The Garden Murder Case

TCM's Saturday matinee programming block was running a bunch of Philo Vance mysteries in the 10:00 AM section, although I believe the last one they have aired on July 8, to be followed by the Dr. Kildare films. I mentioned some years back that the Philo Vance mysteries were notable for having a bunch of different actors play the part of the detective, as well as jumping from one studio to another. Anyhow, recently, I watched one of the movies in the series, The Garden Murder Case.

This time, the movie was made at MGM and starred Edmund Lowe in the title role. Philo shows up at some sort of society steeplechase, where a well-to-do doctor, Dr. Garden (Henry B. Walthall) has a son who's going to be one of the jockeys. On the way to the race, the son can be heard saying something like "must kill self" in the sort of toneless voice that sounds like Hollywood's stereotype of stage hypnosis, and I don't think I'm giving anything away by saying that since it's so obvious. Sure enough, the jockey falls off his horse, gets trampled to death, and then later Dad collapses in horror.

Meanwhile, all of the other smart set have gone back to the mansion owned by Edgar Lowe-Hammle (Gene Lockhart) to deal with the shock in their own way. And one of those ways is going to be murder! Edgar is in his study on the phone, when we hear a gunshot followed by a woman screaming. Edgar is dead, and everybody wonders which woman screamed. At first, the death is also thought to be suicide, including by investigating detective Heath (Nat Pendelton) and the district attorney (Grant Mitchell), but Philo Vance notices that Edgar doesn't have any powder burns, which he would have had if he had shot himself. So it's obviously murder.

And then, one of the women, Mrs. Fenwicke-Ralston (Frieda Inescort) lets slip that she's got some information on who might have shot Edgar. But as she gets on the bus to go to the police station, followed by Zalia (Virginia Bruce), we hear her doing the same sort of "must kill self" crap that the jockey did. She falls to her death from the top of the double-decker bus, and Zalia is unsurprisingly implicated. It's up to Philo to figure out what really happened.

What really happened is partly easy and partly difficult to figure out, the latter part because in many ways the point of some of these mystery movie series isn't so much the mystery but the star playing the lead role as well as the interactions of the rest of the cast. Lowe does a good enough job here, and there is as always a nice cast of character actors in the supporting roles. Much like the British movie Death Goes to School that I blogged about a few months back, the material feels like it would have been perfect for an episode of Columbo.

If you're looking for an engrossing mystery, you're not going to find it here. But if you just want to sit back and be entertained for an hour or so, I think you'll get that.