The Mystery of Edwin Drood Reviews

Rains is a cathedral choirmaster and opium addict who falls in love with Angel, the fiancee of his nephew, Manners. During a raging storm on Christmas Eve, he strangles Manners and dumps his body in a quicklime pit in the crypt under the cathedral. He tries to pin the murder on Montgomery, just back from Ceylon, but he is foiled. Eventually the crypt is opened and in the lime pit can be seen the impression left by Manners' body, with his engagement ring plainly visible where his hand used to be. As accusing eyes fall on Rains, he climbs to the top of the church tower and jumps to his death. Charles Dickens died before completing the novel on which the film is based, and how he would have resolved the situation he set up has been a subject of debate among literature professors ever since. This variation on one of the suggested scenarios works reasonably well despite some tortuous twists in logic. Nevertheless it is Rains--in his fourth feature--who carries the film as he smokes opium, wracked with unholy lust for Angel and guilt over his crime. The look of the film is shadowy, perfectly complementing the Gothic horror story the Universal writers made of Dickens' unfinished work. The crypt set was the one built for DRACULA (1931), one of many appearances that mossy basement was to make in Universal's films.