"Mystery of Marie Roget" is a sub-par B-movie from Universal. While the story purports to be from the Edgar Allan Poe story, it's really very different.When the film begins, Marie has been reported missing and the police have so far found nothing. They do eventually find a corpse that MIGHT be her...but her face is missing. When they tell her family that they've found her, she then walks in the house...so the corpse obviously was NOT her. However, eventually Marie really is murdered and it's up to Poe's Dupin character (Patric Knowles) to solve the murder. As for Dupin, he's a know-it-all who acts a lot like the movie version of Sherlock Holmes and has a partner (Lloyd Corrigan) who is even stupider and more useless than the movie version of Watson. In fact, he's such a bumbling moron that it totally ruins the movie...as does Dupin's bizarre manner in which he investigates. Overall, just a silly and inconsequential B murder mystery--complete with all the usual clichés and plot problems. A time-passer at best...but you could easily do better.

Edgar Allan Poe's three tales of Paris crime-solver C. Auguste Dupin are considered the first detective stories. "The Mystery of Marie Roget" is the least known of the three, and by far the dullest, but it has the distinction of being the first "ripped from the headlines" whodunit. Based on the unsolved murder of a minor New York celebrity named Mary Rogers, "Marie Roget" was a thinly fictionalized essay on the facts of that case and the newspapers' theories about it. (How thinly fictionalized was it? Poe even added footnotes to remind readers that he was actually talking about Mary Rogers!) There are plenty of colorful theories about why Poe came up with such a vague, confusing solution to the mystery, but he probably just didn't want to be proved wrong if the real crime was ever solved.Any "Marie Roget" movie true to the original material would attract mostly scholars, literary buffs and insomniacs, but fortunately this film throws in elements from other Poe stories to liven things up. It also has Dupin do something a bit more exciting than sit in an armchair and deliver a lecture. He's called "Paul Dupin" here, but as Marie Roget might say, "Just call me Mary."

Tag line: "Beautiful beast! Maddening...with her soft caress! Murdering...with steel-clawed terror!" In late 19th century Paris, the musical comedy star Marie Roget (Maria Montez) goes missing and Prefect of Police Gobelin (Lloyd Corrigan) is under pressure to solve the case. On the very day a woman's body is found floating in the Seine with her face torn off, Marie suddenly re-appears. Her half-sister Camille's (Nell O'Day) fiancé, Marcel (Edward Norris), an attaché to the Department of the Navy, is having a secret affair with Marie who's involved with Beauvais (John Litel), Marcel's boss. Overhearing a sinister plot hatched by Marie to kill Camille, the girls' grandmother, Cecile (Maria Ouspenskaya), hires police chemist Dr. Paul Dupin (Patrick Knowles) to escort Camille to a welcome back party for Marie where the murder will supposedly take place. When Marie, and not Camille, disappears during the festivities and is later found floating faceless in the river, Dr. Dupin uses ratiocination to solve the mystery.Edgar Allan Poe, the father of American detective pulp fiction, wrote "The Mystery Of Marie Roget" in 1842 as a sequel to his "Murders In The Rue Morgue" and was based on the real-life murder of "The Beautiful Cigar Girl", Mary Rogers, in NYC. Poe wrote the story in three installments for "Snowden's Ladies' Companion" magazine; after the second part was published, there was a suicide and a deathbed confession in the real-life case that flew in the face of known facts so Poe adjusted the third installment accordingly. The case is still unsolved and author Irving Wallace has offered up Poe himself as a possible suspect as he had a passing acquaintance with the dead girl. Very loosely based on the Poe, Universal's MYSTERY OF MARIE ROGET is a fast-moving, atmospheric programmer set in 1889 Paris. Universal utilized the back lot villages from their horror films to recreate the city and some of the murky photography foreshadows the look of the "period noir" yet to come. Everyone's a suspect including Maria Ouspenskaya's pet leopard but the final outcome comes as no surprise. Patric Knowles' Dr. Dupin is reminiscent of Sherlock Holmes (he even has a Watson in the form of the Prefect of Police) and uses deductive reasoning along with some unorthodox science to solve the crimes; removing Marie's brain from the morgue, he examines it and later announces the star had a twisted criminal mind (?!). For a finale, there's a fast-paced chase and shoot-out across the roofs of Paris with barely a loose end tied up. Exotic Maria Montez' accent isn't out of place at all and she even gets to sing a (dubbed) song. Overall, not bad but strictly second feature.

This one hour film is almost a paradigm for the average B movie from the 30s and 40s. It has some suspense, (it uses the great forest sets left over from The Wolf Man), and a fast pace and if you are into this type of mystery go see it, but don't go out of your way to find it. The performances, direction, etc. are all adequate and it progresses in the typical 'the dumb cop can't figure it out, so the smart young independent detective knows everything' approach. Generallly atmospheric and fun, though.