This promotional still of Fox and Gemora depicts what the 1932 pre-Code film leaves largely implicit.


in my FRANKENSTEIN adaptation. Bela Lugosi became Dr. Mirakle—a mad scientist desirous of creating a human being—not with body parts sto- len from a graveyard and a brain from a lab, but by the mating of an ape with a woman” (p. 50-1). Unlike the counterparts in FRANKENSTEIN, however, Erik turns on his master—not because he’s been rejected by him, but because he wants to prevent Mirakle from harming his prize, Camille. Ironically, Mirakle is brought down by the very theory he was attempting to prove. There are two alpha-males in the cage and only one prize. The weaker primate has to go, and he does. The stron- ger alpha-male prevails. He claims his prize and takes to the highest rooftops of Paris with the un- conscious beauty under his arm, much as another primate would do only a year later in a far more dramatic fashion in Merian Cooper and Ernest Schoedsack’s KING KONG (1933). Just like in KING KONG, Erik is riddled with bullets and falls off the rooftop to his death below while the hero saves the girl from a similar fate.


Universal’s MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE was released on February 21, 1932. This was only seven years after the highly controversial 1925 le- gal case The State of Tennessee v. John Thomas Scopes, also known as “The Scopes Monkey Trial” which later inspired the 1955 hit play INHERIT THE WIND by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee. In Dayton, Tennessee, a high school teacher was arrested for violating The Butler Act, which outlawed the teaching of evolution in high schools in any form. Despite his being defended by Clarence Darrow, the most prominent defense at- torney of his day, the jury found Scopes guilty on July 21, 1925 and forced him to pay hefty fines. The Butler Act was not repealed in Tennessee until 1967, 42 years later and only seven years after the release of the ultimate Darwinian ape-man movie: Stanley Kramer’s INHERIT THE WIND (1960), star- ring Fredric March and Spencer Tracy, both of whom had played the ape-like Mr. Hyde in the two most famous cinematic adaptations of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novel THE STRANGE CASE


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