Kino Lorber continues to churn out their three-movie Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema sets and I keep happily buying them. As I write this, they have just announced the 20th volume in the series. With that many titles, there will doubtlessly be a few that are controversial in being labeled as “noir”. The biggest mystery in 1942’s The Mystery of Marie Roget is why the distributor believes this qualifies as such. Honestly, I wouldn’t care to what extent it is noir, so long as it is a good movie. Unfortunately, this isn’t that good of a film.
This Poe adaptation is set in Paris in 1889, which would make one think that automatically disqualifies it. I think more people equate Poe with horror or the supernatural. Also, while many excellent noirs were set in Paris, I don’t think any of those were set before the 20th century.
This is a straight-up mystery, with some elements of its presentation likely to have some viewers regarding it as a horror film, in retrospect. Yes, it has a suspicious character sneaking into a morgue at night and stealing the titular character’s brain out of her corpse, but that is Patric Knowles, the star and our alleged hero.
I’m not sure which I disliked more in this film: Knowles the actor or the character he plays. Overall, I find him very bland, and he was even worse in the same year’s Lady In a Jam. In Roget, he is somehow solidly beige while also being a smug asshat who repeatedly lets his boss (Lloyd Corrigan) rush to wrong conclusions. In multiple scenes, he steps aside as the man is about to make a fool of himself while knowing exactly what will happen. If I was Corrigan, I would have sacked that jerk as soon as possible.
I don’t even think the coroner is a good investigator. He has an “expert” do analysis on that brain he stole and accepts that person’s conclusion that the deceased had a criminal mind. Oh how I wish we could have heard that conversation. I’m surprised phrenology wasn’t also employed. One element of police investigations we see here, and of which I was previously unaware, is a cannon being fired from a boat with the intention of the sound vibrations dislodging any corpses caught on anything under the water’s surface.
Maria Montez is the titular character, an stage actress who comes across as exceptionally vain, even for somebody in that profession. As I learned in the Tom Weaver commentary track on this blu-ray (one of two, with the other led by Kim Newman), Montez wasn’t too different from that character in real life.
When we first see her, she has simply wandered back into the apartment of her grandmother (Maria Ouspenskaya) and sister (Nell O’Day), as if she’s oblivious to the news of her disappearance which has enthralled the city. There was even a body found in the water which was believed to have been hers, and which had its face crudely removed, perhaps by the claws of a large animal. And there just happens to be such an animal in the apartment, a leopard the grandmother is inexplicably keeping as a pet. And, wait a mo—don’t leopards have big, nasty claws? Hmmm… Still, it shouldn’t surprise anybody when that leopard turns out to be a red herring, however zoologically unlikely that may seem.
Montez isn’t telling anybody where she had been during that time she had been missing. Funny, but I wasn’t intrigued by why she had been off the radar. I am no way surprised an actress would do something to create high drama around her and draw a great deal of public attention towards herself.
In that same scene, we learn O’Day is to marry Edward Norris. As soon as everybody but Norris and Montez have left the room, we learn these two are lovers and the plan is for him to go through with marrying O’Day and then killing her. Once he has the family fortune, he will marry Montez. What they don’t realize is grandma is just outside the door, listening in to the conversation.
There are various intrigues here, most of which are so creaky they probably felt anachronistic even at the time this movie was made. In one unintentionally funny scene, a hand reaches into frame when two characters have their backs turned, and it empties powder from a vial into the drinking glasses of those characters. I could not help but wonder if the poison was iocaine powder.
Among the aspects of The Mystery of Marie Roget that left me frustrated, I was most concerned by how I couldn’t follow the elements of the mystery. And this doesn’t seem to be a particularly complex mystery, so I have the nagging suspicions there are numerous plot holes. Then again, I wasn’t engaged enough by this to dissect it further. Perhaps the most damning thing I say about this picture is it has so few characters that could be the murderer, yet I disliked (or, at least, felt no commitment to) any of those people and so did not care whether or not they were the one.
Dir: Phil Rosen
Starring Patric Knowles, Maria Montez, Lloyd Corrigan
Watched as part of Kino Lorber’s blu-ray box set Film Noir: The Dark Side of Cinema XVI