The Misery of Marie Roget

Found a somewhat blurry copy of Phil Rosen's Universal B-picture THE MYSTERY OF MARIE ROGET in my DVD-R collection and decided to give it a spin. I hadn't seen it since childhood and all I could remember of it were shots of a racing horse drawn carriage - which turns out to be because it's virtually the only thing in the film that's not talk. 

The movie opens with a discerning hand plucking a thick hardcover copy of Poe's short story from a piddling display of classic literature. The first thing the 60-minute film shows us is a Paris newspaper headline exclaiming the murder of Marie Roget - a simple perfume salesgirl in the story, but here an exotic music hall singer who is the toast of Paris! "Prefecture of Police BAFFLED!" we are informed. But Maria is soon revealed to be still alive, not the dead disfigured girl dredged up from the Seine. She and her sister's fiancée are plotting to murder her sister, a plan overheard by the grandmother who asks our hero Pierre Dupin to protect her. Dupin, the character Leon Ames (as Leon Waycoff) played in 1932's MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE, is played by the woefully bland Patric Knowles and he's continually being congratulated on solving that legendary case. The evil Maria's musicality is explained by the fact that Universal cast Maria Montez in the title role; but what is not so easily explained is that Maria is the granddaughter of Maria Ouspenskaya and the sister of Nell O'Day - so the three members of the Roget family living under the same roof have wildly different accents - and not one of them French! 

Nelly O'Day, Lloyd Corrigan, Patric Knowles, Maria Ouspenskaya and John Litel.

The other French roles are played by those beloved Gallic performers Lloyd Corrigan, John Litel, and (as a zoo keeper) Charles Middleton. Corrigan is the foolish Prefect ("Pre-fey") of Police, who has to be reminded more than once in his impulsive attempts to arrest people that it would help to have an airtight case against the suspects first. He gabs so relentlessly and pointlessly he must have been paid by the word; his fussy, comic, impatient window dressing crowds the film so badly that our hero-genius Dupin is reduced to standing around mixing chemicals and slyly testing theories he confides in neither the Prefect nor the audience, so his general lack of charisma is compounded by the no more than vague sketch we're given of this celebrated detective. The movie lifts whenever Madame Ouspenskaya puts him in his place. At a party, Maria makes everyone swoon by singing an interminable song in Spanish. When someone tries to poison her and Dupin (perhaps a music critic), it looks like Phil Rosen himself stepped up to tap the powder into their untended drinks. In a last act confession of creative bankruptcy, Dupin deduces that the cause of the shared facial disfigurementa of the female murder victims is a common hand garden rake - the very same prop used as the signature weapon of the killers in Universal's THE SCARLET CLAW and SHE-WOLF OF LONDON, made around the same time. The film's only persuasive whiff of France comes from a climactic rooftop chase as Dupin and the Prefect chase the skulking shadow figure from HORROR ISLAND over the rooftops of Paris. His defeat doesn't bring us much closure; we're told who this cloaked phantom is by name, but we're not given a shot of his face to confirm which of the cast members he was.

On the very narrow plus side is some occasionally striking photography by Elwood Bredell (THE MUMMY'S HAND, HELLZAPOPPIN!, PHANTOM LADY), which must be even better served by a proper presentation. Entertaining in its general ineptitude, and the inability of the actors to speak either believable English OR French, I'm sure the reason why my childhood memories of THE MYSTERY OF MARIE ROGET are so limited is that it must have driven me to raid the refrigerator.

Having fallen back on my old DVD-R out of mistaken desperation, I now see that it's been available from Universal since 2014 as part of their Vault Series. If my notes have intrigued you, you can find it here.

(c) 2020 by Tim Lucas. All rights reserved.