Murders in the Rue Morgue (Florey, 1932) + Mad Love (Freund, 1935):
Cinema Museum, 7pm
Founded in 1966, the Gothique Film Society specialises in double bills ‘for the connoisseur of the macabre’. This is their latest at the Cinema Museum.
Muders in the Rue Morgue review (from Chicago Reader):
After a star-making performance in Dracula, Bela Lugosi passed up Frankenstein
to star in this loose adaptation of the Edgar Allan Poe story (and boy,
was he sorry). As the oily Dr. Mirakle, Lugosi presides over a
live-gorilla act at a carnival in mid-19th-century Paris; by night he
kidnaps young women and injects them with simian blood, a fiendish
experiment whose aim was lost on me. Directed by Robert Florey, this
1932 feature turned out to be a minor entry in Universal’s horror cycle,
though it’s a good opportunity to see Lugosi’s ham still fresh from the
tin.
JR Jones
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Mad Love review (from Chicago Reader):
This atmospheric 1935 chiller, a remake of the silent expressionist film The Hands of Orlac, was directed by the great cinematographer Karl Freund, who shot Metropolis, The Last Laugh, and a dozen other classics, then spent his twilight years shooting I Love Lucy.
Peter Lorre (in his first American role) plays a mad surgeon who grafts
the hands of a psychopath onto a crippled concert pianist. The film is
worth seeing for a number of reasons, but its latter-day reputation
rests on Pauline Kael’s theory that Gregg Toland, the photographer, used
this film to try out the effects he later applied to Citizen Kane.
Dave Kehr
Here (and above) is the trailer for Mad Love.
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