The Pale Blue Eye (A Movie Reflection)

Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth.

- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

When I watched the movie “The pale Blue eye”, I first had the impression of the fictional character of a novel by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle who is "Sherlock Holmes”, a detective in the old time London who used his deductive reasoning skills in order to solve the mystery of a crime.

The movie is about a historical murder mystery that will have you frustrated by the twist and gruesomeness of the murder [1]. An investigator named Augustus Landor was renowned for his work in solving some of New York’s most difficult crimes. He was summoned to the United States Military Academy at West Point to solve a most gruesome murder; the hanging of a young cadet who was found with his heart missing. This cadet was named Leroy Fry, the first of the grisly murders that Landor was tasked with solving. Along the way, Landor employs the help of a fourth-classman Edgar Allan Poe, the famous poet. The first suspect was Daniel Marquis, the man in charge of performing the autopsy on Mr. Fry. It was deduced that the heart was taken out by someone who was good with the knife, not particularly someone who was big and strong and had a basic understanding of human anatomy, but what’s more concerning were all the details that the doctor missed. For example, the contusion found on the back of Fry’s head or the torn note clutched between his fingers both point to the theory that Fry did not hang himself but rather was killed. So was the doctor really incompetent in his analysis of Fry’s death, or was something more notorious at play? When Landor discovers that the murder may have been the result of a satanic ritual, he visits his friend and expert on the occult, Jean Pepe. There he learns of a witch hunter by the name of Henri Le Clerc who left behind instructions on achieving immortality. He would have known that at a witch’s feast, they dined on unclean animals' hearts, the hearts of unbaptized children, and the hearts of hanged men. Perhaps the hard parts were pivotal in a ritual that would give this immortality in an effort to gain more clues. Poe infiltrates Fry’s group of friends, which includes three men of importance; Randy Ballinger, Stoddard, and Artemis Marquis, the doctor’s son. Soon he’s invited over to the Marquis household, where he meets Artemis’ sister Lea, whom he falls in love with, but Randy isn’t too fond of Poe’s admiration for Leah and attacks him at night, with Landor saving him and fending off the attack. The next morning, however, Randy is found hanging with his heart out, just like Cadet Fry. Poe and Landor are invited to the Marquis household in order to mourn the death of Randy. Landor finds a few items of note, an odd-looking tome, a painting, which he will later learn is that of witch-hunter Henry Le Clerc, and a West Point officer’s jacket. one that is missing a bar on the left shoulder. It turns out that the whole Marquis family was in on it and that the sloppy performance of the doctor was to cover up the doings of his children.

The most intriguing part that caught my interest was the detail of the movie and the cinematography that matches the timeline of the plot. It is interesting to watch and to look forward to how the detective collects clues on the crime scene and how they gradually unfold the mystery of the suspected murder. I was particularly interested in the part where they were trying so hard to decipher a torn letter in order to complete the message that was missing. Indeed, I believe that there is no such thing as a perfect crime because there will always be a way to solve it. The only reason why there are unsolved crimes is that maybe the criminal is more cunning in doing so and is meticulous in hiding the traces of the crime scene, or the investigators are incompetent in doing their job.

[1] Wikimedia Foundation. (2023). The pale blue eye. Wikipedia. Retrieved January 10, 2023, from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pale_Blue_Eye.