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The Murders in the Rue Morgue

Of the handful of adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe's seminal detective story, the 1986 TV film is often called the best. Certainly better than the 1932 Bela Lugosi horror film that had little connection to the Poe story.

The 1986 German production doesn't seem made-for-TV, as it stars leading American actors in a sumptuous setting that evokes Paris of the nineteenth century in rich detail. You could easily mistake it for one of the fondly recalled Hammer Studio horror and detective productions of the 1950s (see The Curse of Frankenstein and The Hound of the Baskervilles).

The great George C. Scott is Poe's sleuth Auguste Dupin. In this version of The Murders in the Rue Morgue he is a retired and widowed inspector who pines for his old job and spends his enforced dotage playing chess with his daughter (Rebecca De Mornay) and anyone who visits—until he is drawn into action for one last great, grisly mystery. Obviously a great deal of effort has gone into fleshing out the short story, changing and creating characters, as well as building entirely new subplots—one about Dupin's daughter's fiancé being arrested for the murders while another young man (Val Kilmer) obviously falls for her and another about the rivalry between Dupin and the jealous police prefect (Ian MacShane before achieving Lovejoy television fame).

But in this case tinkering with a classic is not a bad thing. It's done well and involves us in a story that takes longer than the mere thirty minutes we could get from the original tale. The actors make the most of a melodramatic script. Scott is a delight to watch as the curmudgeonly old detective and seems to delight in the role himself, though Kilmer beside him is rather dull and pallid, never really seeming to be anything other than Val Kilmer, rising star of American film.

The ending is somewhat of a letdown. To be fair, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" offers an impossible challenge: anyone interested in seeing a film of this story likely already knows the strange identity of the killer, which might have shocked at one time. Odd then that the film goes to such great lengths to protect us from this knowledge, even to try to heighten the suspense in ways that could only work on someone who does not guess the conclusion. When we do "discover" the truth, we're tempted to laugh at its ridiculousness. And then the film is over so quickly, leaving loose ends dangling ... almost as if someone had a sequel or a whole series in mind. That might have been enjoyable