Murders in the Rue Morgue (Robert Florey, 1932)

This extremely loose adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe novella is a fairly routine horror/suspense thriller, but it looks great, has some high-powered talent behind and in front of the camera, and moves swiftly enough, and Bela Lugosi is in excellent form as Mirakle.
Director Robert Florey's film dispenses with most of Poe's story, keeping only its setting (Paris) and a handful of plot details (mostly squeezed in at the end). It even changes the story's dangerous primate from an orangutan to an ape and turns Poe's main character, the brilliant detective Dupin, into a young medical student. When a detective finally appears in the film's closing scenes, he's an arrogant buffoon.

In Poe's novella, which many literary scholars and critics believe is the first modern American detective story, an orangutan belonging to a sailor escapes and commits a double murder. Dupin solves the crime. In Florey's film, Bela Lugosi plays Dr. Mirakle, the proprietor and host of a tent show at a traveling carnival starring his pet ape. The carnival show is a front for Mirakle's real passion. He's a mad scientist and proponent of Darwin's theory of evolution who is in the habit of kidnapping women and injecting them with his ape's blood to prove his theories. This ends up killing the women, to Mirakle's chagrin, and he dumps the bodies in the river. Not the guy you want convincing people to believe in evolution. We need some PR help over here.

When medical student Dupin (Leon Ames) attends the carnival with his girlfriend Camille (Sidney Fox) and his fellow student/roommate Paul (Bert Roach) and his girlfriend, the ape and Mirakle take a liking to Camille, and Mirakle decides she's a perfect specimen for his experiments. Things proceed predictably, story-wise, but there are some beautifully expressive shots and images throughout, Lugosi gives a classic Lugosi performance, and the most of the comedic moments are genuinely funny (and just the right side of corny).
The cinematographer on the film was Karl Freund, who I wrote a lot about in my review of The Mummy a few months ago. Freund, who directed The Mummy and Mad Love but primarily worked as a cinematographer, shoots the film in deep, gorgeous black and white and captures a lot of great light and shadow on the studio sets. My favorite moments are a stagecoach scene at night drenched in shadow, a rooftop chase in the moonlight, and a bright, elegant shot of a woman being pushed on a swing.

Director Florey and star Lugosi were offered Rue Morgue as a consolation after being replaced by James Whale and Boris Karloff, respectively, on Frankenstein. Florey and Lugosi had done extensive planning for Frankenstein, which Florey planned to direct with Lugosi playing the scientist. The studio stepped in and told Lugosi to play the part of the monster instead. Lugosi felt he would be unrecognizable under the makeup and dropped out. With Lugosi out, producer Carl Laemmle, who didn't like the direction Florey was taking Frankenstein, replaced him with Whale, who really wanted the job. Whale and Boris Karloff made a great team, and the film was a hit and an enduring horror classic. Laemmle knew Florey still had a strong desire to make a horror film and decided to make it up to him and Lugosi by giving them Rue Morgue. Unfortunately, the film didn't do very well, and Universal ended Lugosi's contract.

Florey, a Frenchman obsessed with Hollywood who moved to the United States in his early twenties, had a long journeyman career directing movies and TV. He specialized in B-movies (in the classic Hollywood sense of the term) in all genres and was famous for bringing them in under budget but over schedule. (What?) Some of his better known films besides Rue Morgue include the experimental short The Life and Death of 9413, a Hollywood Extra, the first Marx Brothers movie, The Cocoanuts (which the brothers hated), The Woman in Red (with Barbara Stanwyck), Hollywood Boulevard, Daughter of Shanghai, Meet Boston Blackie, God Is My Co-Pilot, and The Beast with Five Fingers. His last two credits were episodes of The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits in 1964.

One last surprising name in the credits is a young John Huston, who wrote some of the dialogue. He had just broken into Hollywood as a screenwriter after publishing some short stories and journalism pieces in a few magazines, though it would be another nine years before he would make his debut as a director with The Maltese Falcon.