Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932)

Bela Lugosi is at his most rigid best in this eerily spooky adaptation of Edgar Allan Poe's story. It's 1800s Paris and amidst the fog and the cobblestones streets, young women are being kidnapped and disappearing without trace. What's this to do with "Mirakle" (Lugosi)? Well we quite quickly discover that he is working on a Darwin-esque plan to prove the relationship between human beings and apes. To prove his theories, he is using the blood from his more hirsute helpers to contaminate his guinea pigs, but as yet to no avail. When he alights on the young "Camille" (Sidney Fox) her boyfriend, medical student "Dupin" (Leon Ames) starts to piece things together but how on earth is he going to convince the gendarmerie? I really quite enjoyed this hour of megalomanic science, peppered with some acceptable co-starring and a reasonably tight script as the tension of the adventure is managed quite effectively by Robert Florey towards a denouement that has a soupçon more jeopardy than you might expect. Of course, the role given to Fox is little better than that of one tied to a rail track, but she still manages to exude just enough of a sense of panic to keep things interesting and it's a decent example of an early, at times even scary, talkie.