The Watchdog Barks WE’RE ASSEMBLING this first issue of 2012 under a dark cloud of loss, due to the recent passings of film producer Rich- ard Gordon, a personal friend to me and an enthusiastic follower of this magazine for many years, possibly our most frequent con- tributor to our “Letterbox” column; popular music scholar and teacher David Sanjek, a VW subscriber and supporter since 1990, another friendly corre- spondent, as well as a patron of the Bava book; and writer-director Ken Russell, whom I never had the pleasure of meeting face-to-face but whose body of work touched me deeply and directly and thus stands very near the heart of this magazine, its identity and its ideals. I will have more to say about Mr. Russell in our next issue.
Donna and I intend 2012 to be an innovative and transformative year for VW, and true to those intentions, this issue is doing something we’ve never done before. Our feature article by new contributor Robert Guffey, originally titled “The Suppressed Science of Dr. Mirakle: Cinematic Ancestors and Descendants of Charles Darwin,” proved to be much too lengthy for us to publish in its original form once Donna adapted the text to our layout. I had accepted the article, wanted to publish it, but the only way to accomodate it was to introduce a new idea. Therefore, I edited Bob’s much longer article to one focused on the influ- ence of Charles Darwin and his Theory of Evolution on Robert Florey’s 1932 film MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE (the focus of the first half of Bob’s manuscript). As a compliment to that version, we offer the complete text (which ventures further comment on such later horror films as THE APE, THE APE MAN, THE MONSTER AND THE GIRL and KONGA) as a website exclusive intended solely for our readers and subscribers. To access this, our first fully-illustrated web-exclusive feature, visit
www.videowatchdog.com/web/mirakle. In one of those strange serendipities we enjoy noting, Bob’s article happened to arrive just as I was reading for the first time Gaston Leroux’s novel BALAOO, first published in 1912, just two years after the first publication of his immortal THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA. It is the story of a provincial French doctor who surgically modifies an ape into a civilized, monocled, speaking mem- ber of his household, albeit one still prone to
outbursts of animal temperament with sometimes catastrophic results. BALAOO was one of Leroux’s most popular French works, inspiring a sequel in 1938, but it appeared in English only in a British edition of 1913, so it has never been well-known in America. (It is nevertheless now available as a print- on-demand paperback from Dodo Press, and as part of an ebook collection of Leroux’s fiction.) Nevertheless, it somehow had quite an effect on the world of cinema—some of which is traced in the longer version of Bob’s article, notably an authorized partial filming of 1913 and some later, looser, unauthorized adaptations such as THE WIZARD (1927) and DR. RENAULT’S SECRET (1942). Bob’s article draws a straight and certainly valid line between Darwin and MURDERS IN THE RUE MORGUE’s Dr. Mirakle (Bela Lugosi), but having now read BALAOO, I would be remiss in my editorial duties if I didn’t point out the novel’s place in this constellation of ideas. Like Dr. Mirakle, BALAOO’s Dr. Coriolis Boussac Saint-Aubin believes in the superiority of animals to humankind, or is brought to that understanding by his experiment’s powers of articulation and grace under pressure. And like Mirakle’s ape Eric, Balaoo is processed and civilized by science to the point of encouraging his human appetites, which are ex- pressed in terms of his deep devotion to Coriolis’ daughter Madeleine and his dawning, doomed awareness that they can never be as one. His frustrations compel him to secretly seek out the society of other animals and other animalistic humans, which involves him in criminal activity. The book builds to familiar scenes and sugges- tions of fair ladies abducted from their fancy boudoirs, carried across Parisian rooftops to for- ested lairs—which would subsequently inform Edgar Wallace in the writing of his 1926 thriller THE AVENGER which, as I cited in my article for VIDEO WATCHDOG #126, was the seed for the story he contributed to the 1933 classic KING KONG— but the novel’s final revelations and closure still come as unexpected and satisfying. It’s a chap- ter that must be factored into our feature article’s chronology.
I’m running out of room, so I’ll close with the promise that, later in this New Year, other new and exciting facets will be added to the VIDEO WATCH- DOG experience, including downloadable issues, esubscriptions and ebooks. So stay tuned!
Tim Lucas 3
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