Hiding in a box marked Noir is one of Universal’s horror-adjacent ’40s mystery thrillers, in a terrific new transfer. The talky adaptation retains some of Edgar Allan Poe’s complicated detective ratiocinations, and spices things up with personalities like prickly Maria Ouspenskaya and star-to-be Maria Montez. Paul Dupin must juggle a mysterious disappearance, plus mutilation murders and a feline red herring in the form of a pet leopard. Also starring Patric Knowles, Nell O’Day and Lloyd Corrigan. Kino gives it dueling commentaries headed by Tom Weaver and Kim Newman.

Mystery of Marie Roget
Blu-ray
KL Studio Classics
1942 / B&W / 1:37 Academy / 61 min. / Street Date January 9, 2024 / Part of the The Dark Side of Cinema XVI, available through Kino Lorber / 49.95
Starring: Patric Knowles, Maria Montez, Maria Ouspenskaya, John Litel, Edward Norris, Lloyd Corrigan, Nell O’Day, Frank Reicher, Charles Middleton, Reed Hadley, Raymond Bailey, Paul Dubov.
Cinematography: Elwood Bredell
Costume Design: Vera West
Art Director: Jack Otterson
Film Editor: Milton Carruth
Music Director: Hans J. Salter
Written by Michael Jacoby based on Mystery of Marie Rogêt by Edgar Allan Poe
Produced by Paul Malvern
Directed by Phil Rosen

Late in his audio commentary, Tom Weaver defends Univeral’s marketing of Mystery of Marie Roget as a horror film, pleading that they at least didn’t call it a western or a film noir. But Kino Lorber does, by including it in their Film Noir, the Dark Side of Cinema series. The popular definition of Noir is by now so diluted that Kino can claim fair game when applying it to a wide range of B&W dramas. And Marie Roget certainly looks like ‘dark cinema.’ Its low key lighting schemes would be a plus in any noir effort.

←  Marie Roget is not a stand-alone release. It is presently part of the three-title  The Dark Side of Cinema XVI box, bundled with the Jeff Chandler boxing drama  Iron Man and a genuine film noir starring Alan Ladd,  Chicago Deadline.

An unsolicited sidebar memory: back in film school, a critical studies student analyzing Chicago Deadline noticed that it was full of on-screen clocks. He timed them, and reported that they kept better ‘interior time sync’ than did Fred Zinnemann’s clocks in High Noon. In arcane film studies, we call this a Subject for Further Research.

You say Roget, I say Rogêt.

But we’re singling out Mystery of Marie Roget, an odd detective thriller that has always commonly been associated with horror, starting with Universal’s original advertising that featured a hooded phantom, and publicity taglines like “Beautiful beast! Maddening…with her soft caress!  Murdering…with steel-clawed terror!”   As kids we thought it was horror from its inclusion in the ‘Shock’ TV distribution package that jump-started the Universal horror craze of the late 1950s. Commentators Weaver and Kim Newman let us know that Marie Roget was sold as horror from the very beginning. Weaver reminds us that the on-screen title has no ‘the.’

The story is a somewhat disorganized ramble. In Paris of 1889, the notoriously attractive club entertainer Marie Roget (Maria Montez) has been missing for ten days, and the Minister of Naval Affairs Henri Beauvais (John Litel) demands that she be found. When a mutilated corpse is pulled from the Seine, Police Prefect Gobelin goes to inform Marie Roget’s grandmother, taking with him police medical officer and noted crime solver Paul Dupin (Patric Knowles). The prickly Mme. Cecile Roget (Maria Ouspenskaya) shows little interest in Marie — who suddenly reappears during the official visit, safe and sound. But the old lady coincidentally insists on engaging Paul to prevent the murder of her other granddaughter, the un-notorious and equally lovely Camille (Nell O’Day). Also in the mix is Marcel Vigneaux (Edward Norris of Decoy), Beauvais’ assistant, who is romantically involved with the Roget sisters.

The mystery bumbles along, with Paul Dupin playing a cultured Sherlock Holmes opposite the silly Prefect of Police, Gobelin (Lloyd Corrigan). Poor Gobelin is forever being shown up as a fool, mainly because Dupin keeps all of his ‘brilliant deductions’ to himself. The twists and turns of who is suspected and why, is interrputed by another horrible murder, another woman fished out of the Seine with her face clawed off.

With its substitution of talk for action, Mystery of Marie Roget gets off to a rocky start. Most everybody makes Dupin’s suspect list: Beauvais, Vigneaux, even cranky old Mme. Roget. A pet leopard is a potential killer. One prime suspect confesses, but Dupin calls off the prosecution, with the theory that the confession might be a clever legal dodge.

The film’s strongest element is the fine cinematography of Elwood ‘Woody’ Bredell, who would soon be celebrated for standout visuals in noirs like  Phantom Lady. Bredell thinks nothing of throwing strong window-pane shadows over a roomful of characters. Most of the interior sets have ceilings. Director Phil Rosen doesn’t move the camera much, but the static angles are always attractive.

Although horror was making a comeback at Universal, the Production Code office would tolerate nothing resembling the license of the pre-Code era. We only hear talk about unseen gruesome murder-mutilations, brief verbal descriptions. The camera accompanies Dupin into a morgue at midnight, but Phil Rosen and Woody Bredell play most of it in the dark, without special lighting emphasis. Was Bredell asked to avoid showing gurneys and shrouded corpses to keep the censors at bay?  This morgue scene is tame compared to the pre-Codes  Dr. X and  Mystery of the Wax Museum, with their macabre play with dead bodies.

Marie Roget is set up as a semi-sequel to Universal’s own very pre-Code horror thriller  Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932). Gobelin twice introduces Paul Dupin as the sleuth who solved that famous case. One of the disc commentators asks why Universal simply didn’t remake Murders in the Rue Morgue, when that title was almost certainly on a Code Office list of ‘off limits’ properties. The original floated sick ideas about sex, prostitutes and gorillas — adult horror content that Code Enforcement banned outright.

Knowles’ Dupin and Lloyd Corrigan’s Inspector Gobelin operate as something of a low-wattage Sherlock Holmes & Doctor Watson. The always-flustered Gobelin introduces himself with his lofty rank of Prefect, only to be ignored or insulted. Paul Dupin remains aloof and Gobelin blunders about jumping to conclusions. In truth, Gobelin has every right to be furious, as Dupin keeps him in the dark about the investigation. The semi-comic pairing looks like a warm-up for Universal’s wartime Sherlock Holmes series, except that Nigel Bruce’s Dr. Watson was never treated as this much of a buffoon.

A couple of Universal’s more horror-centric thrillers were even more schizophrenic in their subject matter. 1940’s  Black Friday is half-structured as a gangster picture. The odd 1942 horror item The Strange Case of Dr. Rx channels partners a ‘Thin Man’ vibe, with ex detective Patric Knowles and mystery writer Anne Gwynne trading quips as romantic detectives.

Beyond its Poe pedigree, Mystery of Marie Roget also connects with the fan cult for Maria Montez, who was a wartime phenomenon in popular, not-particularly-adept Technicolor costume adventures. We reviewed her Cobra Woman, a South Seas fantasy that was one of her biggest hits. Ms. Montez shows little acting ability in movies seemingly created to appeal to the Camp sensibility. Commentator and Montez biographer Tom Zimmerman reports that Ms. Montez was outspoken about her physical appeal, and for her exotic fantasy roles was often costumed in clingy sarongs, etc., more revealing than the norm. Wartime movies were sent overseas to entertain the troops; we like to think that Montez was allowed to serve as a slightly racy pin-up as a gift to servicemen marooned far from home.

The B&W Marie Roget precedes Maria Montez’s Technicolor bust-out, and her standard-issue period dresses are not pin-up material. The character is only in the picture for a few minutes. She lip-syncs to a vocal performed by another singer, helped by Woody Bredell’s classy cinematography. Frankly, her Marie Roget is not particularly distinctive, and doesn’t project a personality to suggest the Oo-lah-lah toast of the Paris club scene circa 1889.

Ms. Montez’s stardom may be explainable as a symptom of the studios’ full control of the movie business in the 1940s, when almost everything made money. Studios major and minor needed to churn out product as cheaply as possible. Some bosses at small outfits that couldn’t afford stars promoted their girlfriends as stars; how else does one explain a Vera Hruba Ralston?  Maria Montez did look incredibly good in Technicolor. Both she and Universal got what they wanted by promoting her as a big star and a big talent.

Maria Ouspenskaya’s grumpy old dame plays most her part siting down, frowning. Her dialogue has no bon mots or sentimental touches. John Litel, Edward Norris and others serve as Red Herring characters, whose exact motivations are purposely kept vague. Nell O’Day’s heroine is given almost nothing to do, and generates little romantic chemistry with Paul Dupin.

The show makes good use of (standing?) sets for the Paris streets, and a particularly good Paris rooftop set for an exciting chase and shoot-out. Tom Weaver points out that night exterior filming was banned during the war years, because of Air Raid blackout requirements. But aren’t those Paris street sets outdoors?  They couldn’t have tented them, could they?

This isn’t a particularly distinguished film for director Phil Rosen. Stuck in the ‘B’ trenches, the silent movie veteran could shine when a good script came along, as with RKO’s overachieving  Step by Step with Lawrence Tierney. In Marie Roget Rosen seems to have his hands full just making sure that the audience doesn’t lose the story thread in all the dialogue-heavy scenes. It’s all competent, but not very expressive — Maria Montez gets no help from the direction, and she needs it.

Overall Marie Roget still feels weak in both plotting and logic. Paris is turned upside down to find Marie Roget, but her reappearance is no big deal. Paul Dupin is offered a steep fee to serve as Camille Roget’s bodyguard at a party, and then leaves her alone and unprotected. Later, it is revealed that Paul stole a brain from a corpse in the morgue, so a learned colleague can examine it to determine if it is  a criminal brain.  It sounds like pseudo-science nonsense inspired by the theft of the ‘criminal brain’ in Universal’s original Frankenstein. Perhaps our read of the storyline needs help from the experts — does Paul Dupin float this brain business to throw his suspects off balance?

The KL Studio Classics Blu-ray of Mystery of Marie Roget will be a blessing to horror fans, as a mystery thriller traditionally coded as horror-adjacent. Even in good 16mm prints parts of it always seemed too dark, but HD encoding gives it new screen life. The film elements are in excellent condition, as is the sound.

We thought that Hans J. Salter’s music contribution was excellent until the final scenes, when the cues seemed ‘not right’ to illustrate a rooftop shoot-out. The commentators then say that the music tracks are mostly borrowed or repurposed from elsewhere, that most are library cues.

Kino gives this sixty-minute movie two audio commentaries. Kim Newman and Stephan Jones offers an enthusiastic appraisal, pointing out the picture’s good aspects and going easy on some the weak acting — Edward Norris’s performance is described as making the colorless Patric Knowles look like a great actor.

Universal horror enthusiast Tom Weaver loves the studio’s ’40s output and appears to have a soft spot for this one. He has a fine time pointing out bit players and admiring minor absurdities: in the title sequence, a row of E.A. Poe books gives the impression that the author’s short stories and poems are full novels. Tom farms out much of the film’s one-hour running time to others. Gary L. Prange is given the task of compiling the many drownings in Universal horror films, a brisk detour that pays off in a Weaver joke that reminds us of old-time radio comedy.

Tom Weaver found a good book on Maria Montez, but, following his credo of not appropriating the work of others, invited guest speaker Tom Zimmerman to give a ten-minute history of the actress’s stellar career. Tom’s own interview material centers on cast members’ memories of star Maria Ouspenskaya. Marie Roget went into production just after Pearl Harbor was attacked, which permits Tom to investigate how the trade papers handled Hollywood’s post-attack jitters. Of course the town was on edge; thousands of healthy young actors and extras suddenly found themselves extra-qualified for the draft.

The first murder mystery based on a real-life crime.

Both commentaries discuss Poe’s original story, its place in the development of Detective Fiction, and the fact that Poe was inspired by a real crime that became something of a legend, a drowning victim that was never identified. Kim Newman’s track tells us that more facts surfaced about the real murder before all of Poe’s serialized story was published. Poe revised his final installment to add new facts from police-blotters, further confusing the issue.

The trailer included is a Universal original in fine condition, not Realart reissue. Realart didn’t care about the Poe connection, and changed the title to Phantom of Paris.

With factual corrections from Tom Weaver.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson

Mystery of Marie Roget
Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Good +/-
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
Audio commentary with Tom Weaver, Gary L. Prange, Tom Zimmerman
Audio commentary with Kim Newman and Stephan Jones.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case
Reviewed: March 3, 2024
(7088roge)

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