Talk:Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932 film)

Plot summary problem
The plot summary currently states that "Mirakle ... abducts young virgin women and injects them with ape blood, in order to create a mate for his talking sideshow ape Erik". This badly mangles the most outrageously pre-code aspect of the film. Mirakle injects them with ape blood, not to "create" a mate for Erik, but to test their biological compatibility with Erik. The "mixing of the blood" he is after is not the literal one actually shown, but the figurative one for which that phrase was a period euphemism. His plan is to find a compatible virgin ("Will my search never end?") and sexually couple her with his ape. The resulting progeny will enable him to "prove [man's] kinship with the ape" (and therefore the theory of evolution), as he told his hostile audience he would do in the tent show scene.

Apes ravishing women in the jungle are a titillating feature of more than one lurid pre-20th century piece of "literature" and the meaning would have been clear enough to many viewers of the film in 1932, as it was clear enough to the several later commentators who have mentioned it in print. However, I have no proper citable refs for those sources at hand, and at least one respectable cit will certainly be required to sustain a revision of the plot summary per the above. Is anyone out there better equipped and up for the task? 66.81.241.72 (talk) 23:55, 21 May 2016 (UTC)

P.S. From this source, which, unfortunately like several outstanding online sources for classic film scholarship, is a blog and therefore verboten per strict WP criteria for citation, some typical commentary: "It is hard not to conclude that despite what we know of Mirakle’s previous experiments, he intends to prove his theories by making Camille the recipient of something other than merely Erik’s blood. Otherwise…why all the emphasis upon how much Erik likes Camille…?"; " [...] the censors [...] were also outraged by the implications of Mirakle’s plans for Camille, which apparently they interpreted the same way we do." 66.81.240.90 (talk) 12:45, 22 May 2016 (UTC)