|
"Broken hopes and bodies and hearts... Paris. My city." The gleam in the fog is a sideshow sketched with bustling diagonals (cf. Murnau's Faust), past the wriggling odalisques and Apache scalpers is Dr. Mirakle's presentation on depraved evolution. "Erik the Ape Man" is the main attraction, the crowd passes between the legs of a cardboard gorilla to find Bela Lugosi's skulking rendition of a carny-provocateur. Bestial rants are his specialty, a mate for his caged primate is the experiment, a simple matter of mixing blood. "Behold: First man!" The cruel fate of a streetwalker (Arlene Francis) is practically an Artaud ballad, scooped off the gutter and bled on a rack and dumped into the river. Purity is demanded, the lily-white mademoiselle (Sidney Fox) courted by the medical student (Leon Ames) fits the bill. "Do they still burn men for heresy?" Robert Florey's Gallic delirium and Karl Freund's Germanic eye, thus the Grand Guignol distillate of Poe. The idea of normalcy is gleefully mocked: The vision of marriage has the obsessed hero at the microscope while the apron-wearing roommate (Bert Roach) fusses over an ignored meal ("Vampire! Vulture! Body-snatcher!"), elsewhere the pastoral picnic is packed with wolves. (The camera is mounted on a tree swing and suddenly, amid all the luridness, a foreglimpse of Renoir's Partie de Campagne.) The hairy arm sticking out of the carriage, the body stuffed up the chimney, the heroine's Fuseli nightmare—a suit of remarkable images leading to the ape and the maiden on the rooftop one year ahead of King Kong. The Seine receives victim and villain alike, the last word belongs to the mortician's scratchy quill. With Betty Ross Clarke, Brandon Hurst, D'Arcy Corrigan, Noble Johnson, and Herman Bing. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |