Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 26: Fri Jan 26

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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