I Want to Believe?

Having purchased seasons 6 and 7 of The X Files on DVD, and thus been watching several episodes a day, I find these seasons a curiously bothersome experience. It's not that the episodes all seem derivative and tautological (well they do because they are), it's not that the episodes are rubbish (some of them are quite surprisingly good actually), it's that now the core and essence of the series is made so abundantly clear. There were hints, oh yes there were plenty of hints all along the way, but now there can be no doubt about it: it's all about faith and belief.

This is what the entire series is founded upon.

Mulder knows the way things are. Mulder knows what is what, he just cannot prove anything. So his sayings and claims have to be taken on faith.

We, the viewers, are given some glimpses of the truth. Sometimes these are explained away, sometimes they aren't. But clearly we are given to understand that Mulder is right. He holds the truth.

Fair enough.

But this doesn't seem to satisfy the powers that be. This is the point where The X Files ceases to be science fiction, falls flat on its face and becomes soap opera. Or religious soap opera, which is much worse. Not to say embarrassingly banal.

Mulder isn't simply the fellow who tries to get to the bottom of things and expose the corruption. Oh no. Mulder is given saint like properties. Mulder is a Holy Prophet. And to underline this, to make it clear as a bell, he, time and again, dies and comes back through resurrection. He suffers for our sins. He is crucified. He preaches the truth but no one will listen to him. He is mocked. He is ridiculed. He is silenced. But he will not, cannot be silenced. He will suffer any consequence, withstand any torture, to get his truth out. His truth. The truth.

Believe and ye shall be saved. Question and ye shall perish.

Mulder is, to put it quite bluntly, Messiah. Even Scully, who's supposed to be the rational partner, isn't really convinced that science can provide any real answers. She relies on religion. "Are you asking me to pray?"Belief is the key. Believe and ye shall be saved.

This makes me right miffed.

It's cheating. I don't want my science fiction to be sugar-coated religion masquerading as bold, independent and intellectually valid art.

I'm perfectly willing to accept the core truth of almost all religions, that essential truth that is akin to mythology and must be understood as a metaphor of the soul and mankind's spiritual journey, and I'm quite willing to accept the theological framework that lies at the heart of The X Files as a perfectly legitimate and indeed compelling dramaturgical and emotional construction. But when it comes down to a question or rather a demand of personal and unquestioned and blind belief I tend to get extremely irritated. Sometimes even hostile. And when it comes to scientific thought having to yield to faith I am at a loss for words.

It offends my sense of rationality, it offends everything I hold true. It offends common sense.

And, this is the cruncher, it makes for poor art. The religious undertones in The X Files completely ruin any chance of it being taken seriously, its hubristic Messianic tendencies only serve to make it a piece of juvenile and unsound propaganda. Propaganda is never good art. Propaganda is never art at all.

"You're not Christ," says the Smoking Man to Mulder in an early season 7 episode. But of course the opposite is true and this is the way we are to understand it. He is Christ and meant to be seen as such. The Smoking man is of course Satan - "May I offer you a cigarette?" - and the ominous red glow of his ever present cigarette tip a little piece of Hell. He tries to lead Mulder astray with his lies and mendacious rationalizations, and by showing him a false picture of how life could be if only he gave up his foolish quest. He could have a normal life, just like anybody else. Mulder remains strong in his faith, with a little help fron Scully.

Mulder is the one man who stands between us and extinction. He cannot waver. He must believe or else comes the Apocalypse. The Smoking Man crucifies Mulder, literally, and on his head Mulder wears the Crown of Thorns - suitably updated for a cyber age. Behold the man.

Good stuff, powerful imagery. But. This is what it comes down to and this is what makes me rather less than happy - the preaching. What The X Files preaches is: belief is good, science and rationality are bad. I'll repeat: belief good, science and rationality bad.

And now I see Mulder's motto and the motto of the entire series - "I want to believe" - in a totally new light and it gives me the shivers. Was it this blatant from the start?

Any work of art that preaches such truths is rubbish, complete and utter, not to say intellectually dishonest. No further explanations necessary.

I'm not entirely certain this is Chris Carter's intention. But - if it isn't he's a pretty confused fellow and doesn't quite know what he's up to. Any which way it doesn't make him look particularly good.

What really amazes me is that it took so long for me to spot the obvious. I suppose I just didn't want to believe.

"Extremely Distasteful"

I've never particularly cared for Hitchcock. The films are quite entertaining as such but afterwards one inevitably gets an empty, almost nauseating feeling; just like after having eaten something dodgy or read a Christie novel. There's something off, there's something fundamental lacking; they both have this frighteningly chilly core at the centre of their art, this inhuman vacuum where a human soul of some description ought to reside.

However, I do love a few Hitchcock movies. Psycho. Vertigo. North by Northwest. It took me long while to see just what it was that made me adore these films in particular, even view them as masterpieces. Then the obvious suddenly struck me: Bernard Herrmann.

It's Herrmann's music that transforms these movies into gripping cinematic experiences and singular works of art.

Herrmann (born in 1911) was a native New Yorker and attended New York University and the Juilliard School. He was a member of Aaron Copland's circle and tried his hand at composing, writing his first dramatic score at 22, La Belle Dame sans Merci. In the early '30s he joined the CBS orchestra as a conductor and avidly performed new and unknown works. Like those of Charles Ives, who was still alive at the time and whom he soon befriended. Ives was at this point in time almost entirely unplayed and quite unknown. Certainly nobody had any idea he was the greatest composer the United States had produced - still is - and the New World's equivalent of Arnold Schönberg. Herrmann understood it.

CBS also broadcast a lot of radio plays, like those put on by the Mercury Theatre and the Campbell Playhouse, both of which operated under the auspices of that controversial theatrical wunderkind Orson Welles. The radio plays of course needed music. Herrmann suplied it. He conducted the music for Welles's best known and most poignant radio play The War of the Worlds in 1938 and scored many other productions. It naturally befell Hermann to score Welles's first venture into the world of cinema, an almost forgotten little effort called Citizen Kane.He also did the score for The Magnificent Ambersons but pulled it when the studio in a dastardly fashion slaughtered the film in Welles's absence. A few bits of it remain in the carnage that the studio released, much against Herrmann's wishes.

After that there was no turning back. In the '40s he scored Robert Stevens's Jane Eyre (with Joan Fontaine in the title role and Welles as the dark and brooding Rochester), John Brahm's Hangover Square (with Laird Cregar and George Sanders), John Cromwell's Anna and the King of Siam (with Irene Dunne and Rex Harrison) and Joseph Mankiewicz's The Ghost and Mrs Muir (with Gene Tierney and Rex Harrison). Among his highlights in the '50s were the science fiction classic The Day the Earth Stood Still (by Robert Wise), Mankiewicz's spy thriller 5 Fingers (with James Mason and Danielle Darrieux), Henry King's Hemingway picture The Snows of Kimanjaro (with Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner), and Michael Curtiz's Mika Waltari epic The Egyptian (with Peter Ustinov and Gene Tierney).

In 1955 the collaboration with Hitchcock started with The Trouble With Harry and the following year he did both the re-make of The Man Who Knew Too Much and The Wrong Man. Then it came: the truly unsurpassed masterpieces - Vertigo in 1958 and North by Northwest in 1959. Then Psycho in 1960 and J. Lee Thompson's Cape Fear in 1962.

The collaboration with Hitchcock ended in 1964 and Torn Curtain. Hitchcock wanted a jazz and pop influenced score, Herrmann wanted to do it his own way. Like always. He would not be dictated to. If he couldn't do it exactly like he wanted, if he wasn't in total control of the music and in on the making of the movie from the word go, then he didn't want to do it. Quite sensibly, I might add. Hitchcock and Herrmann parted on not too amicable terms. After Hitchcock Herrmann did write a couple of important scores but the entire industry was changing and not all for the better. He wrote the scores for Fahrenheit 451 (1966, based on the Bardbury novel) and The Bride Wore Black (1968, based on the Cornell Woolrich novel) for Truffaut and Taxi Driver (1976) for Martin Scorcese. He died just a few hours after having finished recording the soundtrack for Taxi Driver.

I have a particular fondness for North by Northwest. Maybe there we have the finest film music he wrote. Or even: the finest film music ever written. The fandango that begins the film is right on the money and let's us know the name of the game at once. It's repetitive, simple, obsessive and frustrating. The effect is at the same time both dizzying and hypnotic. It's like we're in this spinning carousel and can't get off. In Psycho there are the unforgettable stabbing pizzicati and screeching birdlike violins. And again the repetition: the anxiety and the frustration grow and grow till we can no longer bear it. The it starts anew. There can be no solace. Something bad is about to happen, every note is a harbinger of doom. Nothing can avert the evil. It is like the rain in the driving scene: all-permeating and absolute. We can do nothing but await its coming and accept it when it does come.

What Herrmann realised is that film music doesn't have to be complex or stand on its own two feet. What is needed is impact. This is more often than not acheived by doing quite simple things. But doing them just at the right time. And repetition is the key - breaking down the viewer's every last resistance.

Herrmann goes for the gut reaction and by Jove he gets it.

In Vertigo we have the haunting Tristan like theme that keeps repeating itself and the frustration keeps building. It's never in the pictures or the lines - it's all in the music. This is probably something of which Hitchcock was acutely aware and disliked immensely. It has been suggested that a great part in the rift between Hitchcock and Herrmann was played by the possible fact that Hitchcock on some level, subliminal or not, resented the immense impact Herrmann had on his movies.

Herrmann's second unsurpassed masterpiece is the score of Cape Fear. The theme is simplicity itself. And it spells doom. It never relents, it never gives up, it never goes away. It immediately goes for the jugular. Four chords that keep on repeating. And repeating. And repeating. Till the bitter end. Right from the first note we know it's going to be a tragedy of epic Greek proportions with proper carnage. It can end only in cathartic death. But in a Herrmann score not even death brings us an escape from the frustration and anxiety he's built up. There is no escape. There is no relief. Not in the movie, not in life.

The last work, Taxi Driver, is a departure from the usual Herrmann. The jazzy score is softer, moodier, less anxious and neurotic. But again he unerringly captures not only the mood but the essence of the film - the hopeless cosmic loneliness of Travis Bickle. The music insulates him from the rest of humanity. They cannot hear it nor understand it just like they cannot understand or connect with him. The saxophone plays only for him. He's alone.

The title of this entry comes from a letter Herrmann wrote to his first wife, the author Lucille Fletcher (who wrote the briliant radio play Sorry, Wrong Number, which later was made into not quite as brilliant a movie with Burt Lancaster and Barbara Stanwyck): "I entered into work that was extremely distasteful to me . . . I never had time for my own reflection and work . . ." According to Lucille he wanted to be a conductor and conduct those pieces of music by Ives and Bartok and the other big boys he truly loved. He wrote one symphony, one opera and a cantata dedicated to Ives.

So this is his tragedy. He didn't really want to be a composer of film music at all. It's just that he was so incredibly good at it, so exceptional. He might have become a conductor of note - but we have those. We have many many brilliant conductors. We have no other film composer like Herrmann. Not even close.

Herrmann's only screen appearance is in The Man Who Knew Too Much. The scene takes place in Albert Hall and in it Herrmann plays - a conductor.

The Rabbit and the Hound

In The Norwood Builder Jonas Oldacre fakes his own death and frames the "unhappy John Hector Macfarlane" for murder.

Oldacre seems like a thoroughly unpleasant fellow. "He was a strange, little, ferret-like man, with white eyelashes," is how Macfarlane describes him. Macfarlane's mother, who once was engaged to Oldacre, gives the following description: "He was more like a malignant and cunning ape than a human being". This is the first impression Watson receives: "It was an odious face - crafty, vicious, malignant, with shifty, light-grey eyes and white eyelashes."

In his preface to my edition of The Return of Sherlock Holmes (Pan, 1979) Angus Wilson draws attention to the fact how much animal imagery there in the tales that make up this particular collection: "the world of beasts is never far away as a shadow world behind the strange or dreadful events which Holmes reduces to questions of orderly reason."

A ferret, an ape. "A little, wizened man" who darted out of his cubby-hole "like a rabbit out of its burrow."

So perhaps it's quite in order that Oldacre uses animal remains when he fakes his own death. Chicken bones? That's the way I always remember it. No. I check the story and it seems my memory is incorrect. "By the way," Holmes asks Oldacre in the end, "what was it you put into the wood-pile besides your old trousers? A dead dog, rabbits, or what?" Oldacre gives no reply. "Well, well, I dare say that a couple of rabbits would account for the blood and the charred ashes", Holmes concludes.

Still, this point has always made me wonder. Is it really viable to mistake charred rabbit bones for human remains? What medical examiner would make such a dismal error? Would Dr Watson, as a trained professional, fall for such a clumsy device? Hardly. But Watson never gets to see the remains, unless I'm much mistaken. Does Holmes see them? The story isn't entirely clear on that point.

Holmes says: "They had spent the morning raking among the ashes of the burned wood-pile and besides the charred organic remains they had secured several discoloured metal discs. I examined them with care, and there was no doubt that they were trouser buttons." So he has access to what the police found. Surely that would include a glance at the organic remains?

Now the bones are charred. Ashes really, is what Doyle writes. But is that possible? Can bones be thus annihilated in a mere wood-fire? I doubt it. It seems extremely unlikely. No, I'll venture a bold statement: It's entirely impossible.

There is absolutely no way a whole human corpse can be reduced entirely to ashes and cinder in a smallish wood-fire. The temperatures required for that are far higher. Surely Doyle as a professional medical gentleman was aware of this. Dear old Bertie Wooster is fond of quoting Tennyson's The Charge of the Light Brigade, but unfortunately he never can remember more than "ta-dum ta-dum ta-dum - someone had blunder'd." And that someone, in this case, is Arthur Conan Doyle. He, putting it bluntly, blundered. He slipped up. He stepped into it. No two ways about it. Well, that sort of thing tends to happen when the pace one writes at is fast and furious.

The Granada television series acknowledges the problem and the script tweaks the story a bit. In the episode Oldacre lures a tramp to his house, murders him and burns his body. As the remains of the tramp are clad in Oldacre's clothes, it is naturally assumed that the dead man is Oldacre.

This is all good and well and settles the matter of the unconvincing animal remains. However. Doyle's Oldacre is clearly a timid, shifty, cunning man. A man who in cold blood frames someone and takes a sadistic pleasure from doing it. But he's a ferret, a rabbit. Not someone who would or indeed could murder a man, not with his own hands. Only cowardly by proxy. Therefore in the episode they have a big, strong and bullish Oldacre - the antithesis of Doyle's intention. It throws the whole episode off for me, as the plan is still quite clearly a timid coward's sadistic plan and therefore not at all in synch with this new he-man Oldacre.

By the way, there's a rather remarkable thing about The Norwood Builder. Doyle didn't write the story alone. This, I believe is a pretty unique occurrence in the Canon. His partner was called Fletcher Robinson, but I'm not entirely certain if Robinson ever did more than help with the plotting.

Fletcher Robinson's name is important because of another thing he did. He's the man who came up with the original idea that produced The Hound of the Baskervilles. It was originally supposed to be a collaboration between Doyle and Robinson but then somehow Holmes crept in. This is curious. Holmes was, at this point, quite dead. Doyle certainly had no intention of resurrecting him, none at all. Yet Holmes managed to worm his way into The Hound of the Baskervilles and transform the entire novel into a vehicle for himself. Now there was no turning back and it didn't take too long before the short stories started to appear once more in the Strand and Holmes was officially returned to the fold, resurrected and back in business.

When Holmes came in, Robinson was out. But how much of the story did he write? Any of it? We don't quite know. Doyle kept it pretty schtumm and Robinson himself died shortly afterwards. It surely isn't too much of a stretch to wonder if he wrote some bits of the legend of the Hound. That was after all his main contribution to Doyle - the Legend of the Hound. At least some of the plotting must have come from him. I think we may take for granted that Doyle wrote all the bits with Holmes and/or Watson in them. Or may we? What was the book to be like before Holmes stepped in? Who was to be the hero? How far did Robinson and Doyle get in their planning? They commenced the writing, that much seems certain, but how far did they in fact get? Have any parts of the book been modified and was Holmes perchance inserted into already existing scenes? I don't find it at all impossible, at least in the latter parts of the book.

Anyway, interesting fact: Fletcher Robinson was involved in the writing of two Canonical Sherlock Holmes stories. The only outsider who ever was, I believe.

Scottish Curse

J.L. Carrell's The Shakespeare Curse isn't that bad. Really. There are quite interesting things in it. A lot of them, in fact. There's also a lot of rather annoying and embarrassing nonsense, and, what's more, the dramaturgy is once again "borrowed" from that eternal masterpiece of esoteric prose and flawless scholarship The Da Vinci Code.

Ok, so the plot is pretty boring and plodding. The Wiccan twaddle is insufferable. But still.

Macbeth is what it's all about. A lot of strange things and spooky happenings tend to cluster around the play and performances thereof. Mentioning its name, the names of the principal characters or quoting from it is considered to be bad form and even dangerous. It will bring bad luck, at least that's the impression in theatrical circles. Some suppose it cursed. Death and misery seem to follow it everywhere. This, according to Carrell, is because Shakespeare - while in Scotland in 1585 as an itinerant player - witnessed the rites of a coven of witches and pinched their secret spells for his play. A play what he then wrote twenty years later. Right. The spells are also what made Will such a hot writer. Right.

There is obviously a magic object and everybody wants it to perform their rite. No, there's three actually. A magic mirror which once belonged to the notorious Dr Dee, a sacred cauldron and the original manuscript of Macbeth with the potent spells still in it. Oh, and of course an ancient knife with an unslaked thirst for blood.

Our heroine, the theatre director Kate Stanley, well remembered from The Shakespeare Secret, must recover these objects or a young girl dies. And she's only got 48 hours. Or something. And, of course, there's a crazed killer around, killing his innocent victims left right and centre. Much hilarity ensues.

What I do like is the obvious homework Carrell has done on and around her subject. That's the core and essence of the book, the yummy stuff. She's found some quite fascinating things and used a lot of her materials rather well, inventively even. There is of course a wealth of material when it comes to Macbeth. Too much, in fact, if you try to use most every scrap of it in a single novel. Carrell seems to believe that her book becomes the better the more of it she uses. The opposite is true. Now the novel drowns in a swamp of quaint factoids, none of them really relevant or properly developed.

But. Interesting factoids: Dr Dee owned an Aztec mirror. Did it have magical properties? Is it the same mirror which is currently in the British Museum? That's what Horace Walpole claimed. Dee is perennially interesting, the archetype of both the consummate scholar and proto-scientist and the magician. Carrell makes Shakespeare his pupil. Not bad. Did Walsingham and Lord Salisbury use itinerant players as their wandering spies? Marlowe certainly was one, so too maybe Kyd. Which is of course what got them into trouble and what got Marlowe very dead indeed. What about Shakespeare? Was he in the cloak and dagger business? Good stuff. Did Hal Berridge, who played the Queen in the first performance, die in that performance or just after it? And did Shakespeare have to jump in to finish the role? So legend has it. What happened to Berridge? The curse? Is that how it originated? But, hang on, was there a Hal Berridge? Surely he's mentioned in some list of players? No. Nobody seems to mention him, apart from Aubrey. Or does Aubrey ever mention Berridge? Could it all just be a huge joke on the theatrical world, a succesful prank perpetrated by the sardonic Max Beerbohm? And speaking of Beerbohms, what happened to the early film version of Macbeth with Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree in the title role? Tree died soon after having finished the film - any connection there?

Tree's Lady Macbeth was, by the way, Constance Collier in one of her first screen appearances. Today Collier is perhaps best remembered as the tipsy aunt in Hitchcock's Rope. I'd quite like to see her Lady M.

Carrell clearly is extremely knowledgeable in the field of early American Shakespeare tradition and once again displays it wonderfully. Like when she fishes out the macabre case of Forrest vs. Macready - a feud about Macbeth interpretations that started the lamentable Astor Place riot in 1849 and got nearly thirty people killed.

Edwin Forrest was perhaps the earliest great American Shakespeare actor. He befriended his English colleague Charles Macready and they became fast friends. Macready toured the United States, Forrest toured Britain. It was all a great success. On a tour of England the public suddenly turned on Forrest and wouldn't buy his Macbeth, and Forrest blamed it on Macready and started to hound the baffled Englishman. Once when Macready did a Hamlet Forrest stood up, during the To Be or Not To Be monologue, naturally, and started hissing and booing Macready and ruined the entire performance. He started to sabotage Macready's productions. When Macready appeared in a play, Forrest would arrange to appear in a play in the same town and at the exact same time. Often it was even the same play.

In May 1849 Macready was doing Macbeth in New York at the Astor Place Opera House quite near the Bowery - a tough neighbourhood where the dreaded gangs of New York resided. The lethal Five Points weren't far off either. Forrest was doing Macbeth the same night only a few blocks away on Broadway. The lines were drawn and clear as a bell. Macready was favoured by the anglophile upper crust while Forrest was to the liking of the lower orders to whom Forrest was one of them. Three nights before the riot a number of tough Forrest aficionados bought several hundreds of tickets to Macready's performance and belted the poor man with rotten lettuce and eggs and potatoes and rotten tomatoes and shoes and stenching foul liquids; with anything basically they could hurl at the despised foreign toff. They also pretty much gutted the theatre in the process. Macready knew a hint when he saw one. Time to shift. However, he was talked out of going back to England by such members of the cultural elite of New York as Herman Melville and Washington Irving. He stayed and once more he braved the New York stage as the Scottish King.

That's when things got really nasty.

When the performance commenced there was an enraged rabble of thousands outside the theatre, maybe 20 000 people, drummed up by posters and word of mouth, howling for the Englishman's blood. They stoned the theatre and tried to set it on fire. The Police were pretty helpless against such numbers so the National Guard was called in. The crowd would not settle down so the National Guard fired into it. Nearly thirty died and hundreds were injured.

And I don't think it quite settled the matter of whose Macbeth was better.

Funny thing. Shakespeare seems to have been staggeringly popular and well known in America in the 19th century, even among ill-educated people, and really meant something to them. And in those days there was no mass entertainment and therefore no great divide between low and high art. That came later. So what they had were the classics, above all Shakespeare. It is, by the way, quite impossible to imagine a riot getting started today over whose Macbeth is the better. Not in America, not anywhere is such a thing within the realm of possibility or even the scope of imagination. Not even close.

But back to The Shakespeare Curse. Not an entire waste of time. In parts quite entertaining. But as a novel hopelessly muddled. Rather as one did expect.

What Price Shakespeare

Watching that very splendid study in Shakespearean gore, Theatre of Blood, with Vincent Price as the ageing Shakespeare ham who's the butt of every critic's joke, got me wondering if Price ever had done any Shakespeare for real.

A quick glance at his movie credits seems to turn up precious few roles in tights. Surprisingly few, in fact. In the early The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex he plays Sir Walter Raleigh and then there are the Poe movies, several of which might fit the bill. The closest he gets, apart from Theatre of Blood that is, is the Corman low-budget Tower of London, a ghost movie in which he plays a Richard of Gloucester haunted by those he's murdered. I also have a clear recollection of him doing Osric in Laurence Olivier's film version of Hamlet. I am of course wrong and it was in fact Peter Cushing. Close but no cigar.

He never did much work on the stage. In the 30s he was, briefly, with Orson Welles's legendary Mercury Theatre and appeared in Thomas Dekker's Shoemaker's Holiday and Bernard Shaw's Heartbreak House. The total sum of the stage productions he took part in is a round dozen; the most interesting of which is Richard III in New York in 1953. He appears, perhaps slightly surprisingly, as the Duke of Buckingham and not the hunchback.

Richard III would of course have been the ideal role for him. Oh how low and dastardly he would have been, oh how vile and scheming and how delighted at his own villainy. He played Richard in Tower of London and even in Theatre of Blood, in the scene where he drowned one of the hated critics in a butt of not Malmsey but Claret. Poetic justice, that.

Another role he was born to play was Iago. The problem there would be this: his Iago would probably destroy the tragedy of the tragedy. He would be so charming, so witty, have such underlying good humour that we'd be on his side and not really care a tinker's cuss what happens to the silly Moor and his bit of fluff. So the play would no longer be Othello but Iago.

In Hamlet he'd be an excellently foppish Osric, a wonderfully annoying Rosencrantz or Guildenstern, and most likely a fine and remarkably dangerous Polonius. And, this goes without saying, a superbly loathsome Claudius. But as Hamlet? Now there would be a fascinating study, I'm willing to bet. Not everyone's cup of tea, but interesting.

As a straight hero Price is impossible. He doesn't look the part. He's odd, his long and narrow Puritan face is somehow rubbery, like a Halloween mask. He's off and that's what makes him so fascinating. And he's got a voice. It's a blend of honey and poison. His manner is always sarcastic, bordering on the insolent and even malicious. We never can trust him. At the same time we never can completely dislike him either, even at his most dastardly. Particularly at his most dastardly.

Other leads? A stranded and more than slightly diabolical Prospero (the imprisonment of whom seems entirely just), a Julius Caesar who rather deserves what he's getting, a Timon who hates mankind with unsurpassable intensity and is out to get each and every one of its members. Put a false belly on him and he's the drunken braggart Falstaff, downing cups and felling wenches like nobody's business, completely enamoured with his own excellence.

Twelfth Night might have been an excellent vehicle for him. I see him doing a scathing Sir Toby Belch and also a tragic Malvolio. In the comedy tragedy and horror, and naturally vice versa. Which obviously is his forte.

What about Macbeth? Is there much room for dark comedy in Macbeth? Perhaps more than at first one might suppose. It would however alter the entire dynamics of the play. Not perhaps such a bad thing. And the witches are often played for comedy, justly or not. The more I think about Vincent Price as Macbeth the more the notion appeals to me.

Such a great pity he never did much Shakespeare to speak of. Still, Theatre of Blood almost makes up for it. Or perhaps even more than makes up for it.

In Memory Yet Green

There is a quite fascinating article in the spanking new Clarkesworld Magazine about brains and how they function. In it Luc Reid makes a couple of very salient points.

Firstly: our memories are very incomplete. By and large a lot of them are, partially, synthetic constructions. We have certain facts stored in the vaults of the brain and a lot of facts we don't have stored. Thus, when we remember the mind fills in the blanks and so we have what we imagine to be complete and unadulturated memories. The appearance of what happened instead of what actually did happen.

This, interestingly enough, is rather how fiction works. The author throws out a few important facts. He, for instance, describes a scene by pointing out this tree and that house and yonder barking mutt. And the mind of the reader fills in the gaps and gets a full and rich picture of what is going on and what it looks like and how it feels and smells and tastes.

Our mind works like this the whole time, constantly filling in and completing pictures, finding patterns and regularities where none in fact exist. Creating them out of very little. That's why we see faces on the surface of Mars or in omelettes - our brains are wired to see them.

Seasoned neurologists like Lurija and Sacks go a bit beyond this. They claim that our whole consciousness is filled with gaps and glaring holes. They claim that each day we construct our consciousness anew - each day we construct who we are. They claim that our consciousness is not so much a state but a process. Like Phoenix we arise each morning from the ashes of oblivion. Except when we don't. It never may be taken for granted. And the mind is such a delicate instrument, the most delicate there is. No wonder then when things go wrong with it. Miracle that it functions at all.

Those whose consciousness functions poorly may construct a new past for themselves, a new history and a new persona. The flawed mind still connects the dots and where no dots exist it creates them. Usually that works almost as well as the genuine article. Which, as we've seen, isn't all that genuine, to be honest.

But if this gaps in the consciousness theory holds water, then Aldous Huxley was very seriously wrong in his theory. In his book The Doors of Perception he claimed that we see and hear everything, far more than we ever are aware of, and store all of it in the brain. He also believed that the chief function of the mind was to filter most of that unnecessary and unimportant information so it wouldn't clog our consciousness. If we saw and heard and were aware of everything, all the time, saw every tiny detail as through a magnifying glass, and had to notice everything on a conscious level, we'd very soon go mad. Drugs, he thought, disabled the filter and allowed us to experience everything our senses took in, and for once be aware of every tiny detail around us.

"If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks in his cavern."

Secondly: each time we access a memory we in essence rewrite it. Remembering something tampers with that memory and ultimately alters it. So the memory is never static, our memories live with us. And importantly, "anything that interferes with the re-writing turns recollection into erasure".

Thirdly, and this is an amusing thought: were somebody to try to copy one's brain (or remove it from one's head and plant it in somebody else's head, which is always a dreaded risk), they would have to recreate one's entire endocrinology as well. For the brain does not operate in a vacuum. All the chemicals we have are individual and are part of how our brain functions. So copying (or removing) only one's brain would be futile without the neurotransmitters and organs that operate the whole system. There's a relief.

It's a curiously haunting thought: every time we remeber something that memory is, if ever so slightly altered. You never can go back. You never can step into the same river twice.

The mind is a fragile and incomplete thing and we are largely our own constructions.

38:38

What ho. Today, it seems, it begins. The madness.

A group of intrepid people are attempting to read all of Shakespeare's plays in only thirty-eight days. Here's a link: http://www.shicho.net/38/

Now this is insanity of the first water (even the name smacks of a horror movie) so obviously I'm severely tempted.

The number of the plays, I notice, is thirty-eight. This includes the late collaboration with Fletcher, The Two Noble Kinsmen. As a bonus there's the slightly iffy case Edward III, which I haven't read or at least can't recall having read. The attribution to Shakespeare isn't universally accepted but portions of it may well have been penned by the Swan of Avon. Who wrote the rest of it - meaning the rubbish bits - remains unclear.

Edmund Ironside is noticeably absent. Around twenty or twenty-five years ago it was widely trumpeted that Edmund Ironside was indeed a lost play by Shakespeare, nowadays not so much. I read it when it first came out - as by Shakespeare - but honestly can't remember much of it. So it probably made no immortal impression with its deathless blank verse or its spectacular plotting. I really have to re-read it and make up my own mind about it and especially about who wrote it. Or the pertinent fact may well be who didn't write it. There don't seem to be many editions out and about, maybe there's only the very one I read around 1986 or so. Edward III is quite definitely another must-read.

This is what my trusted Shakespeare Companion 1564-1964 has to say about Edward III: "An anonymous historical play published by Cuthbert Burby in 1596 as 'The True Raigne of King Edward the Third: As it hath bin sundrie times plaied about the Citie of London'. There is no external evidence of Shakespeare's authorship save its ascription to Shakespeare in the play-list of Rogers and Ley (1656). Capell reprinted it in his Prolusions in 1760, and described it as 'thought to be writ by Shakespeare', on the grounds that he was the only man who could have written so well in 1595. Tennyson agreed with Capell, and Swinburne disagreed. There seem to be two hands in the play, one of which may be Shakespeare's. The best writing is in Act II and IV, iv. The line 'Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds' occurs in II, i as well as in Sonnet 94. But we cannot assign any part in the play to Shakespeare with any confidence on the basis of internal evidence only."

It would indeed seem to me that the quotation from the sonnet speaks against Shakespeare's authorship of the play. On the other hand it may well have been an inside joke or a dig at Shakespeare by the play's other author.

About Edmund Ironside Halliday has not a sausage to say. Fair enough.

Maybe this will be my tiny contribution to this delightful Shakespearean March madness - reading and/or re-reading the two dubious newcomers Edmund Ironside and Edward III. And announcing to the yet unknowing world what I think about their literary pedigree. I also have J.L. Carrell's new Shakespeare thriller The Shakespeare Curse to tackle. This time around Carrell does a number on Macbeth. It's a hefty tome but could be amusing. If, that is, one as a reader is willing to overlook the somewhat verbally challenged prose the authoress, for reasons best known to herself, appears to favour.

Good luck to all those brave enough to take on Old Will - I salute you: Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more!

Rejuvenation and Demise

Before I Hang (1940, directed by the to me previously unknown Nick Grindé) is almost a companion piece to a movie I wrote about earlier, The Walking Dead, and likewise situated somewhere in that gloriously indefined terrain that falls between crime, horror and science fiction. In this one Boris Karloff plays the very old and venerably white-haired doctor Garth, an altruist and humanitarian who based on his experiments with the human cellular unit is convinced that old age is a disease and humans may live well-nigh forever. He has experimented with a serum to rid the human cell of the poison that is old age, but the serum doesn't work. Not quite, not yet. Before he can perfect his formula he's sentenced to death for a mercy killing. He tried the serum on one of his dying patients. It had no effect. In the end he could watch the suffering no longer and ended the patient's life. For this he must suffer the penalty.

Dr Garth has three weeks before the sentence is carried through and he is executed.

In gaol Dr Garth gets a most peculiar proposition. The warden and the prison doctor are willing to allow him to continue with his work. For his serum he uses the blood of executed criminals and by Jove, this time it seems he gets it right. But there's no time to verify the result, the day of his execution is upon him. With less than half an hour to live, he gets the prison doctor to inject him with the serum so that his body may be studied after his death: his last gift to science. Then they shall see if it works, if it really works.

But wait, hang on - just as Dr Garth is about to step out of the laboratory gallantly to brave the gallows there's a telephone call. The governor has tweaked the sentence a bit and instead of hanging Dr Garth now faces life imprisonment. Dr Garth feels almost cheated, then the serum makes him feel a bit funny and he passes out.

He goes into a coma and when he comes to, well, dash it all, he's different. He doesn't need his spectacles for a start. That's not all. He looks younger, his hair's no longer completely white. As his colleague the prison doctor who has analysed Dr Garth's blood exclaims: "John, by every medical test you are twenty years younger than when you came here!" Blimey. Oh, and another thing. Before he went into coma he turned quite nasty and had to be subdued by three men and put in a strait-jacket.

Shortly thereafter Dr Garth is fully pardoned and may return to his studies. He's changed and not only physically. There's something eating at him, something he cannot remember - it's like a curtain or a wall and he cannot get past it. The prison doctor has been murdered and he isn't fully convinced the convict who is supposed to have done the deed is in fact guilty. There's something he must remember. But he can't.

Dr Garth throws a party for his friends at his residence. When it commences he just stands there glowering at the piano player, his face twitching. After the piece is finished the other guests rush over to the pianist gushing over his performance, telling him how he improves with every passing year and just keeps getting better and better. Dr Garth puts them in their place and cruelly tells the player they're lying and that he, the player, is an old man and that his powers rapidly decrease.

Then he tells them he's chosen them of all his friends to be the next recipients of his serum so that they may aid mankind with their crucial gifts for years to come. The guests are reluctant, the risk is simply too great. "I've had a full life," says one guest, "and after all, man is supposed to live three score and ten years." "But old age is a disease and I can cure it," exclaims Dr Garth, not quite understanding why the others are so unwilling. It baffles him. It hurts him. This is where science inevitably is going but oh so painfully slowly, while he, with one small inoculation, can add years to their lives, and do it right now, at this instant. Why are they hesitating?

The party ends on a sour note and Dr Garth storms off to his private quarters. Cut to the pianist's residence. He sits at his piano and practices but his fingers simply won't obey. Maybe Garth was right. He is getting old. Suddenly there's an ominous tap on the French windows. It's Dr Garth. He's come to persuade the pianist to take the serum. The pianist gives in. We shall do it now, Dr Garth says and reaches for his black bag which he's brought with him.

Whilst mixing the serum Dr Garth seems to experience a headache. He pulls out a white handkerchief - with which he then, quite coolly, proceeds to strangle the pianist. Then, horrified at what he's done, he shies back.

The detective on the case immediately hones in on Dr Garth and wants him under surveillance. Distraught and horrified at his deed, Dr Garth pays a call to a friend. He admits it was he who killed the pianist and the prison doctor as well - and he now knows why. The serum he was inoculated with was made from the blood of a murderer and the lust for murder has tainted his own blood. He will confess his deed to the police, he will turn himself in, but not quite yet. First he wishes to inoculate his friend so he may check and verify the result scientifically. Otherwise his huge discovery will die with him and that cannot be allowed to happen. The friend hesitates. Dr Garth pulls out his handkerchief to wipe his brow. There's an alarming look in his eyes. The friend tries to call for help and Dr Garth strangles him.

Dr Garth hurries home. His daughter finds him packing. His daughter knows. He pulls out his hanky, as if to strangle her, and she passes out. The police storm his house but he's already flown the coop. He makes his way to the gaol and he's let in. He acts in a strange and threatening manner and the guard shoots him down as he keeps coming on like he was crazy. I only wanted to be hanged before I kill again, he explains to the warden and then he expires.

"In the war of science many must die before victory is won," Dr Garth's assistant declaims in the end, echoing the sentiments of Dr Garth.

Karloff again gives a splendid, inspired and graceful performance. The script, despite its many fine qualities, is severely lacking. Which eventually sinks the film. And as the movie is just a few minutes over an hour long it's a bit of a rush job anyway. And the melodrama is too much. Cheap, to put it in a word. The horror elements are few and far between, the crime plot rather bland and banal, and the science fiction slightly juvenile. Which all of it could be ignored and heartily forgiven were the script better. This one really don't hold a candle to the extremely fine The Walking Dead.

The director, by the way, isn't quite as unknown as first I surmised. He's done Million Dollar Legs with Betty Grable, Shopworn with Barbara Stanwyck and above all The Bishop Murder Case with Basil Rathbone as Philo Vance. Not too shabby. The Philo Vance books never work as films but I'd quite like to see Rathbone's performance as that epitome of American snobbery and insufferable besserwisserism.

Sherlok Kholms Revisited

The Twentieth Century Approaches is the final instalment in the excellent Russian Livanov-Solomin-Maslennikov Sherlock Holmes series. Holmes is retired and keeping his bees somewhere in the sticks (and sporting a dashing goatee), Watson lives with his wife (who, at aquick glance, seemed to me to be the former Miss Morstan) and runs a private practice. Poor Mrs. Hudson is dead and the illustrious Baker Street residence of yore has been turned into a museum for Sherlock, filled with Sherlockian memorabilia and impressive regal busts of The Great Detective. There are sheets and shrouds over everything, lending the place a somewhat funereal air. It isn't as much a museum as a shrine.

The mood is now very different. Gone are the leisurely times of yesteryear and the gentle - and genteel - unhurried pace of the Victorian age. This is a new age, this is the future. Efficiency is the key. Watson now writes his stories with a clanking typewriter. There are loud clunky telephones everywhere, the lights are electric and harsh, the mode of transport the automobile or - heavens - a motor bicycle! (I love, by the way, Watson's motoring attire: a long dark oilskin motoring coat, extremely stylized goggles and a sinister black balaclava - making him look like he's just sprung from a Tardi comic book.) This is indeed a mechanical age, and men have turned into stiff automatons: the caretaker at 221b is nearly a robot, Lestrade's successor speaks like a computer and even Mycroft Homes is now very much the epitome of modern inhumanity. Sherlock the cold calculating machine, as he was, seems now like a clumsy relic of the primitive past.

No wonder, then, the retirement. No wonder, then, the preference for bees over men.

But the retirement isn't to last. Watson motors over from the city and lays before Holmes the strange case of a patient of his, the young engineer Victor Hatherley, who most savagely has lost a digit. Holmes is off like a shot and in no time he solves the case and finds out it revolves around a counterfeiting operation. The birds, however, have flown the coop. And, by the way, highly significant fact, they spoke German amongst themselves.

Then Mycroft has a most important case for his brother. A certain highly sensitive document is gone. If it falls in the wrong hands, the Prime Minister informs Holmes, it could cost England millions of pounds and the lives of a hundred thousand men. The document has gone missing from the home of the Secretary of State, in a most mysterious fashion. There aren't many foreign operatives in London who have the clout to handle such a document. Holmes quickly narrows the list of suspects to three. And, in the morning paper, Watson simultaneously reads that one of them, a certain Eduardo Lucas, has been found stabbed to death.

Can this be a mere coincidence? I think not, exclaims Sherlock. And the pair head to the scene of the crime where they encounter Lestrade and his successor. It turns out that Eduardo Lucas and Lysander Stark are one and the same. Holmes very quickly discovers the hiding place of the letter, but finds it distressingly empty. It takes him but a brief instant to deduce where the letter is now and who has it. They hasten to the house of the Secretary of State and confront his wife. She cracks and owns up. Yes, she has the letter, Lucas was blackmailing her. When she delivered it to him his wife stormed in, made a scene, accused him of infidelity, and stabbed him. The following day, upon learning of the huge importance of the letter, she returned to Lucas's home and by means of trickery recovered the letter. Holmes places it in the dispatch box from which it was stolen and the case is closed. War is averted. End of part one.

In the beginning of part two we come upon German villainy. The dastardly von Bork has resided in England for years and is the king-pin of his country's espionage. He is the spider in the centre of the intricate web of Hunnish dirty tricks. Now he is awaiting the arrival of the new Naval signals from a traitor, an Irish-American called Altamont. It may be worth mentioning that by some curious chance von Bork seems to reside next door to Sherlock Holmes who provides him with honey from his bees.

And once again his government needs Sherlock. A clerk is dead and the plans for a revolutionary new submarine, held in his department, are missing. The signs would seem to be pointing to the spy Hugo Oberstein. Sherlock, with the aid of Watson, decides it's time for a spot of well-aimed burglary, much like in the case of the blackmailer Milverton. They confirm the suspicion: Oberstein is indeed involved. Finding out that Oberstein keeps in touch with his lackey through the personal columns they set a trap and catch the culprit. It is now time to take care of von Bork.

The Irish-American traitor Altamont delivers the new signals to von Bork - but Altamont is Holmes. It's been a trap all along! Holmes has been under cover for years and on the track of von Bork for quite a while! Even Mrs. Hudson is involved (seems like she wasn't that dead after all). Holmes and Watson foil the evil schemes of the nasty Teutonic warmongers - but even they cannot avert the coming war, only delay the inevitable. August 1914 is but a few short months away. The war will come. And with it dies the old century, for good, and what little was left of the old world.

Well, what can one say? It's quite a mix. The Twentieth Century Approaches makes use, quite freely too, of four short stories: The Engineer's Thumb, The Second Stain, The Bruce-Partington Plans and His Last Bow. The settings are once more quite lovely, even when they never remotely look English. They still manage to convey the atmosphere of Sherlockian magic very nicely indeed. There's even a house that sits right smack on top of a railway track and the trains run beneath it in a tunnel - you can't get more perfect for the Bruce-Partinton Plans even if you try. Is, by the way, the machinist in the very end the director Igor Maslennikov himself, or do I see sights?

As a whole I didn't really enjoy this episode as much as the previous ones. Why? I like spy stories, so that isn't the reason. The script took several liberties with the original stories, but not, I think, too great liberties. The whole thing was mostly pretty firmly rooted in the Canon. And lumping together the spy stories (plus Engineer's Thumb) I find justified, if not well advised. The script, however, was rather weak and there were several embarrasing blunders that destroyed the episode for me.

There are simply too many aspects of the script that do not work. The role of Lysander Stark's woman in The Engineer's Thumb works. She's an unwilling participant in the events and tries to warn off the engineer. The role of Lucas's wife in The Second Stain works. She's mad with jealousy after having discovered that her husband leads a double life in London. But you can't have the same woman do both. It makes no sense whatsoever. In the film the woman is in London to begin with. She knows her husband leads a double life and is a spy. Why should she suddenly go mad with jealousy? Second point: von Bork pays his spies with a cheque? No master spy he, let me tell you, even if the cheque is worthless. The mind boggles.

Thirdly and most importantly: Holmes has been deep under cover for years establishing a false identity in order to get close to von Bork. Yet he at once dashes off to solve cases when Watson asks him to. Wouldn't that immediately blow his cover? Especially when he gets involved in cases that directly concern von Bork? Is von Bork really that stupid and inept? Somehow I don't think it's just a matter of putting on or removing a false beard. And if Holmes is under cover (and presumably so on orders from the Government - ie. Mycroft), why the devil would Mycroft then ask him to solve less important cases and by so doing blow his cover and kiss off the really important case he's spent years on? Once you are under cover you are under cover and that's it. It really makes no sense whatsoever to surface as Holmes. It's pure madness. But once you do surface it's plain madness to go back under cover. And if he really is under cover how does Watson even know where he is? This is really bad thinking on the script-writer's part. It's such a huge lapse in logic that one cannot take the film seriously.

There's also a strong parodic element in the episode and at times it gets to be too much. It just isn't that interesting and pretty much destroys the Sherlockian atmosphere. Mycroft as a mechanic man is a funny idea but not much more than that. Ultimately it leads nowhere. And we know the war is coming. We know what it causes. Yes, war is a crime. The greatest crime. But what we're interested in is Sherlock and his cases, not the First World War (fascinating though it is).

No, I much prefer the gentle and genteel Sherlockian atmosphere of the earlier entries. And Sherlock working his criminal cases.

Somehow it completely escaped me that the first episode was in fact in two parts, the second part having a further go at the very first Sherlock story A Study in Scarlet. Now, having seen the whole, I must admit that I quite liked it - especially after The Twentieth Century Approaches. A Study in Scarlet is always difficult to dramatise with its unwieldy back-story that engulfs pretty much half of the book. Wisely they've omitted most of it. Too much perhaps? I don't know. At least it works better than in The Agra Treasure where everything was omitted and no one could understand why Jonathan Small done what he did. Here Jefferson Hope gets to explain himself and his deeds. His is of course a tragic story, he has been treated most vilely and most unjustly and we're quite saddened to see him put behind bars. As is of course Sherlock himself.

It's a good mystery and a romping yarn, is A Study in Scarlet.

I can't help it but I don't particularly care for the actor who plays Lestrade. He annoys me. I do wish the fellow who played Gregson had played Lestrade instead. He strikes me as being an intelligent and capable policeman. Lestrade is just comic relief. And not really that funny either.

Earlier I, in my infinite cleverness, bemoaned the fact that the only missing Slavic element in the series was the Samovar. So, lo and behold: in the end of the second part they do take their tea from a Samovar (or what very much looks like a Samovar), which I find only charming and appropriate.

Electric Lazarus

In Michael Curtiz's The Walking Dead (1936) Boris Karloff is a meek and gentle pianist who's spent ten years in gaol on a false charge. Upon his release crooked attorney Ricardo Cortez and his gang see the perfect patsy in him and promptly frame him - for the murder of the judge who all those years ago sentenced him. A young scientist and his bride can vouch for Karloff's innocence, for they saw the real murderers. The gang, however, scared them off and at the trial they remain silent. His defence is handled by none other than Cortez, who sees to it that he won't be acquitted.

Karloff is sent to gaol, once more for something he didn't do. This time the sentence is a bit stiffer - it's the chair for him. The day of the execution grows nearer. The scientist and his bride begin to have second doubts - can they really let an innocent man suffer? They cannot, so on the very day of the execution they go to the scientist's boss, Edmund Gwenn, and spill the beans. Gwenn contacts Karloff's lawyer who promises to get in touch with the prosecutor. But, alas and alack, Karloff's lawyer is of course the man behind the murder, and he sees to it that the governor will not be contacted in time. And when the reprieve finally arrives it is too late. The switch is pulled at the very same moment the prison authorities get word of the reprieve. Oh bitter irony!

But wait! cries Gwenn the very eminent scientist. All is not lost! he shouts, all is by no means lost! For he, like a modern Frankenstein, has been experimenting with flesh and electric currents and other quite modern and radical and impressive science thingummies. He claims to be able to reanimate Karloff. He can do it, by Jove he can! Cortez isn't best pleased.

It isn't easy - how could it be? - but in the end Gwenn and his crack team of top boffins, sporting very hi-tech gear for 1936, manage to resurrect Karloff. But, not surprisingly, he's not the same man he used to be.

Karloff has changed, oh yes, he's changed. Now he's subdued, lethargic, as if in a mild state of somnanbulism. He has trouble remembering who he is and what has happened. He limps heavily, his other hand seems useless and he's gone partially grey. On his expressive face there is this constant look of great and unrelenting sorrow. Gwenn, not perhaps in the best of scientific manners, is very keen to find out what Karloff has seen and experienced on the other side. What great secrets he could reveal - if only he remembered!

When Karloff meets Cortez he at once knows. He knows that Cortez is behind everything, he knows that Cortez is his enemy. But how can he know that? He didn't know it before - how can he know it now? Gwenn and the prosecutor throw a party and invite the entire Cortez gang. From Karloff's reactions they at once see who the guilty ones are.

One by one Karloff seeks out the guilty parties and confronts them. Why did they do it? he asks softly, merely seeking knowledge, merely seeking understanding, merely trying to find out what happened to him and why it happened. Why did they kill him? Why? The confrontations all end in the villains dying - of natural causes or in freak accidents. Karloff never lays a hand on them. Yet there is something vaguely supernatural in the accidents.

When there are only two villains left, Cortez and his boorish henchman Barton MacLane, they decide to take matters into their own hands and finish Karloff off. Karloff has sneaked out of Gwenn's house. He now spends his time at the cemetery, among the silent headstones and the tranquil dead, because that's the only place where he can find peace. The villains track him down and pump him full of lead, but while making their getaway in the heavy rain they lose the control of their car and crash straight into an electric pole and are immediately electrocuted. Oh sweet irony.

This time Karloff is in for it. Even Gwenn can't save him now, not a second time. While Karloff lies there dying, Gwenn urges him to tell everything he remembers. It's urgent. Science must know everything. And Karloff remembers. It's all very hazy but he remembers. "After the shock," he utters feebly, "I seemed to feel . . . peace . . . and . . ." - then he heaves his last sigh and is gone, this time for good. Cue violins.

A ripping movie and an extremely fascinating melange of gangster story, classic science fiction and genteel gothic horror. Curtiz's direction is especially delicious with extremely effective use of light and shadow. But what makes the movie live and breathe is obviously Karloff's beautiful acting which is so tender and gentle and sensitive that it's almost beyond belief - proving him to be a very fine actor and a true artist. The Walking Dead is also fascinating as a companion piece to Whale's Frankenstein, as Karloff is reanimated and viciously abused in both films. And while The Walking Dead is a later film it still doesn't exploit Frankenstein but rather complements it very nicely indeed.

Here's, by the way, another film that mixes gothic horror and science fiction in a most pleasing manner: Frank R. Strayer's The Vampire Bat (1933). In a small rustic village somewhere in darkest Germany people start turning up dead. They're drained of blood and have two smallish punctures in their neck. What else could it be than vampires? Well, it turns out to be this deranged scientist who needs fresh human blood for his experiments (they fairly often do, it seems), so what ho: the gothic horror movie suddenly becomes straightforward science fiction. Nice one.

But really The Walking Dead is what the doctor orders. Quite possibly Karloff's finest hour. What a performance.

The Strange Case of Miss Violet Smith

I've always particularly liked The Solitary Cyclist. It took me a good long while fully to grasp why this was the case. Like The Speckled Band it is a seminal Sherlock Holmes story, indeed an essential one. Essential in the sense that in it we perceive quite clearly the essence of Sherlock's quest. To come to the aid of a damsel in distress, yes, but it isn't quite as straightforward as that. What Sherlock defends, in almost every single story in the Canon, is Family.

To Doyle family is the prime unit of socity, that which above all cannot be tampered with. Therefore every crime that is aimed at family is especially heinous. Very rarely in the Canon are there simple capers, jewel heists, gold robberies - things that are standard fare in crime fiction. No, that would be too simple, too childish. Doyle is far shrewder than that. Even when there are robberies there always are underlying reasons, most often pertaining to a familial situation of some kind. And that is precisely why his stories live and have such an exceptionally wide following, and such an immense impact on the reader: because the emotional and psychological core of the stories strikes a nerve with every reader. Probably a subconscious nerve but a nerve nevertheless. Because every crime concerns family, it concerns us personally. Crimes of that sort are never abstract or theoretical. They could happen anywhere in the world. In any period of time. To any one of us. They are international, timeless and ubiquitous.

The heart of family is the sacred bond of marriage. Yes, sacred bond. The complications arise because a marriage is also a finacial arrangement, more so in those Victorian days than today when women are liberated and control their own finances and fortunes. In The Solitary Cyclist it would be financially advantageous for the villain to marry Miss Smith because as her husband he would gain control over her fortune. In The Speckled Band it would be financially cataclysmic for Dr. Roylott to let his step-daughter Miss Stoner marry because as a married woman she would take her income with her. The theme recurs in A Case of Identity. The step-father creates the imaginary (and disappearing) suitor Hosmer Angel to prevent his step-daughter Miss Sutherland her from marrying anyone else. For, of course, financial reasons. In Charles Augustus Milverton, when the blackmailer threatens to expose the indiscretions of his victims, he poses a threat not merely to their reputation and social standing but primarily to their marriage.

The most shattering crimes are those perpetrated within the family circle, by one member against another. In the Cardboard Box the sailor Jim Browner murders his faithless wife and her lover, but the main culprit may be the younger Miss Cushing who has encouraged her sister to pursue the illicit affair and ruined Browner's marriage and happiness. In The Priory School the kidnapper of the son and heir of the Duke of Holdernesse is his own illegitimate son. In the The Golden Pince-Nez the true crime is the betrayal of the wife by her husband, not the murder which is merely an accident and a by-product of the original crime. In The Copper Beeches Jephro Rucastle imprisons his own daughter in order to prevent her from marrying and depriving the family of her income (yet another instance of the already familiar theme). In The Hound of the Baskervilles the son of the long lost black sheep of the family returns to his ancestral grounds to claim what he perceives to be his heritage - ready to kill off any and all members of the family who stand in his way.

The family. Family was very important to Doyle, it was also a very sensitive point with him. Probably because there was lot of trouble with his own family when he was growing up. The fons et origo of the family problems was his father's alcoholism. After a while his father lost the light of his sanity and was committed to an insane asylum. After that Doyle's mother was reduced to taking lodgers. One of them was called Bryan Waller. He was a doctor and quite possibly Doyle's mother's lover. There are certain theories that the story of the cardboard box and the gruesome severed ears in some way reflected the illicit love triangle of Waller and Doyle's parents.

These are murky and dangerous waters of which Doyle himself never writes a word. Not consciously, that is. But sometimes bits and pieces seep into his stories, perhaps without him even realising the fact. This because the Holmes stories are never meant to be taken seriously, nor are they written with quite the same care and trepidation which he applied to his other more ambitious tales - more like off the cuff and on the fly. He took what first came into his head and ran with it. That is precisely why they do betray so much about Doyle the man. He gives himself away, time and again. Perhaps writing his stories is also, for him, a way to deal with the things that eat away at him, as it is with any writer, consciously or not. The tragic fate of his father. The scandalous behaviour of his mother. These things never go away. How could they? In her later years Doyle's mother even went so far as to move in with Waller, residing in a cottage on his estate; much it seems, to the chagrin of Waller's wife. Upon this point also Doyle remains mysteriously silent.

Much is open to speculation. However, upon this we may rely: the wounds are deep and the scars life-long and eternally sore, as they tend to be when received whilst growing up.

When he writes about crimes against family and marriage, Doyle is in earnest, deadly earnest. For him there can be no greater crime than the crime against or within the holy family circle. All the rest is merely twaddle.

Treasons, stratagems and spoils

Roderigo Lopes or Rodrigo Lopez was a Portuguese Converso and suspected Marrano, for which he had to flee for his life to England. A Converso was a Jew who had renounced his faith and been baptised, a New Christian, as they also were called. For a Jew in those days, in Spain and Portugal, it was rather a good idea to renounce your faith and become a Christian, otherwise they fried you at the stake. After having tortured you pretty extensively, that is. Hence many Conversos were also Marranos. A Marrano was a secret Jew, one who practised Christianity in public and Judaism in private.

In England Lopes, a doctor, eventually became physician-in-chief to Queen Elizabeth. He was granted privileges and soon became a wealthy man. Then, in 1593 he was arrested. The charge was extremely serious: conspiring to poison Her Majesty the Queen. The charge may have been false and simply politics; the Queen never seems to have been convinced of his guilt. However, Lopes was executed: hanged, drawn and quartered.

Marlowe mentions Dr. Lopes in one version of his Doctor Faustus: "Doctor Lopus was never such a doctor!" More significantly, he may have been the inspiration for the Jew Shylock in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice. In the play Shylock's "currish spirit Govern'd a wolf . . . hanged for human slaughter." Wolf being lupus or Lopes. There seems to be some indication for this theory but the evidence is by no means more than circumstancial.

In Faye Kellerman's 1989 novel The Quality of Mercy Shakespeare encounters Lopes's plucky daughter Rebecca and, inevitably, falls in love. The year is 1593, the theatres have been closed - plague year - and Will has time on his hands. He can't write bloody poetry all the time! He's also trying to do some sleuthing: somebody has murdered a player colleague and Will aims to get to the bottom of the mystery and get justice for his wickedly slain friend.

Then we have the story of Dr. Lopes seen through his daughter's eyes. No, it's more than that, Kellerman expands it to include the whole history of Conversos and Marranos in Europe. There is also an interesting parallel: Catholics and the secret Catholics in England. The murdered man was born a Catholic, maybe he even died one. What about Shakespeare himself? Peter Levi's Shakespeare biography The Life and Time of William Shakespeare claims that Shakespeare too was a secret Catholic, at least born and raised one, and that his father John was a very stubborn Catholic and that this was the cause of his very spectacular downfall. There may be some truth in the suspicion, though I'd be wildly surprised if Shakespeare himself was ever particularly religious in any traditional sectarian fashion.

There is a lot of fascinating stuff in Kellerman's novel. Lopes is a meaty morsel and personifies a number of dynamic dichotomies. One couldn't ask for a better focal point. He's a Protestant but a Jew. The blood is never quite forgiven and former Jews and their offspring are ever second rate Christians. He's a doctor but has access to the highest circles in the realm. He's a bit of a profiteer. He's from Catholic Spain (Spain and Portugal were the same country at the time) and therefore automatically a suspect. He has secret dealings with Spaniards - obviously there are still family ties and suchlike - perhaps to smuggle out other Marranos. Nobody quite knows where his loyalties lie. He isn't much liked by Walsingham, the Queen's spy master. It's only five years since the Armada was crushed and the Catholics are still plotting. And the Jews? On whose side are they? Nobody much cares about that and everybody's out to get them. In retrospect it all seems so very obvious. For a man of his background he simply flew to close to the sun not to get his wings burned off. He never stood a chance really.

Rebecca is a good, strong, independent character in a world where women have just about zero independence and absolutely no clout (at least if they're unmarried). So naturally she dresses up as a man in order to acheive a certain degree of freedom, much like the more intrepid heroines of Shakespeare's plays. Which is of course why Will is attracted to her. Her father is close to the Queen so we get a glimpse of the courtly life and even of Old Bess herself (who, a bit surprisingly, turns out to be a fairly wicked lesbian lusting after young flesh), the only woman with any clout and independence at all. Her father's position doesn't make it any easier for Rebecca and fundamentally Rebecca's situation is, to say the least, impossible, her being not only a Jewess and Portuguese but a woman to boot. The odds cannot be beaten. There is no happy ending to her story, nor can there be.

As the novel is well-nigh 600 pages long there's also a lot of boring stuff. The main problem is that the bits about the Lopes family and the bits about the murder mystery never quite connect on any satisfactory level. The analogy between Jew and Catholic simply isn't enough to carry the book. It's like Kellerman wrote two novels and for some reason decided to package them between one set of covers: two for the price of one as it were. Another flaw is definitely the murder mystery; it isn't particularly interesting and it's abandoned for the longest periods of time, only for the case to be cracked wide open at the end. As if it were something of an afterthought. But at that point we don't particularly care who's croaked Will's chum and erstwhile mentor Harry Whitman any longer because Harry Whitman doesn't mean anything to us, nor does his murder. We've all but forgotten him. It's all very distant and academic. Pity. The fate of the Lopes family, that's what we care about. And so does the author. The murder mystery is superfluous and rather redundant. The book would be far better without it.

Another thing. Shakespeare and Lopes never actually mingle much. So the case of Lopes being the inspiration for Shylock is not particularly strong here. Which is a bit ironic, it being the whole premise, I suppose.

A few years back Charles Nicholl wrote a most excellent book on Christopher Marlowe and the events surrounding his death called The Reckoning. Now he's written another book called The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street. Silver Street in Cripplegate is the only known address of Shakespeare in London. He lived there for a while around 1603-04 (it's anybody's guess just for how long) as the lodger of a certain Christopher Mountjoy, a French tire-maker. A tire-maker, by the way, produces headgear and any little whatnots and thingummies one wears on one's head short of hats: wigs, head-dresses, headpieces. Some of it was for the stage - a nice solid theatrical connection there.

In 1612 Mountjoy's son-in-law Stephen Bellott sued him. According to Bellott Mountjoy had promised his daughter £60 in dowry and another £200 to Bellott in his will. But Mountjoy had gone back on his word and not paid. Mountjoy of course denied this. The key witness in the case was the lodger William Shakespeare. It was on his testimony the whole case turned.

The really fascinating thing is: the actual testimony of Shakespeare, word for word, is amongst the documents of the case. Shakespeare's words, just as he spoke them, have been taken down and preserved for posterity. The only such case known to exist.

Shakespeare's role in the affair was curiously large. Marie Mountjoy even asked him to act as a go-between in the courtship of her daughter and Mountjoy's apprentice Bellott (which sounds like it was from one of his own comedies - almost to good to be true). Testimony of Joan Johnson, maidservant: "And as she remembereth the defendant did send and perswade one Mr Shakespeare that lay in the house to perswade the plaintiff to the same marriadge." Shakespeare's testimony: "To the third interrogatory this deponent sayeth . . . that the said deffendantes wyeffe did sollicitt and entreat this deponent to move and perswade the said complainant to effect the said marriadge, and accordingly this deponent did moue and perswade the complainant therevnto".

Apparently he was also crucial in the dowry negotiations. Then in 1612 he was asked to testify. At first he told the officials that Bellott's cause was just and that the sums Belott claimed were indeed what Mountjoy had promised. Later, when he gave his deposition, he changed his story. Now, he claimed, he couldn't remember the exact sum that was agreed upon. This meant that Bellott lost his case.

There is no doubt that Mountjoy was in the wrong and lied. He seems to have been a notorious rascal. From the church elders he received stiff letters about his unfortunate habit of getting his serving wenches pregnant with illegitimate offspring. His reason for not giving his daughter her money was that he could not give it as he didn't know what he might need for himself later on. To Bellott he raved that he'd never see a penny of it whatever happened.

Another witness of note, besides Shakespeare, was a certain George Wilkins. Wilkins was a writer of sorts, a playwright, a novelist, a pamfletist, and thus Shakespeare's colleague. He wrote a novel about Pericles, based on the play, and a play called The Miseries of Inforst Marriage, based on a recent murder tragedy. He collaborated with Dekker, Day and Rowley. And possibly with Shakespeare as well. It is widely thought that he wrote the inferior bits in Pericles while Shakespeare wrote the better ones.

Wilkins was also a victualler. That was his main occupation. Victualler in those days was code for brothel keeper. One immediately thinks of the marvellous Pompey in Measure For Measure. Wilkins seems not to have been particulary marvellous, he was in fact a remarkably vicious pimp and a violent criminal. His assaults were always on women, he was a multiple woman beater. Once he kicked a pregnant woman in the stomach. This seems to have been how he kept his punks in order. Nasty character, I must say, and a fairly unlikely fellow to have collaborated with Shakespeare. Could he be the link between Shakespeare and other shady underworld operators like Wayte, Gardner and Langley? Is there a connection? As most theatre owners also owned brothels (on the very same premises too) it may well be that Wilkins was in fact a prime example of the sort of company Shakespeare did keep.

Nicholl's The Lodger is a pretty riveting read. However it suffers from the same ailment every other biographical study of Shakespeare's life. There simply isn't enough material there. It's just shreds and guesses. Nicholl hasn't got much to work with and ends up grasping at straws. He goes around in concentric circles, praying that he'd be in luck and stumble on something directly bearing on the case. The hard facts are few and far between. Nicholl does his best. It just isn't there. He simply does not catch that wily figure William Shakespeare napping. He shines his light but Shakespeare is already gone, he's slipped into the night without a trace. Thus always. Blasted man!

Howard & Wilmer - and Rathbone too

Managed to catch a few early Holmes episodes. The American series Sherlock Holmes was produced 1954-55 and ran for 39 episodes. The British series Sherlock Holmes (named with equal inventive boldness and sparkling wit) was made 1964-65 and there were 13 episodes.

In the former Holmes is played by Ronald Howard, son of the legendary Leslie Howard, and Watson by H. Marion-Crawford. The series seems quite cheaply produced, there are only a couple of guest actors per episode and virtually all the scenes are indoors, in sets that bear remarkably little or no resemblance at all to Victorian rooms. The scripts are straightforward and tend to lean, very heavily, on redundant banter between Holmes and Watson and Lestrade. Very likely to save money. The crimes are nothing to write home about and seldom seem like cases that would merit the involvement of the great Sherlock Holmes. And what's more, nary a whiff of the Canon is to be observed, but for one or two exceptions. No - new cases for a new Televison Holmes. Lestrade is of course a dimwitted bungler who, upon receiving a case, immediately sets off for Baker Street.

This sort of thing always annoys me greatly. Where's the glory in outwitting Lestrade if the man is so blatantly unfit to tie his own shoe-laces? I ask you.

The best episode of the ones I've so far seen is The Case of the French Interpreter. It is of course The Greek Interpreter but for some mysterious reason done with a French one instead. The script follows the original pretty faithfully, a shrewd move that. Now for once we get genuine tension and excitement, interesting characters and bizarre situations, there's a dynamic in the episode and even some welcome outdoor shots, so the look of this one is far fresher and more lively than is usual. Even the acting seems superior. Of course they've cut corners here as well, no Mycroft for instance, but the result is by no means to be frowned at.

Howard as Holmes looks startlingly like a young Rathbone, or to be even more precise, like a cross between Rathbone and a young Roddy McDowall. He's tall, he's got a profile and is obviously upper crust. It is, however, dashed hard to say if he's a good, bad or indifferent Holmes. This is because the scripts give him precious little to work with. He doesn't dazzle but neither does he stink. Compared to Rathbone he lacks energy and that wonderfully superior attitude, the scathing wit that makes Rathbone's crisp delivery enjoyable even when he's at his hammiest. One does rather suspect that Howard was given the role for his looks, and famous name. Alas.

The Steinbrunner-Michael book on Holmes films calls H. Marion-Crawford's Watson one of the best Watsons. At first this baffled me slightly as I found him a sort of lighter version of Nigel Bruce - less stupid and annoying but still of no use whatsoever to Holmes. And that's what he is, quite frankly, but when he does the narrative bits he's a different man altogether: he's intelligent, sharp, alert and he's got a beautifully mellifluous voice. A pity that he's made to play Watson as a Brucean buffoon the rest of the time. A great pity.

In the UK Douglas Wilmer is considered to be a very fine Holmes indeed. As I've only seen the two first episodes of the series, I have a very incomplete grasp of his performance and of course of the series as a whole.

The first episode, The Speckled Band, I find poorly written and rather boring. It opens with the events leading to the death of Helen Stoner's sister in mysterious circumstances, on the eve of her marriage - and then jumps ahead a couple years to Miss Stoner getting engaged. And we have the stepfather acting suspiciously all over the place, playing the heavy for all he's worth, bullying and intimidating the poor girl at every turn. At which point I'm almost ready to give up. The Speckled Band is always a sure thing. How is it even possible to muck it up? Well we get Holmes, eventually, and the brilliant scene with the sinister Dr. Grimesby Roylott barging in at Baker Street and bending pokers. Then there are more tedious bits with Holmes and Watson discussing the case, and touching upon nothing of remarkable interest or everlasting brilliance. After which they travel to the Hall. And solve the mystery and save the day. Blimey. Hooray for Captain Spaulding.

Not a particularly good episode nor a felicitous beginning for a series. The script drags and both Wilmer and his Watson Nigel Stock are clearly not at ease with their roles. But mostly it's the script. The script doesn't give them anything interesting or worthwhile to do until the very end. And the indoor sets are stuffy and look cheap. The camera work is primitive and doesn't exactly enhance the mood, quite the contrary.

The second episode, The Illustrious Client, is a great improvement. The script is tighter and follows the original story more closely. The sets are lighter and more airy but don't really look like authentic period rooms. Well, that's what Television was like in those days, one supposes. Wilmer and Stock are more comfortable with their parts and seem to have more confidence both in themselves and the production. There's a lively scene in a music hall - which does go on for rather too long and does seem a bit self-indulgent, to be honest, but who's complaining - and one in a Turkish bath. So we have scenery and location which is always nice.

Wilmer as Holmes seems merrier than Holmes usually is depicted as, a man of good cheer and excellent spirit. His profile is perhaps less aquiline than might be and his nose not quite as imperial a beak as Paget would have us believe. Still, those things are secondary. Unfortunately both these episodes prove to be rotten when it comes to judging Wilmer's performance or the perspicaciousness of his Holmes as he isn't given enough Holmesian things to do for one to pass the sentence. In this episode much of the action is given to Watson as Holmes is viciously beaten up by two thugs.

Stock's Watson seems pretty much all right. He isn't a stupid man nor a silly duffer, and neither should he be. Watson is a man of action, a soldier, a doctor and an author. He is an asset to Holmes, otherwise why should Holmes keep him around and rely on him? But in most productions Watson is only kept around for Holmes to show how jolly clever he is compared to Watson. Here the same goes as for Lestrade - where's the merit in being cleverer than a dunce? There is no merit. It only makes Holmes seem a pretentious show-off and, well, a bit dim himself. The stupider the Watson, the stupider the Holmes.

Interesting fact about Douglas Wilmer: he went to Stonyhurst. Stonyhurst is of course the Jesuit school to which Doyle himself went.

And lastly a bit of Rathbone and Bruce. Roy William Neill's The Pearl of Death (1944 - the seventh entry in the Universal series and Rathbone's ninth appearance as the wizard of 221b) is ostensibly based on The Six Napoleons and parts of it actually are, too. As Rathbone movies goes this one isn't too bad. It definitely has its moments, I'll grant you that. It does, however, make Holmes look like a pratt. On several occasions. Which is quite unforgivable.

In order to show how vulnerable a museum's electric system guarding a priceless pearl (a pearl having once belonged to the blood-thirsty Borgias and with an equally bloody history) is, Holmes switches it off on the sly. Purely to demonstrate the folly of the museum's manager. The villain, who is lurking about, just outside the door, of course, hears this and goes off and pinches the unprotected pearl. And Holmes ends up with egg on his face. Now this is a really bad move by the script writer. Why on earth does it have to be Holmes's foolishness that results in the theft? It's utterly pointless and weakens Holmes immeasurably. For what purpose, I ask? And answer there came none.

Well anyway, the thief hides the pearl - and this is where the motif of the six Napoleons comes in - and we have a race between Holmes and the villains as to who will find it first. The best thing in the movie are definitely the villains: head villain Giles Conover (played by Miles Mander - who was the murderer in the previous Holmes movie The Scarlet Claw), his fetching helpmate Naomi Drake (Evelyn Ankers) and especially the gang's gorilla known as The Creeper (the grotesquely misshapen Rondo Hatton).

The Creeper's modus operandi is ghastly. When the villains have established the location of a Napoleon statue,The Creeper breaks in, breaks his hapless victim's back with his bare hands, always at the third vertebrae, then smashes all the china in the house in a maniacal frenzy. The Creeper is as terrible an apparition as one may ever wish to see; this because of Hatton's inhuman affliction, acromegaly, which transformed him inch by inch into something unpleasantly akin to Frankenstein's monster and - a few years after the film - finally killed him. The genius of the film is that we never really see the creeper except for a few shady glimpses and quick shadows - until the very end, that is.

The ending is a bit silly and again makes Holmes look bad. He has Conover at gun point and still manages to loose his gun to the criminal in an extremely silly way. Making him look like a right amateur. Holmes then, somehow knowing that The Creeper carries a torch for Naomi who's in police custody, gets Conover to say that he doesn't care that she goes to prison, she or her fate are of absolutely no importance whatsoever. Whereupon The Creeper breaks Conover's back and Holmes shoots The Creeper.

There is some amount of Sherlockian sleuthing in the movie but mostly it's thrills and dramatic trickery. The atmosphere and scenery are rather better than in an average Rathbone film and The Creeper is obviously a great asset - quite unforgettable in his exquisite hideousness and tragic deformity. It is really he who makes the movie. Or breaks it, if you'll forgive a foolish pun.

But The Pearl of Death does make Holmes look like a fool. And that's no good neither to man nor beast.

Rue Morgue goes Ape

Robert Florey's 1932 movie Murders in the Rue Morgue is a quite curious movie. The Poe connection is, to put it bluntly, tenuous - not to say sporadic. There is a Dupin in the movie, there is an ape, there are killings. However, Dupin isn't Poe's Chevalier Auguste Dupin but a medical student Pierre Dupin. The murders aren't really murders at all, not actually, but the unfortunate result of ill-guided medical experiments. The ape isn't an orangutang but a gorilla. And the gorilla, brilliantly, is "played" by a chimpanzee. And sometimes a bloke in a skin. Obviously.

Paris, 1845. Dr Mirakle, played by Bela Lugosi with menacing simian eye-brows, displays his gorilla at a side-show. Really his ambition is to prove that man and ape are close relatives, that there's such a thing as evolution. This he tries to do by abducting young and particularly pretty women and mixing their blood with simian blood. Unfortunately his experiments tend to go awry and the young ladies loose their lives. He gets rid of their corpses in the Seine. Dupin has noticed that there's something fishy about the young women that turn up dead in the river. He wants specimens of their blood. At the same time Dr Mirakle has his eye on Dupin's beloved.

Dupin and his beloved Camille have been to the side-show and seen Mirakle's gorilla. The gorilla even snatched Camille's bonnet, so Mirakle had to send her a new one.

Dupin seeks up Mirakle an questions him. Mirakle doesn't want to talk about his experiments and claims he's just off to Munich. Dupin finds out that this isn't true and follows Mirakle to his lair on, wait for it - the Rue Morgue. He hears Mirakle converse with his gorilla (this time played by an actor in a gorilla skin, not terribly convincingly). Later that evening, when Dupin's at Camille's, Mirakle stands down in the street stalking them. When Dupin's gone Mirakle knocks her up and tries to lure her out but she refuses. Mirakle returns to his carriage where the gorilla awaits him. The gorilla isn't pleased. It seems like the gorilla gives him his orders!

Simultaneously Dupin has an astonishing breakthrough - it's the blood of a gorilla! The girls died because a gorilla's blood was injected in their veins! (Which seems like a slightly unlikely discovery in 1845. Or do I mean utterly impossible?) At the same moment he realises Camille is in danger! (Which also seem a bit unlikely - what on earth is the connection, one wonders?) So he rushes off.

Meanwhile Mirakle stands on the street and watches how his gorilla scales the wall of Camille's house. (Which seems highly illogical as all the previous victims have been procured by Mirakle for scientific experiments, but apparently - this time it's personal.) Like a miniature King Kong the gorilla heaves himself up on Camille's balcony and enters her bed chamber. Camille sees the gorilla (now again it's a chimp), screams her head off and faints. Camille's mother rushes to the room. But, oh no, the gorilla is still there. Not to worry, Dupin's on his way.

But it's too late. When he breaks down the door the gorilla has already made off with Camille. Oh the anguish! Oh the agony! Why will no one believe that this is serious? our hero moans to the thick gendarmes. Does nobody understand that she's in danger?

Now we come to bastardized Poe country, something actually from the original story, with witnesses being questioned about what language the abductor spoke. Was it Italian? Yes, says one witness, a German, absolutely Italian. Or was it Danish? Yes, says another witness, an Italian, definitely Danish. No, says a third witness, a Dane, it was in fact German!

At last our hero is brought out to be heard by the prefect. He's in chains, an obvious suspect. He knows who committed the murder: an ape! What murder, the prefect says. Dupin explains that there were two women in the room and the door was locked and bolted. Therefore, Dupin explains, one woman was carried away and the other murdered (which seems like an utterly unreasonable deduction on the face of it). What ho - the room is searched and Camille's mother found stuck up the chimney.

Still nobody believes Dupin. An ape? No. He must be crazy. Before the gendarmes drag him away he discovers the hair the old woman has clutched in her fist - not human hair but ape hair! Look! Therefore he must be telling the truth. The prefect nods his head in perfect agreement. Yes, it must be an ape.

Back in Mirakle's secret lair the doctor makes a happy discovery: her blood is perfect for his experiment! The chimp, behind bars again, goes ape with joy and extasy. But Dupin has already led the gendarmes there. No! Dr. Mirakle shouts to his simian assistant - hold them off till I'm ready!

The gorilla breaks out of his cage. Back in to your cage! Mirakle orders. The gorilla attacks Mirakle, apparently in an attempt to protect Camille. The gendarmes break in. The gorilla picks up Camille and carries her off, again, now to the roof. Somebody spots them and the gendarmes and the rabble start following them. Lots of shots of the gorilla transporting Camille King Kong like over roofs.

There really is no escape for the ape. Or is there? Our hero Dupin grabs a pistol off a gendarme. The gorilla is in a cul-de-sac. Dupin climbs up on the roof. The gorilla drops Camille and goes for Dupin. Dupin fires and the gorilla is hit and rolls off the roof into the Seine. Hooray - the day is saved by our brave and resourceful Dupin!

What can one say? Want rubbish dialogue, childish plotting, hammy acting, sloppy sets? This is your movie. The ape that falls in love with the beautiful woman and abducts her. How very original. But if they wanted to rip off King Kong why did they have to soil Poe? Then something starts nagging me, a little odd feeling somewhere at the back of my skull. So I check my facts. This movie was in fact made before King Kong! Amazing. So is it King Kong that rips off Murders in the Rue Morgue? Now there's a thought.

An interesting little fact: Florey and Lugosi were originally slated to do Frankenstein, Florey to direct and Lugosi to play the scientist Henry Frankenstein. As the directing job went to James Whale and the role to Colin Clive, Florey and Lugosi were given this picture instead. Frankenstein was a hug hit and became a classic, this one wasn't and didn't. Another interesting little fact: additional dialogue was supplied by none other than John Huston. Yet another interesting little fact: the cinematographer Karl Freund had previously shot such classics as Der Golem and Metropolis. And he would soon direct The Mummy with Boris Karloff. Maybe it's due to him that certain portions of Murders in the Rue Morgue remind one a bit of Das Kabinett des Dr. Caligari. But, honestly, I don't understand the claims that the film actully seems like a piece of German expressionism. It doesn't. It truly doesn't.

Worth noting too, perhaps, that Florey directed the first Marx Brothers film Cocoanuts and wrote the screenplay to the 1933 Sherlock Holmes movie A Study in Scarlet with Reginald Owen as Holmes.

Any which way one looks at it, Murders in the Rue Morgue is definitely worth a look. But not much more. There's nowhere near the emotional impact of King Kong or the intellectual impact of Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue. This movie is sheer exploitation, not even clever exploitation, but still somewhat amusing.