of alligator pituitary gland serum is radioactivity, or that cobalt 60 is transported in simple wooden crates you leave standing around at a rural train station until a mad alcoholic can get them? -, and not as clever as one would like it to be - after all, the only way the film's writer Orville H. Hampton can think of to produce a meeting between scaly-faced Paul and Joyce is to have the up to that point perfectly capable and sane woman suddenly run hysterically through a swamp full of very laid-back alligators by night, during a storm, and nearly getting raped by Lon Chaney Jr. whose leering she seems completely oblivious towards.

Despite these problems, the film has its moments. Director Roy Del Ruth (a man with a long and varied filmography starting in the early 1920s and nearly ending here) manages from time to time to conquer his workmanlike tendencies and shoot an atmospheric scene or two before it all breaks down in a very badly done bit of last minute monster rampage that only seems to happen because the producers suddenly realized they were selling this as a monster movie and not the science fictionally enabled melodrama they actually had. Plus, when she's not going into uncharacteristic hysterics, The Alligator People unexpectedly gives always theoretically capable (which is to say, as much as the movies she was in allowed her) b-movie actress Beverly Garland much opportunity to shine as the sort of heroine that even comes to her melodramatic moments with honesty. When the script isn't betraying her, Garland is very convincing as the driven, capable (for a 50s genre movie) woman out to understand why the hell her jerk of a husband suddenly disappeared. She gives the character just the right amount of frailty and desperation at the edges of her strength, making her much more believable than anyone or anything else in the movie.

Unfortunately, nobody else in the cast got the memo about Garland's kind of naturalistic acting, and so Inescort, Macready, and Chaney are mugging their roles up with fierce abandon. Chaney clearly has fun with his role (and who wouldn't have - he has a hook hand and rants about the evil of alligators, after all), while Macready speaks every single one of his lines (even "good morning", if he'd ever say something quite as prosaic) with a pathos and overemphasis I can only explain with him assuming every single member of any giving movie audience to be dumb and deaf. Even though I do approve of a good bit of overacting, I don't think these performances do the film any favours at all. They sure as hell don't do Garland's performance the justice it deserves.

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Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back (1934)

On the wedding day of his brain-dead sidekick Algy (Charles Butterworth), adventurer Hugh "Bulldog" Drummond begins to think about retirement in Sussex; after all, all that romance and excitement in his life is beginning to get tiresome, and now that Algy isn't around for a quickie anymore, what's left?

Drummond changes his mind very quickly when he leaves his friend's wedding and steps into a foggy London night, where he first meets a confused young woman (Loretta Young) - later to be named as Lola Field - and then stumbles upon a dead body lying in an empty villa. Strangely enough, once Drummond returns to the villa with a bobby in tow, the place isn't empty any longer but populated by Achmed (Warner Oland), the "oriental" (because Warner Oland) envoy or prince or something of a made-up country, and his henchpeople. There's no trace of a dead body anymore, and the bobby sure as hell isn't going to think anything bad about a decent gentleman like Achmed.

Drummond for his part returns to his home to call Algy away from his wedding night and ponder things quietly. Until the confused young woman he met in the fog appears on his doorstep right when Drummond - the creepy toffer - is fantasizing about his need for a woman in need. Her name is Lola Field, and she was actually looking for Drummond's neighbour Captain/Colonel/Inspector Neilson (C. Aubrey Smith) of Scotland Yard, for her uncle is missing, and people seem to pretend he never even existed. Of course, Drummond is instantly smitten by Lola and willing to help, and of course, the dead man he saw will turn out to have been Lola's uncle. From this point on, people will repeatedly be kidnapped from Drummond's living room, Drummond will repeatedly break into Achmed's villa, Neilson will doubt Drummond's sanity (he's right), and Algy's wedding night will be a no-show. Fun will be had by all.

This is the second and last time Ronald Colman was taking on the role of Bulldog Drummond - the actor's first appearance in the role being in 1929's Bulldog Drummond - and like his first outing this mystery comedy in the same spirit of style and verve responsible for The Thin Man is quite a bit of fun.

Unlike the earlier movie, Drummond Strikes Back does not feature the stiff and possibly slightly confused acting of an early talkie. Instead, the film is dominated by the type of slick and glossy acting I find typical of classical Hollywood films. Colman still is the stand-out actor here, hitting the right spot between charming and smug, convincing the audience that being a crime fighting vigilante must be quite the lark, and again pulling the rest of the cast with him in any scene he is in; the difference this time around is just that his colleagues don't need as much pulling and clearly are able to stand on their own feet.

Most of what I have written about the 1929 film stands here too, though the level of pulpy thrills has been reduced a bit - there's no mad scientist in place, the more risqué psychosexual undertones have gone missing, and Warner Oland's "evil oriental" (sigh) is a bit bland as a villain for my tastes - in favour of more comedic bits, which usually would spell doom for me liking any film. I don't mind in Drummond Strikes Back's case though, for most of the humour - except for the always insufferable Algy - is as witty and charming as what Colman projects.

Even though the movie's plot really is paper thing - the mystery Drummond is trying to solve isn't much of one, and there isn't much happening beyond kidnappings and rescues once the situation has been set up - it's a whole lot of fun to watch Colman having fun, delight at the often very stylish manner director Roy Del Ruth shoots his few yet finely made sets, and forget all about the rather nasty political background of the Bulldog Drummond books. Sure, there is Oland's "oriental" evil mastermind (sort of) to remind one of the latter, however, there's so little mean-spirited about his use I found it difficult to get annoyed. It's an unfortunate cliché in a generally good-natured film, and seems to me more of a sign of the times the film was made in than any sign of active racism of its makers; it's the difference between actively doing evil and being thoughtless.

Apart from that, I can only criticize Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back for making me unhappy Colman didn't star in more Drummond films, and that's a criticism born of the fun I had with this one as well as the actor's earlier stint as the character.

 

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