Joaquim da Silva Fontes, Significação e Estabilidade do Género no ...

pace and takes us to the airless sitting rooms and boudoirs of Dr. Seward’s asylum. One of
the first successful talkies in America, it should also be remembered that the
cinematographer for this film was Karl Freund, who had come from Germany, where he
had worked on films like Lang’s Metropolis (1927), Wegener’s The Golem (1920), and
Murnau’s The Last Laugh (1924). Freund was known for his photographic mastery and
imaginative camera movement, with his use of tracking shots, which are evident in
Dracula. All these ingredients combined make Dracula an acclaimed classic, especially
for its visuals and for the verbal eccentricities of Bela Lugosi.
Karl Freund also photographed two other films which, I believe, not only show the
transposition of pure Weimar to Hollywood, but also reveal early experimentation with
film noir techniques vis-à-vis acting and lighting techniques. French director Robert
Florey’s Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932) again stars Bela Lugosi (in the role of Dr.
Mirakle) and again is taken from an Edgar Allan Poe short story (1841). The film reveals a
considerable influence of the German Expressionism, with strong echoes of The Cabinet of
Dr. Caligari in the warped streets of nineteenth-century Paris, mysteriously distorted
houses that lean over the glossy paving stones, and ominous darkness. In fact, the final
scenes of the movie seem to have been taken from Dr. Caligari, when the police arrive just
after Eric, the Gorilla (Charles Gemora) kills Dr. Mirakle and seizes Camille (Sidney Fox),
running off with her across the rooftops of Paris. 37 All in all, the screenwriters, Tom Reed
and Dale Van Every, managed to change Poe’s original dry detective story into a tale of a
maniacal scientist with his talking orangutan (fig. 29), and his attempts to prove that man
has indeed an ape-human blood affinity. 38 As a Gothic specialist who was originally slated
to direct Frankenstein (though he ended up directing Murders in the Rue Morgue),
Florey’s finest work was in these low-budget programmers, B-films such as the skilful noir
production The Crooked Way (1949). As for German cinematographer Karl Freund, his
more than one hundred films show that he was an Expressionist technician, and when he
emigrated to the United States in 1929, he went on shooting well-remembered films such
as the above-mentioned Dracula and a noir film, Key Largo (1948).
37 This final act surely also reminds the viewer of the final scene of Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B.
Schoedsack’s King Kong (1933). As a fact of the matter, Murders in the Rue Morgue also achieved this scene
with stop-motion animation.
38 Murders in the Rue Morgue is set just shortly after the publication of Darwin’s The Origins of Species.
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