Thread by @marccold

the mask goes OVER YOUR MOUTH God I can't believe I have to keep repeating this

and uh also don't decapitate people with your hatchet, that too is bad for public health

this is from a 1971 film vaguely based on "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and starring, improbably, Jason Robards

he must have been going through some kind of slump before winning his two Oscars that decade

now this guy is not even trying with his mask

in case you're wondering, although this is called "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," it is in fact a movie about actors in a theatrical version of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." it is in fact yet another retelling of "The Phantom of the Opera," which is why he's wearing this mask

I realize this is confusing. take it up with Roger Corman.

Adolfo Celi (known to Bond fans for Thunderball and to MST3K fans for his INCREDIBLE costumes in Operation Kid Brother and his slightly less interesting turn in Danger Diabolik) plays Inspector Vidocq (yes, Vidocq! no, this is not an adaptation of that famous crime work either)

Vidocq, for anyone who cares: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eug%C3%A8…

WE GOT A DEAL ON OUR FALSE MUSTACHES BY PURCHASING THEM IN BULK

poor guy who's second from right is THIS CLOSE to reaching up and holding his in place

this movie cannot really get started, because it keeps beginning scenes and then revealing that PSYCH IT'S ALL A DREAM

this has happened THREE TIMES ALREADY

like, come on, we're barely twenty minutes in

I'm almost positive that a murder happened and that that was not a dream, but aside from that, I don't know how much of what has happened so far is supposed to be real

I think Jason Robards is married to this one lady and carrying on with another lady, but now that I think of it he self-identified as married to Lady 1 in a dream Lady 1 had, so maybe he's not married to Lady 1? unsure

It doesn't help that Lady 1 and Lady 2 look very much alike (white, thin, early twenties)

anyway, AFAIK:

we began by seeing a theatrical troupe perform a play very loosely based on The Murders in the Rue Morgue

then we see a man with a mask chasing the actress from the play with a hatchet

then it's revealed that she fell asleep on stage and that was a dream

we see the play end

we see the guy playing the gorilla (I told you it was a loose adaptation) return to his dressing room

he takes off the costume and we see it's a guy in a mask (but NOT the guy in the mask from the dream, different-looking guy, different-looking mask)

the guy puts the gorilla suit away and we see there's a dead guy in the closet

he sneers at the dead guy and leaves

there's a carnival

a rando points at the theater and yells LOOK A MURDERER

the erstwhile gorilla is now standing on top of the theater (how? why?)

he runs away

the police chase him

the police are bad at chasing, he hides around a corner and they don't see him

we never learn how the rando knew there had been a murder, or that erstwhile gorilla was the murderer

more carnival

the first masked guy prances around a little- yup, dream

more carnival

a lady makes a date with Jason Robards, she is not his wife we later learn

Vidocq shows up, they talk about the theatre, we learn that Lady 1, the dreamer, had a mother who was also an actress at the same theatre

more carnival, a puppeteer delivers a package to somebody

we see the actors preparing for another performance, Jason Robards tells Lady 1 that he loves her and that they are married, she says she has a secret admirer so nyah, a dead body falls out of the wings, wait no this is another dream being had by Lady 1

not a lot is going on that's not a dream. I think the carnival puppet show has had more plot development so far

we have now moved from the "actors wearing obviously false mustaches" period of the film to the "actors wearing obviously fake beards" period

oh my God, Jason Robards just walked through the first-floor room with False Beard Guy, met the lady, started walking up the main staircase- AND FALSE BEARD GUY IS WALKING DOWN THE STAIRS FROM THE SECOND FLOOR

how the hell did he get up there so fast?

was there some kind of extra shortage at that time? they couldn't afford more than one Elderly Clubman Type?

you'd think at least they would have subbed out his false beard with Adolfo's snappy false mustache, tried to make him look different

lady just asked Jason Robards, "can the dead come back?" #spooky

only I misheard it as "can the debt come back?" until I rewound it to get my screenshot of False Beard Guy, and just thought, well, yes

we're getting a whole bunch of backstory at this time. there used to be another actor in the troupe named Rene. Rene had his face burned with vitriol somehow or other, everyone's very vague. but he's dead now. yup, he's dead. no doubt about THAT.

now all these other people who were actors in the troupe at the same time are being killed by having acid thrown on them by A Mysterious Masked Man. can't be Rene, though. no way. Rene is dead.

Lady 2 is the latest victim, the lady with whom Jason Robards is stepping out and whom he met at the nightclub. she was apparently also an actor in the troupe twenty years ago. "you were so innocent then," says Robards, which makes sense, given that she must have been about two.

Jason Robards is back home with the woman I am now pretty sure is his wife, Lady 1, who keeps having dreams. she is suspicious about Lady 2. "were you in love with her?" she asks Robards. Robards says, "of course not, I was in love with your mother."

that's...weird.

The Mysterious Masked Man Who Keeps Throwing Acid at People But Is Definitely Not the Guy Who Had Acid Thrown at Him By These Same People Twenty Years Ago, Oh No, is now perving on Lady 1. Oh, yeah, MMMWKTAPBIDNGWHATHBTSPTYAON was also in love with Lady 1's mother.

all these Lady 1 dream sequences are so patently done for the sake of showing us Lady 1 backlit in her filmy white nightgown

Lady 1 has woken up again and asks her husband what happened to her mother. her husband tells her she doesn't want to know, which seems like the worst answer possible to that question. she presses him, says she had a dream about a giant mansion. well, he says, that was her house.

she was a very wealthy actress, apparently, and she had a private theatre in her house where she gave performances with Jason Robards's Grand Guignol troupe for the aristocracy. we go into a flashback and see one of their plays. it is...pretty dire.

in the play, Jason Robards is playing a torturer who threatens Lady 1's mother, playing a damsel, with branding and acid. fun! Rene, the actor who was in love with her and who is definitely dead now, so not the Mysterious Man, etc., is playing the torturer's employer.

basically, here is the plot of every single one of this theatrical troupe's plays.

someone (a medieval duke, a mad scientist, etc.) threatens to disfigure a helpless lady.

there is an ape in the room.

the ape attacks the medieval duke/mad scientist and kills them.

the end.

you can see why they're so WILDLY SUCCESSFUL that they can afford to build houses that look like Tara from Gone with the Wind.

and own giant houses in the center of Paris for when they are bored with their country estates.

anyway, the play goes as planned until Lady 1's mother, as per the script, throws acid at Rene after the ape frees her. turns out the theater troupe accidentally used real acid instead of fake acid. WHOOPS.

Rene is kinda upset. Lady 1's mother offers to marry him as recompense. he agrees, but then he commits suicide.*

Lady 1 is comforted, even though HER QUESTION IS NEVER ANSWERED. she didn't ask what happened to Rene! she asked what happened to her mother!

*or DOES he?

I'm getting weirdly fond of this terrible band that's in nearly every scene, in their very distinctive uniforms.

ah, we FINALLY learn what happened to Lady 1's mother. she was killed with an axe. by Rene. who then committed suicide OR DID HE

stop harping on this point, movie. there's no mystery. we know he didn't. he's wearing a mask over part of his face, but we can still see him. my coworkers don't greet me every day by saying "look, there's our cataloger OR IS IT WE CAN'T TELL MASK MAYBE IT'S JASON ROBARDS"

finally! yes, Rene faked his suicide. he was buried, but he "used the tricks of the fakirs of the Orient" to stop breathing for three days. then he somehow managed to unscrew and open the lid of his coffin and tunnel up through six feet of earth. pretty good work.

Rene's coffin was later moved to an aboveground tomb. it would have been a hell of a lot easier to escape from it there, so I don't know what he was thinking by telling them to bury it. anyway, they open the coffin. it's empty. Rene, as we knew, is the Mysterious Masked Murderer.

I can't believe that there are almost FORTY MINUTES of this movie left. how many more dream sequences can they cram in? I need another break.

I kinda blanked out during the final forty minutes of this movie after the big reveal. it felt like they shot three different endings and then someone was like, why not put them one after another to make the movie longer? like CLUE. but really bad, and not fun bad, just bad bad.

first, we see Jason Robards and Lady 1 separately decide to confront their pasts and head back to Lady 1's late mother's house. surprise, surprise. Rene is there. Rene chases them around, and they kill him and his servant and then put them in the coffin that he was in originally.

all fine and dandy, right? end? no. Lady 1 is freaking out about having killed Rene. Jason Robards tells her to calm down and go to bed. they do, but Rene (who is still alive) kidnaps them and brings them back to Lady 1's mother's house. oh, and his servant is still alive too.

Rene drops a bombshell on Lady 1- he did not kill her mother with an axe. Jason Robards killed her mother with an axe! and she witnessed it, but blocked it out! that's why she's had nightmares since they got married about being chased by a guy with an axe!

also Robards switched the prop acid for real acid. so he hates Robards for two reasons.

if Robards was solely responsible for all this, then why did he kill all the other actors from the troupe by throwing acid at them? because he was annoyed they believed Robards and not him.

I feel this is disproportionate.

Robards confesses tearfully and Rene beheads him, which strikes me as a pretty moderate punishment considering that all the people who merely thought he was guilty of murder died in prolonged agony as acid ate their bodies.

the cops show up.

Inspector Vidocq, who has been doing fucking nothing, tries to arrest Rene, but Rene escapes. they do manage to kill the servant, again. Vidocq tells Lady 1 that she won't have nightmares ever again, which is pretty rich considering she literally just saw her husband die.

end? end? no, fifteen minutes left. Lady 1 is now preparing for another performance of The Murders in the Rue Morgue, since the theater troupe is, incredibly, still going on. Inspector Vidocq tells her they have not yet caught Rene but that she will be under police protection.

midway through the production, Lady 1 realizes that the actor in the ape costume is Rene, again. she screams, but everyone thinks it's part of the play, including her "police protection." finally, someone catches on and they chase Rene without catching him. again.

Lady 1, who is on her own now that all the police are chasing Rene, goes to her dressing room. she hears a noise! surprise, it's Rene! while the police run around outside, Rene has been massacring everyone in the theater. he thinks she's her mother, and he wants her bad.

she tries to run away, but all the doors are locked. finally, she manages to cut the rope he's using the balance on the catwalk, and he falls to the stage. the cops finally come back and are mightily surprised. Rene is dying (again), but he threatens to haunt her forever.

end? end? no. six minutes left. yet another dream sequence, from which Lady 1 awakes to see Rene's servant standing at the foot of her bed, still alive. unpleasant things are in store. she screams. finally, the end.

I do not recommend this movie.