Mrs. O'Malley and Mr. Malone

Some time back TCM did a prime-time spotlight on some of the films of Marjorie Main. One that I had seen quite a few years back, but did not blog about at the time -- it might even have been before I started blogging -- was Mrs. O'Malley and Mr. Malone. So with that in mind I recorded it and eventually got around to watching it so that I could do this post on it.

Marjorie Main plays Mrs. Hattie O'Malley, a widow living in Proudfoot, MT and running some sort of boarding house; the Montana setting at the start is basically an excuse for Main to do a version of the rustic Ma Kettle character. She gets a sudden call from a radio program in New York which plays her a mystery song for a chance to win a cash and prize package of $50,000, which is a pretty darn big sum for 1950 when the movie was released. She's able to recognize the song, and she's invited on an all-expenses paid trip to New York to receive her winnings.

Cut to Chicago, where John J. Malone (James Whitmore) lives. He's a struggling lawyer, who owes a bunch of money largely because his big client, Steve Kepplar (Douglas Fowley), owes him. Malone had defended Kepplar on an embezzlement charge where Kepplar stole $100K from the firm run by Myron Brynk (Don Porter). Kepplar was convicted, but is about to be paroled now, and Malone would like the money he's owed for his services defending Kepplar. But Malone needs to get in line: Kepplar has an ex-wife Connie (Ann Dvorak) who wants alimony. And, besides, that $100K was never returned to the Brynk business. Still, Brynk offers Kepplar his old job back and to celebrate, they'll go to the same hotel lounge where Mrs. O'Malley is staying on a stopover in Chicago. This, as you can guess, is how the two title characters meet.

Kepplar is a no-show at the big reunion, and the natural suspicion is that he's fleeing the jurisdiction, and absconding with the $100K. His probation officer, Marino (Fred Clark), has good reason to believe that Kepplar is on the train to New York, so he gets on the same train that Mrs. O'Malley will be taking. Malone also gets on the train because he wants his $10,000, even though he should know that the money Kepplar embezzled can't be touched. The ex-Mrs. Kepplar shows up too.

Sure enough, Kepplar is on the train, disguised as a sailor and hiding in the compartment of his girlfriend Lola (Dorothy Malone). But wouldn't you know it, that night Malone returns to his compartment, which conveniently enough for the plot happens to be right next to Mrs. O'Malley's. In that compartment he finds... the undressed body of Steve Kepplar, who has been stabbed to death! Who would want to stab him, and why would the murderer want to remove his clothes? All Mr. Malone knows is that since the body was found in his compartment he's going to be the prime suspect. Mrs. O'Malley sees Malone and the body, and is willing to help in a murder mystery.

Mrs. O'Malley and Mr. Malone is another of those movies where it's easy to see why the people involved in it would want to make it; the premise of another comic murder mystery is one that has obvious appeal. Unfortunately, this one comes across as a bit too manic. Worse, Mr. Malone is just too dishonest to be a sympathetic character, as opposed to a charming person like Nick Charles. I also think it doesn't help that 1950, when the movie was released, was just about the time when stories like this would have started moving to television. So Mrs. O'Malley and Mr. Malone was underwhelming at best.

Better than a Ben Mankiewicz podcast

TCM's schedule for tomorrow, January 22, is all six of the Hildegarde Withers mysteries followed by all four of the Margaret Rutherford Miss Marple movies, before prime time brings us another night of the films of Jean Arthur. I've actually got one film each from the two mystery series sitting on my DVR. But since I don't really feel like doing two mysteries in a row, today's post is going to be on The Plot Thickens, tomorrow at 11:00 AM.

We don't actually meet Hildegarde Withers for a good ten minutes or more. Instead, we get a starting scene in a park, with a woman calling up wealthy John Carter to say she want to meet him there. Carter, meanwhile, has a guest at home and some servants who would prefer the night off. There's the butler, Joe the chauffeur (a young Paul Fix two dozen years before The Rifleman), and Marie the maid who seems to be in romantic entanglements with both Joe and the butler. Everybody's out of the house when a mysterious figure comes out of the bushes in the park and shoots Carter dead during his assignation. But the body is only found the next day, with the investigation also finding a young couple, Bob (Owen Davis, Jr.) and Alice (Louise Latimer) having been at the park so they could be suspects.

It's up to police detective Piper (James Gleason) to solve this. Well, not quite of course. He's the boyfriend of teacher Hildegarde Withers, here played by ZaSu Pitts. Piper calls her up, and as usual she's excited to take part in another murder investigation, although not so excited to deal with incompetence beyond being able to sling acerbic quips at anybody she sees as not up to the task. This of course includes Piper, who is just as good at slinging those barbs back at Hildegarde. The Withers movies are as much about the interaction between Piper and Withers as they are about the mysteries.

In any case, during the investigation at Carter's house, Hildegarde finds a precious gem and learns that it had been stolen some years back in France. The New York police learn from their French counterparts that the man who had stolen it was recently freed from prison, so the assumption is that it might be the same man involved. This also shifts the action to an art museum, specificlly to the exhibit of the "Cellini Cup", an allegedly valuable Renaissance-era piece of fine silver work which also has a pearl hanging from it in one strategic spot. The two things are clearly related, but how is something that we're only going to learn in the final reel when the guilty parties are caught.

As I said, the Hildegarde Withers movies are as much about the relationship between her and Piper as they are about the actual plots. ZaSu Pitts does a good job here, although she doesn't come across quite as well as Edna May Oliver when it comes to striving for a classier attitude. Oliver could seemingly pull that off in her sleep, while Pitts feels a bit more like the Staten Islander types who would be the wives of New York cops. She's still funny, mind you, and the repartee and "mystery", such as the mystery is, do work, making The Plot Thickens an enjoyable entry in the series.

Shelley Fabares is nowhere to be found

I'm getting near to the end of writing up reviews of the movies I recorded when George Raft was TCM's Star of the Month back at the beginning of 2025. This time, it's a film from the beginning of his descent into the realm of B movies: Johnny Angel. It will be on TCM tomorrow, January 13, at 11:30 AM.

Raft actually does play a character named Johnny Angel, and that seems to be the character's real name. Johnny is in the merchant marine, captaining a ship for the Gunderson Line run my George Gustafson (Marvin Miller) out of New Orleans during World War II. Johnny's boat plies the Gulf of Mexico, and as the film opens he and his crew spot another ship that appears to be adrift in the fog. Johnny boards it and finds that it was the ship that his father, also a ship's captain for the Gustafson Line, captained, except that there's nobody left on board, which is an obvious mystery.

Johnny tows his father's boat back to New Orleans, where we find that the shipping line isn't in as good shape as one might have hoped for. George is the latest in a line of Gustafsons, but he's got a wife Lilah (Claire Trevor) who seems to have married him for his money. The fact that Lilah used to be in a relationship with Johhny complicates matters. That, and a secretary Miss Drumm (Margaret Wycherly) who was George's governess back in the day and still seems to have a lot of influence. None of the three have any clue about what might have happened to Johnny's dad; worse, they don't much seem to care.

So Johnny goes back about his father's ship, which is where he finds a woman's shoe and a newspaper that looks like it was printed back in France. So with the help of cabbie Celestial (Hoagy Carmichael), Johnny goes looking for anybody who might have knowledge about a French woman who would likely be new to New Orleans. The fact that there's a war on would at least explain why such a woman would be seeking illicit passage aboard a cargo ship like the ones the Angel father and son captained.

Johnny and Celestial go to the various clubs and other spots where someone new in town might go to look for a cheap place to sleep and get a starter job, so you know they're eventually going to find a woman who might just be the one who was aboard Dad's boat. They do indeed find such a woman, Paulette (Signe Hasso), and she has a story to tell that would be incredibly improbable in real life, but par for the course in a Hollywood movie. Apparently she and her father were transporting Free French gold across the Atlantic for safekeeping, when some people who somehow learned of this come aboard the boat, killing everyone but Paulette who was able to hide or something. (Why there was no blood on the boat is a good question.) So Paulette is out to find that gold, and the people who took it. Johnny, for his part, is willing to help Paulette. But Mr. Gustafson puts a crimp in those plans. Is he in on the heist, or just stupid?

For me, the problem with Johnny Angel is that it had a plot that was too complex for its own good, especially in a B movie like this. George Raft is also not exactly the most charismatic romantic leading man out there. Still, everybody tries, and the movie is not uninteresting if at the same time not particularly great. Johnny Angel is enjoyable enough for a rainy day, but once again it's one of those movies where there are good reasons why it's not very well remembered 80 years on.

Shadow of the Thin Man

TCM has certain marathons they like to do in conjunction with New Year's, either New Year's Eve or New Year's Day. One of those marathons is to run all six of the Thin Man movies in succession. This time, that marathon is on the morning and afternoon of January 1, together with two more William Powell/Myrna Loy movies that are not Thin Man movies. Seeing this, and seeing one of the movies in the series showing up not too long ago, I recorded that movie: Shadow of the Thin Man, so that I could do a post for the upcoming airing. That airing is tomorrow (Jan. 1) at 2:45 PM.

Shadow of the Thin Man is the fourth film in the series, so after Nick Charles (William Powell) get Nora (Myrna Loy) pregnant which, if memory serves, happened at the end of the second film. The kid, Nicky (Dickie Hall), is now three our four years old, and living in San Francisco with is parents in the sort of house that I wonder how the heck a retired police detective could afford. (If memory serves, the excuse is that Nora comes from money.) Nick takes little Nicky to the park and instead of reading a fairy tale reads from the Racing Form. It's a sign that Nick is still into betting on the ponies. He's also still into drinking, as we'll see later in the film although it's exactly a big plot point.

The Charles family is planning on going to the racetrack, but on the way they get passed by a phalanx of police motorcycles accompanying somebody. That somebody turns out to be a police ambulance, as there's been a murder at the racetrack. Not only that, but the murder victim is one of the jockeys. As you might guess, police lieutenant Abrams (Sam Levene) would like Nick to help, but Nick is reluctant. Also as you might guess, Nick eventually does get involved, and everybody winds up being a suspect -- well, not quite everybody as Nora and little Nicky certainly aren't suspects.

The murder of a jockey is presumed to be because of corruption in horse racing, some sort of corruption that the jockey might have been about to reveal or some other such shenanigans. Link Stephens is behind the west coast syndicate, and one of his underlings, Whitey Barrow (Alan Baxter). Working for Stephens and not realizing what he's really doing is secretary Molly (Donna Reed). She's engaged to crusading reporter Paul Clark (Barry Nelson), and when part of the investigation involves a record book and a possible list of some sort, Molly gives Paul her key to the office so he can do some surreptitious investigation. However, he's caught out, and the person who catches him gets murdered by an unseen third party. Paul is understandably the prime suspect in this murder even though we know he's innocent of the killing.

There are other suspects, such as Claire (Stella Adler), the sugar baby who is being blackmailed, and a third killing along the way. As for who's doing the killing and why, Nick brings all the suspects to Lt. Abrams' office for the finale, where he reveals who the killer is. Or, should we say, the killer outs himself as is a trope in these movies.

Shadow of the Thin Man is entertaining enough. It's not quite as good as the original Thin Man movie, but audiences of the day probably didn't care since they didn't have access to the previous movies the way we do today. For them, the continuing antics of Nick, Nora, and Asta were worth the price of admission while the mystery is, if not beside the point, almost a bit of a macguffin. That said, the mystery is, like a Murder, She Wrote episode, adequate, with the rest of the movie providing sufficient entertainment.

Appointment With Death

It's not too long ago from the point of when I wrote this post that I did a post on a Lauren Bacall movie. It's even slightly more recent that I did a post on a movie based on an Agatha Christie novel. Today brings a post on another of those all-star Agatha Christie movies, this one a book I didn't know much about before seeing the move show up on TCM during Lauren Bacall's term as TCM's Star of the Month: Appointment With Death.

The movie opens in 1937 in New Jersey. Emily Boynton (Piper Laurie) is the widow of a wealthy businessman who has one daughter of her own by her late husband, Ginevra, and three step-children from her late husband's first marriage. The Boynton lawyer, Jefferson Cope (David Soul) is discussing the will with Emily. Well, actually, two wills. Apparently it was Dad's original intention that Mom be the head of the trust, judiciously using that money to keep the four children taken care of until Emily dies. This, even though the three step-children are adults by now, one with a wife of his own. Two days before Mr. Boynton died, he wrote out a new will that split the estate among the four children and the widow equally. Emily for fairly obvious reasons doesn't like this, and blackmails Cope into destroying the updated will in the fireplace.

The kids are, for equally obvious reasons, not happy about this and suspect that there was in fact a second will out there but cannot yet provie it. Lennox (Nicholas Guest) is married to a nurse, Nadine (Carrie Fisher); Raymond (John Terlesky) is the youngest; seemingly afraid to do anything to cross his stepmother; and daughter Carol rounds out the family. As a way of getting over the grief of the passing of the family patriarch, Emily suggests that a transatlantic cruise to England followed by a Mediterranean trip to the Holy Land would be just what the doctor ordered. It's also a good way to get away from Cope, since Emily knows what secret he holds over her head.

On the way to Europe, they meet some intersting characters. Lady Westholme (Lauren Bacall) is one of those beautiful Americans looking for a man with class and finding one in the late Lord Westholme who was looking for money which his wife's family had. Miss Quinton (Hayley Mills) is an archaeologist looking to do some digging in Mandatory Palestine, and Dr. King (Jenny Seagrove) is fresh out of medica school. Finally, when the boat docks in Trieste, the lot meet Hercule Poirot (Peter Ustinov), who claims to be on vacation.

Now, we know that Poirot isn't going to get that nice vacation he was hoping for. Everybody makes their way to Jerusalem and then to Qumran, which was one of the big archaeologic sited back in the late 1930s. And it's there that Emily finally gets what's coming to her. But who did it? If you've been watching the movie carefully -- or even not so carefully since this is an Agatha Christie story and you know the formula -- you'll know that most of the other main characters in the piece minus of course Poirot are suspects. Col. Carbury (John Gielgud) is part of the British administration, and he lets Poirot do an investigation as an official investigation might cause some problems since Lady Westholme is a sitting member of Parliament. In the end, Poirot will solve the case....

Appointment With Death follows a formula, but it looks like one of those movies where everybody was getting up there in years and the steam was running out of the formula. As a result, there are some nice locations, although the story and the acting aren't the greatest of the series. (From what I've read, Agatha Christie fans don't consider this one of her best books, never mind the changes made for the screen.) Still, it's an Agatha Christie movie with an all-star -- or mostly-star -- cast, so it will wind up being entertaining enough even if not up to the standard of some of the earlier movies.

Darkness around footsteps

I've been adding a lot of movies to my YouTube TV cloud DVR, with the unsurprising result that a reasonable number of them get another airing on TCM that allows me to do a post on them in conjunction with the upcoming airing. This time, the movie in question is Footsteps in the Dark, which shows up on TCM tomorrow (October 9) at 6:15 PM.

Errol Flynn plays Francis Warren who, at the start of the movie, is being helped by his chauffeur Wilfred (Allen Jenkins) to climb up into his bedroom late one night, so that he won't disturb his wife Rita (Brenda Marshall). The following morning, Francis is at breakfast with his wife and her mother Agatha (Lucile Watson). The two women are aghast over the popular new book, Footsteps in the Dark, and want to sue author F.X. Pettijohn and his publisher, because the book takes prominent society women and, using thinly-veiled identities, skewers these women.

Francis goes downtown for his job as an investment banker, and at lunchtime is driven by Wilfred to a house on the Warner Bros. backlot that he's been renting. Here, it's revealed that Francis is in fact Mr. Pettijohn, who likes to ride with the police on murder investigations, which would explain why he gets home late at night. Of course, Francis hasn't told his wife any of this, which I'd think would be a much bigger problem in their marriage. Meanwhile, police inspector Mason (Alan Hale) knows Pettijohn but not Francis, and thinks Pettijohn doesn't really know how to solve murders.

Back at the office, Francis is met by a Mr. Fessue, who wants him to invest some money from the sale of jewels. But the financial arrangements are going to have to wait until after the close of business when Francis can go meet Fessue at his apartment since Fessue is going sailing for the afternoon. Francis goes there, and Fessue never shows up. When he hears of a boat adrift in the harbor with a man dead of an alcohol-induced heart attack, Francis puts two and two together.

Except that Francis has good reason to believe that it's actually murder, even though the coroner has determined that no, it's just alcoholism. In doing his investigation, Francis learns that Fessue has been seeing a burlesque queen, Blondie White (Lee Patrick). He gets the distinct impression that she's involved in the murder except that she has an airtight alibi, which is that she was at the dentist's office seeing Dr. Davis (Ralph Bellamy) for a dental issue.

Francis keeps investigating, spending time with Blondie, until one of Rita's gossipy friends goes slumming and sees Francis (claiming to be a Texas oil millionaire) with Blondie. Francis now has to try to solve the case without Rita thinking that he's having an illicit relationship with a burlesque dancer. Worse is that things get even more complicated when Blondie turns up dead too. Eventually the case is solved and all the good people wind up living happily ever after, but you know that was always going to happen since there's that pesky Production Code that has to be satisfied.

Footsteps in the Dark is another of those comedic murder mysteries that Hollywood made a lot of in the years before the US got dragged into World War II. Flynn had already done a couple of comedies, and once again, he shows himself to be adept at handling comedy. The supporting cast is also quite good here, although Brenda Marshall as the nominal leading lady doesn't really have a whole lot to do. The mystery itself isn't that much of a mystery, although in a movie like this the actual mystery isn't always quite the point.

Footsteps in the Dark is another fine example of the sort of movie that the Hollywood studio system could churn out back in the day. While it's never going to be remembered as an all-time great, it's definitely a worthy little movie that will entertain viewers even 85 years on.

Ten Little Indians

TCM has a half-night programming block of movies with Christopher Reeve tonight. That means they've got some overnight hours to fill up. The overnight ends with the 1960s adaptation of the Agatha Christie story Ten Little Indians, early tomorrow at 5:00 AM.

This film moves the action from an island to the top of a mountain in the Austrian Alps. The opening shows people arriving in one of those ski-resort villages, each of them getting onto a cable car that takes them to the top of a mountain otherwise only accessible by a dangerously steep trail. (This should make you wonder who wanted to build up here and how they were able to get the building materials here as well as getting a cable car for only one purpose built. But don't think about a plot hole like that.) At the large house where these people are going to be staying for the weekend, they're greeted by the house's two servants, Herr and Frau Grohmann.

As the invited guests meet in the parlour, the introduce themselves to one another as none of them have had a proper British introduction. Indeed, most of the guests are British, except for American pop singer Mike Raven (Fabian) and civil engineer Hugh Lombard (Hugh O'Brian). The others include a secretary, Ann Clyde (Shirley Eaton); acress Ilona Bergen (Daliah Lavi); a doctor, Armstrong (Dennis Price); general Sir John Mandrake (Leo Genn); judge Cannon (Wilfrid Hyde White); and a detective, Blore (Stanley Holloway). They talk and find that they've all been invited by a man named U.N. Owen, but that none of them have ever met this Mr. Owen. Three of them (the Grohmanns and Clyde) were at least hired by Owen, albeit through an agency, while the others you wonder why they showed up.

And then, after dinner, the fun begins. A reel-to-reel tape begins to play with the voice of Mr. Owen, giving some, but not complete, details of how each of the invited guests is guilty of causing the death of one or more people and that they need to pay for this. So all of them are going to pay over the course of the weekend. Not only that, but there's a copy of the old rhyme "Ten Little Indians" in each of the bedrooms and a centerpiece with ten little Indians on the dining room table. Everybody is horrified but also thinks this is nonsense. Mike admits that he is in fact guilty of having driven drunk and killing two people in a hit and run, but that he was already punished by having his driver's license revoked. He then takes a drink, and promptly chokes and dies. That choking is important because it's what the nursery rhyme says happens to the first little Indian.

From there, other characters start dying, which leads the survivors to realize that there really is a crazy Mr. Owen, and eventually reach the conclusion that one of the survivors must be Mr. Owen. But who? And how are the survivors going to figure it out when they're no longer able to trust each other?

Now, if you've read the original Agatha Christie story, you'll know that the story here, as well is in the previous film version from 1945, change the ending. I don't think the Hollywood Production Code would have allowed Christie's original ending. The story here works well enough, although the acting and photography aren't the best. Still, the story makes Ten Little Indians worth a watch.

One note: TCM has put this in a 90-minute slot, with the following movie starting at 6:30 AM. IMDb lists it as 91 minutes, the TCM schedule says 92, while timing it out on my DVR has the running time as about 89:40, although that doesn't include the TCM bumpers before and after the movie. So if you plan to record this you may want to add some padding especially at the ending.

Pat O'Brien grows a moustache

Ever since moving and getting access to reliable high-speed internet two years ago, I've been able to watch the FAST services. Tubi seems to have access to a whole bunch of stuff that wound up in the public domain. One that I hadn't heard of before seeing it in the "classic" movies section was Slightly Honorable.

The movie starts off with the idea that perhaps there's an island somewhere in the South Pacifc that doesn't have corruption, but we're in America, 8,000 miles away. Cut to a shot of the highway commissioner in some state getting killed in a road accident, which is the height of irony because the commissioner was the one more or less responsible for the shoddy state of the roads, what with all the graft in the highway department. At his funeral are newspaper publisher Vincent Cushing (Edward Arnold), who is in on the graft and getting wealthy from it; and attorney John Webb (Pat O'Brien), who wants to eliminate corruption and graft.

Complicating matters is that one of Webb's clients, Alma Brehmer (Claire Dodd) just happens to be the mistress of one Vincent Cushing. Webb and Cushing are brought together again when Alma invites Webb to a swanky party at a nightclub hosted by Cushing. It's also a place for Webb to meet chorine Ann Seymour (Ruth Terry), who thinks of Webb as someone to look up to as well as woo once he saves her from one of the brutes at Cushing's party trying to slap her around because he's jealous of her dancing briefly with Ann. Ann, however, seems mostly to be comic relief, which is surprising considering that Eve Arden is also in the film playing the part of Webb's secretary.

Up to now the movie has been more comedy than drama, although things are about to take a turn. Alma being one of Webb's clients, she wants him to see her about some jewelry Cushing gave her and that she wants appraised so she can have it added to her insurance policy. Webb goes up to her swanky apartment, and finds that somebody's stabbed her! Needless to say, since he's the one to have found her, he's an obvious suspect. Cushing's wife has good reason to worry that perhaps her husband could be held responsible, what with his having an obvious motive of trying to silence poor Alma. So she tries to keep anything bad about Cushing from being released. Worse for Webb is that Cushing's daughter actively wants to implicate Webb. Helping to save Webb is his legal firm partner Sampson (a young Broderick Crawford).

I mentioned above that the movie starts off on a somewhat humorous tone, and in the years before the US got involved in World War II there was quite a cycle of comic murder mystery-type movies. However, Strictly Honorable takes a slightly different tack of being humorous up to the murder and then tacking a much darker turn. It's an odd strategy, and one that doesn't always work. However, the flaws in the movie are also in part to it being a low-budget independently produced movie.

Not that Strictly Honorable is a bad movie; it's more that it's the sort of thing where it's easy to see why it's fallen through the cracks and become largely forgotten.

Murder on the Blackboard

TCM is going through the Hildegarde Withers mysteries as part of the Saturday matinee programming block. There were six of them and Edna May Oliver played Withers in three of them. I know I hadn't recommended Murder on the Blackboard before, as I had never actually sat down to watch it despite the fact that the Withers mysteries show up on TCM often enough and I enjoy the acting of Edna May Oliver. So the last time it aired I recorded it, and now it's getting the Saturday matinee airing, tomorrow (March 15) at 10:15 AM.

As you can guess from the title, the movie is set at a school. Before we get into the mystery aspect of the film, however, we're introduced to the school's janitor, Otto, who seems to live in the basement of the school, probably because he's an alcoholic. We also meet the school's secretary, Miss Davis (Gertrude Michael), who for some reason brings a gun to school. Principal MacFarland (Tully Marshall) tries to put the moves on Miss Davis before seeing the gun; Miss Davis tells him that it belongs to one of the teachers, Louise Halloran, who is also sharing an apartment with Miss Davis. Louise is scared of something.

Miss Davis is in a relationship with one of the teachers, Addison Stevens (Bruce Cabot), who had a failed relationshp with Louise previously. MacFarland has also been trying to put the moves on Louise. And, Lousie and Otto the janitor get into a dispute over her owing him money and having given him a check that bounced. So it doesn't take much to figure out who is going to get bumped off, as well as the fact that we've got a handful of suspects who all had the motive and opportunity to kill the eventual murder victim.

It's only here that we finally meet Hildegarde Withers. She's at school late because she keeping one of the students for being a gossip. That turns out to be fortuitous in a way, in that she's able to find the body of Louise Halloran, who has obviously been murdered. Since she's already solved one murder case in The Penguin Pool Murder, she sends the student to call police detective Oscar Piper (James Gleason), since the two of them worked together on that previous murder case.

The method of killing is kind of nonsensical, and the reveal is particularly silly, but the point of watching the Hildegarde Withers movies isn't so much for the mystery as it is for the comic banter between Withers and Piper, who could each dish it out and who both have their strengths and weaknesses in trying to solve mysteries. Edna May Oliver is in pretty good form here, as is Gleason, and together they much more than the story make the movie something worth watching. These were only B movies, too, so it's not like you're going to be investing too much time in them.

The Sun above evil

Another of the subgenres of films of which I've got multiple sitting on my DVR is adaptations of Agatha Christie movies. Murder on the Orient Express, which I think I blogged about ages ago, changed the nature of such adaptations, turning them into all-star movies filmed in semi-exotic locations the way Airport ushered in the all-star disaster movie, in a stark contrast from MGM's Miss Marple films of the early 1960s with Margaret Rutherford. One of those later all-star adaptions is Evil Under the Sun, which gets an airing on TCM this evening at 10:15 PM.

The movie starts off with what seem like two unrelated scenes, although the second one is more in line with the main action of the story. First, somewhere in northern England, a dead body is found. The police are notified and a determination is made as to the time of death of the female victim, who was clearly strangled to death. We then move to London, where we meet Hercule Poirot (Peter Ustinov) when he shows up at an insurance company. He just did one job for them, and is asked to appraise a diamond which its owner, Sir Horace (Colin Blakeley) wants insured for £50,000. Poirot immediately identifies it as paste, but it's not Sir Horace who's trying to fleece the company. He had given a valuable diamond to his old girlfriend Arlena Marshall; when she broke up with him she gave him a replica.

Arlena (played by Diana Rigg) is a retired actress who is going to be staying at a resort in the Balkan seaside nation of Tyrania; the resort is located on an island gifted to the former Queen of Tyrania, Daphne (Maggie Smith). Hercule should go there to meet up with Arlena and hopefully find the diamond.

Somehow, everybody else who shows up at the resort seems to have a connection to Arelna, who is there with her husband and perpetually ticked-off step-daughter, the step-daughter being ticked off because New Mom treats her badly. There's Rex Brewster (Roddy McDowall), who has been writing an unapproved biography of Arlena that he hopes she'll change her mind and let be published. Odell Gardener (James Mason) is a Broadway producer who was burned when Arlena faked illness to get out of a show. He'd like to get her back on stage, and is there with his long-suffering wife Myra (Sylvia Miles). Rounding up the crowd is Patrick Redfern (Nicholas Clay). He's married to Christine (Jane Birkin), but having an affair with Arlena.

So of course everyone bickers, but it takes a surprisingly long time to figure out which one of them is going to wind up dead so that we can have a murder for Hercule Poirot to solve. (At least we can rule out Poirot himself as the victim.) Eventually, the victim is revealed to be Arlena, and when she's found dead, Poirot is asked to investigate since it's the sort of thing Daphne, and Tyrania in general, would like to handle quietly. Poirot investigates, and everybody seems to have a motive for killing Arlena, but an alibi, or at least a series of interlocking alibis, with the exception of Odell, who is proud not to have an alibi. But then things start to fall apart, and Poirot thinks he can solve the case....

Evil Under the Sun is a movie that fits in well with the cycle of Agatha Christie movies that started with Murder on the Orient Express. Like the disaster movie genre, earlier entries are often the best, with later entries decreasing in quality as producers tried to repeat the formula that caught lightning in a bottle; to do so seemed to require more stars and more exotic locations. Evil Under the Sun is certainly not as good as Murder on the Orient Express, but it's entertaining enough, and the sort of thing that's suitable for those times when you want to sit back and watch something that's not overly challenging.

Thirty Minus Eight

The second of the movies that are on my DVR and coming up on TCM is one that they showed in August as part of Jeanne Crain's day in Summer Under the Stars: Twenty Plus Two. That airing comes up tomorrow, September 22, at 6:00 AM.

Crain isn't the star here although I think she's the highest-billed woman in the cast. The lead is David Janssen, playing Tom Alder. But we don't see him for a few minutes. The movie opens up with a scene at the apartment/office of one Julia Joliet. She runs a service which handles fan mail for movie stars; I assume fans would write to a postal drop and then a service like this would pick up the mail and do whatever the agent and star want done with it. But Joliet's real purpose in the movie is to get murdered.

That's where Alder comes in. He's not the murderer; instead, he's called by one of his police detective friends to look at the case (this rather seems like a plot hole to me). Surprisingly, the place looks like the police haven't gone over it yet. And Alder isn't a police detective. Indeed, he doesn't even like to think of himself as a private detective. Instead, he's the sort of person who goes out and finds missing heirs, which really is detective work but sounds classier. All of this is likely to keep the name of one of Joliet's clients, Leroy Dane (Brad Dexter), out of the papers. And when Alder goes through Joliet's files, he finds some things that he thinks would pertain to a famous missing persons case from a dozen years earler, that of wealthy Doris Delaney.

Indeed, it was reading about the Delaney case years back in a magazine article that gave Alder the idea to become this sort of investigator. And he's about to get another case, as one Jacques Pleschette (Jacques Aubuchon), son of a French-Canadian farmer who emigrated to North Dakota, wants Alder to look for his kid brother Auguste. Searches of military records reveal that there's some weird stuff going on, and one or multiple people is being highly dishonest.

Now if you're still wondering how Jeanne Crain comes into all of this, that's a good question. She doesn't really; instead she plays Linda Foster, a woman Alder had met as she was starting as an undergrad at UCLA and he was about to start law school. Alder didn't become a lawyer because the US got involved in Korea and Alder got his letter from Uncle Sam. That's part of where the closest to a female lead also gets involved. Dina Merrill plays Nicki Kovacs. We first see her as Alder is flying to New York and she's a passenger on the same plane as him. Alder thinks she looks familiar, and he's right. A decade earlier, after he got demobbed and was in Tokyo awaiting transport back to the States, he spent an evening at a taxi dance-type place where Nicki was working, having wanted to get away from the States because.... Well, they spent the evening together and Nicki was a perfect lady to Alder, who had no interest in anything sexual.

Everything eventually comes together for a finale, but before that I should probably mention a couple of cameos. Agnes Moorehead gets one scene as Doris Delaney's mother, who has remained out of the public eye all those years Doris has been missing, but for whatever reason lets this one private investigator talk to her. And William Demarest shows up as an alcoholic journalist. Both of them steal their scenes, unsurprisingly. Oh, there's a third cameo, but not from someone who succeeded as an actor. When Alder is at the taxi dance place, an obnoxious sailor with a bunch of tickets around his neck wants to dance all night with Nicki. IMDb suggests this is a young Robert Osborne, but the voice didn't sound right. Judge for yourself.

Twenty Plus Two isn't a terrible movie, but because of the convoluted plot it certainly isn't great either. To be honest, to me it felt more like the sort of thing that in the 1970s or 1980s would have been maybe a TV movie of the week. Or, possibly more likely, one of those two-hour movies designed to be a test pilot for a possible TV series. (I'm reminded of the one-season TV series Finder of Lost Loves that I used in the February 2020 TV edition of the old Thursday Movie Picks blogathon.) Such a TV show would have been sponsored by United Airlines, considering how many shots show their planes taking off and landing.

David Janssen does OK; Dina Merrill and especially Jeanne Crain are misused; and, as I mentioned, Moorehead and Demarest steal the show. But even with all that, Twenty Plus Two deserves one watch.

Murder, but not my sweet

Robert Mitchum was TCM's Star of the Month back in January, and one of his movies I haven't gotten around to reviewing yet is Farewell, My Lovely. Recently, I finally watched it, so now I can do the review on it.

The movie is based Raymond Chandler's book of the same name, which had already been turned into a movie once before by a major studio, but under the title Murder, My Sweet. Mitchum stars as Chandler's detective Philip Marlowe, here in 1941 Los Angeles, with the passage of time marked by Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak. Other than that, there's not much for Marlowe to look forward to, as he's stuck doing crappy cases finding runaway children or being harassed by the police who want information about one or another case they're investigating.

One night Marlowe finds a runaway teenaged girl working as a taxi dancer. Outside the joint just after getting his money, he's approached by a very large man, "Moose" Malloy (Jack O'Halloran). Moose has just been released from prison after serving a seven-year stretch, and the first thing he did was to go to the nightclub where his old girlfriend Velma worked, wanting to see her again. Seven years is a long time, and in the intervening years the place has changed to one serving a black clientele. So perhaps a private dick like Marlowe can help find Velma.

The new owners of the club, which had been named "Florian's" after the old owner, Jessie Halsted Florian (Sylvia Miles), suggest Marlowe go to the rooming house across the street since someone there might remember the old place. That is indeed the case, and the man suggests where to find Florian and to bring bourbon because she's a hopless drunk now. Jessie gives Marlowe a picture of Velma, and it looks like the case isn't going to be that difficult to solve.

Of course, we're only about a quarter of the way in to the movie, so it should be obvious that there's going to be a catch. The Velma in the photograph is not Velma at all, but a different woman who is now in a sanatorium. The real Velma is going to be much more elusive to find, and much more dangerous. Another guy calls up Marlowe for assistance, but that job goes bad, and the police pick up Marlowe telling him to stop looking for Velma, and that Malloy has gone to Mexico, which I'd think is a parole violation.

But Marlowe wants more information on the other man who hired him, since that guy got murdered on the job he hired Marlowe for while Marlowe was knocked out by unknown assailants. As he continues to poke around, he finds that things are complicated, as he's dealing with some very powerful people. No wonder one of them knocked him unconscious.

I have to admit that I haven't seen Murder, My Sweet in its entirety. But having The Big Sleep and Lady in the Lake, I should point out that at least Farewell, My Lovely isn't quite as convoluted as those other two, particularly The Big Sleep (which I find terribly overrated anyway). The movie has nice atmosphere, and Mitchum is good as the world-weary Marlowe who's getting too old to keep doin this job but doesn't know what else to do.

If you haven't seen Farewell, My Lovely before, it's definitely worth watching.

Backfire

Gordon MacRae is the honoree today in Summer Under the Stars. MacRae is probably better known for his musicals, but I don't think I've got any of his musicals on my DVR. The one movie of his that I do have on my DVR, however, isn't getting an airing on TCM tomorrow. That movie is Backfire, but I watched it anyway in order to do a post on it for MacRae's day tomorrow.

The movie opens up at a veterans' hospital in the Los Angeles area in November 1948. Steve Connolly (Edmond O'Brien) shows up, and asks one of the nurses, Julie Benson (Virginia Mayo), about one of the patients, Bob Corey (Gordon MacRae). Bob is in the hospital undergoing a series of surgeries for the injuries that he suffered during the war. Bob and Steve served together, and they had thought about going into some sort of enterprise together after the war, although Bob's injuries have put a dent in those plans. Still, Steve has been trying to get a VA loan with the intention to start a ranch in Arizona, although that sort of work is probably not so appropriate for Bob right now.

Fast-forward six weeks, to Christmastime. Bob is looking forward to seeing Steve again; in fact, he's supposed to show up both to celebrate the holiday with Bob as well as to keep Bob apprised of their business plans after Bob gets out of the hospital. Julie informs Bob, however, that she hasn't been able to get a hold of Steve at the hotel where he was supposed to be staying. Bob gives Julie a Christmas present to show his love for her, before Julie gives him a sedative to sleep.

The sedative produces delirium, and later that evening a woman comes into the room. Bob obviously thinks it's Julie, but when he's able to focus -- or thinks that he's able to focus -- he finds a mysterious stranger who isn't Julie, telling him that Steve has been in a horrible car accident and that, like Bob, shattered his spine, but wants to die. This strange woman supposedly knew Steve and gives Bob a pad on which she's written down her address, but when he wakes up the next morning nobody has any records of Bob having had a visitor overnight.

Bob finally gets out of the hospital, and is immediately picked up by the police, who take him to the homicide bureau. Now, Bob has a pretty darn good alibi in that he was in that VA hospital. Instead, the police detective Garcia (Ed Begley) wants to know what Bob knows about Steve. Before the war, Steve was a gambler who had run-ins with the law although he never went to prison; come December 7, 1941, Steve figured this would be a good time to start a new life. But he could easily have gone back to his old ways after the war. Worse, a well-known profesional gambler, Solly Blayne, has been killed, and Steve still had some contact with him, which is why he's a natural suspect. Well, that and he's gone missing.

In a totally unsurprising plot twist that would never work in the real world, Bob decides he's going to do an investigation himself and find out who the real killer was. To do that, he's going to have to find Steve first, or perhaps that mysterious woman who may or may not have visited. The murder was before Bob was informed of the accident, so Steve wouldn't have the sort of alibi Bob had. But you'd think that if Steve had been seriously injured, the authorities would have some record of the accident. Bob eventually gets help from Julie too, and their relationship is going to deepen as they try to clear Steve's name together....

Backfire is another movie that's very much of its genre. It's not a bad movie, but the plot really does strain credulity, and the movie doesn't do anything groundbreaking. A pleasant enough time-passer for a rainy day, and I don't feel like I wasted my time watchng it, but there's certainly better stuff out there.

Murder By Death

Quite a fair bit of Neil Simon's work has been turned into Hollywood movies, although it should be added that he wrote several screenplays directly for the screen. One of the latter, as far as I can tell, is the movie Murder by Death, which has been sitting on my DVR for several months now.

The movie starts off with an unseen hand signing the name Lionel Twain (when we eventually see Lionel, he's played by Truman Capote) to a bunch of invitations. These go out to, in order:

Dick and Dora Charleston (David Niven and Maggie Smith respctively), and Pet Terrier in New York;
Inspector Sidney Wang (Peter Sellers), in Catalina;
Monsieur Milo Perrier (James Coco), Brussels;
Mr. Sam Diamond (peter Falk), San Francisco; and
Miss Jessica Marbles (Elsa Lanchester), Sussex, England.

Considering the names of these characters, and the title of the movie, it doesn't take much to figure out that this is going to be a spoof of the detective story/movie genre. Lionel then calls in his bulter Jamessir Bensonmum (Alec Guinness), who is blind, to stamp and deliver the letters. Although one of the jokes is that his stamps miss the letters, the characters all get their invitations, as the next scenes show the various characters trying to make their way to the house. Everybody comes more or less in pairs, as the Charlestons come togther; Wang comes with adopted #3 son Willie (Richard Narita); Milo has a chauffeur Marcel (James Cromwell); Diamond has his secretary Tess (Eileen Brennan); and Miss Marbles has an exceedingly elderly nurse, Miss Withers (Estelle Winwood).

They all get to the house in the thick fog, where they've ostensibly been invited for dinner cooked by a mute maid/cook (Nancy Walker). Of course, once again considering the title, we can guess that's not the real reason Twain invited everybody. Indeed, at dinner he tells them that he knows they're supposedly great detectives, but he's the greatest criminologist of them all. He's going to prove it by there being a murder committed at the house that they will be unable to solve because the mystery behind the murder is so diabolical that only a real mastermind can solve it And if any of them can, they'll win a million bucks. Yeah right.

But wouldn't you know it, the great detectives of the world eventually find a dead body, and one that certainly looks like it's been murdered. And they're in a stereotypically old dark house, so it may threaten them if they split up. Then again, it's not as if they're going to be able to solve it just sitting there together. And there's that big money for solving it.

To make things more complicated, when each of the pairs go to their bedrooms for the night, each of them finds they're also the target of a murder attempt in a way that's as stereotypical but also cinematic as the old dark house. Eventually each of them comes up with their own theory on whodunit and why, but who is right?

Murder by Death is another of those movies where it's very easy to see why everybody involved with it would want to make it. The idea of spoofing all of these literary/cinematic detectives is appealing. Add in the comic writing of Neil Simon, and there's a lot that most people are going to find hilarious.

To me, I have to admit there was a bit of an air of trying just a little too hard. Not that Murder by Death is a bad movie at all; it's more that at times the parody feels way too broad, and therefore not quite as funny as it ought to be. Still, most people are probably going to like this more than I did (and it's certainly not that I didn't like it), so it's absolutely worth watching.

Lake Around the Lady

I've mentioned the Blind Spot blogathon before, where a blogger picks a dozen well-known movies they've not actually seen before and blogs about them over the course of the year. I haven't participated, largely because I don't know what movies I'm going to be watching over an entire year. But one of the movies that would have been a blind spot for me until now was the 1940s version of Lady in the Lake. I finally recorded it it last time it was on TCM, and since it's going to be on TCM again tomorrow, April 20, at 4:30 PM, I recently watched it in order to do a post on it.

Lady in the Lake is a hard movie to do a synopsis on, largely because the plot is so convoluted, thank you very much Raymond Chandler. Raymond Chandler's detective Phillip Marlowe is played here by Robert Montgomery, at least the few times you see him. We do see Marlowe giving the audience a bit of a prologue right at the top of the film, and then he tells us about how he wrote a story based on a case of a lady who drowned in a lake that may have been suicide, but was more likely murder.

As part of trying to flog the story, Marlowe goes to see Adrienne Fromsett (Audrey Totter), a publisher at a company run by Mr. Kingsby (Leon Ames). However, Adrienne's interest isn't really in Marlowe's story, but about his day job as a private investigator. Kingsby's wife has left him, ostensibly going to Mexico to seek a divorce, with some suggestion that Mrs. Kingsby is going to marry some guy named Lavery. Could Marlowe find out what's really going on?

The first indication that there's a problem comes at Lavery's place when, after a brief conversation in which Lavery insists he knows nothing about what's going on, he asks Marlowe if he has the time, despite there being a mantel clock in the room. This is really just an excuse to punch Marlowe out and pour alcohol on him, making him appear drunk like they do to Cary Grant in North by Northwest. That brings Marlowe into contact with the police, notably Lt. DeGarmot (Lloyd Nolan), who is investigating a bunch of the same people, but for a totally different reason.

Apparently, there really was a lady in a lake, with that lake being on a property owned by none other than Kingsby. There's some thought that the dead body might be the wife of Kingsby's caretaker, and Marlowe gets caught up in a murder investigation alongside the cops, who seem decidedly unhappy to have him on the case as well. Likewise, none of the people being investigated seem happy either. But who killed whom?

Part of the problem with Lady in the Lake is that the movie is pretty convoluted, although at least that's not as severe a problem as with another famous movie filmed from a Chandler book, The Big Sleep, which is notorious for how its plot makes little sense. The much bigger problem is the reason the movie is still so well-known today, and that's its direction. Robert Montgomery came up with the intriguing idea of having the entire movie be told from Marlowe's point of view. And I don't just mean narration here; I mean that for almost the entire movie, it's shot as though we're looking through Marlowe's eyes.

Unfortunately, that doesn't work here, in part because the movie cameras in use in the 1940s weren't really capable of pulling off such a thing. Nowadays, when we have cheap GoPros and similar small camera that can be worn to give off a POV, it might work. And if the technique were being used as a brief diversion, especially if this were for comic effect, it might not be so bad. But 100 minutes of a very slow, clunky camera trying to do POV? Oh heavens no.

Still, Lady in the Lake is another one of those movies you probably need to see for yourself to see just why the movie goes wrong.

If it's awful it's better

Recently I was looking through the streaming movie channels on my Roku box, and Cinevault Classics was about to show something that looked interesting, and that I hadn't heard of before, so I sat down to watch it. That movie was the 1958 version of The Whole Truth, a title common enough that there are other movies with the same title and completely different plots.

Stewart Grainger, back in his native Britain more or less, is the nominal star here. He plays Max Poulton, a movie producer whose marriage to his wife Carol (Donna Reed) is hitting a bit of a rough patch. That's in part because his work has him away from home a lot, with the current movie he's working on having him on the French Riviera, or what a British studio's backlot thought could pass for the French Riviera. That movie stars Italian actress Gina Bertini (Gianna Maria Bertale), and because they're both away from home, they spend some time together.

That time together blossoms into something a little more, but of course Max is married, and he's been thinking about trying to patch up his relationship with Carol. Gina, for her part, now has information she could use to blackmail Max, information that might help her advance her career. Max goes to her apartment hotel where she's staying during shooting, to try to deal with this headache. It leads to the sort of heated verbal dispute that the folks in the next apartment would be able to hear, and they'll definitely see Max coming and going.

Max returns home where his wife is hosting a soirée, and coming to that party is an uninvited guest, Carliss (George Sanders). Carliss wants to see Max alone, and informs him that he's from Scotland Yard and that, much more distressingly, Gina has been found stabbed to death! Carliss is going to be working with the French authorities, and starts to pump Max for information about when he last saw Gina and the like.

After the conversation, Max is understandably worried, since the evidence might point to him, even though he's presenting himself to the viewing audience as completely innocent of Gina's murder. But some of the evidence is all the stuff he's left at Gina's place. He goes there to retrieve it so that the police won't find it, and when he returns home, he finds among the guests at the party... Gina, very much not dead!

Max talks to Gina, and we learn that Gina is actually Mrs. Carliss, and that their marriage is estranged in part because her being an actress with some public flings has been bad for her husband's career as a publisher of religious textbooks. (Whatever, although he needs to be in some career where having a straying wife would be very bad PR.) This leads Max to suspect Corliss is lying about a lot. But then Gina winds up being murdered, for real this time, with the body being found in Max's car! Is Max really guilty, or did Carliss do it?

The Whole Truth isn't bad, but the whole thing feels like the sort of material that, in a later generation, would have been a TV movie of the week. In fact, reading about it reveals that the material was originally written as a teleplay for the BBC when they were this sort of live drama the way that US shows like Playhouse 90 or the like were putting on live teleplays. The material then got worked into a stage play, from which the resulting movie was lifted.

Everybody does as well as they can with the material, but, as I said above, it feels kind of lacking. This especially for poor Donna Reed, who doesn't have much to do at all. The casting of George Sanders also sets off a metaphorical flashing red light over him, as if to indicate "Bad guy! Bad guy! Bad guy!"

So, if you're looking through the Cinevault Classic listings and see this one come up again, definitely give it a chance, even if it's by no means the greatest thing any of the cast did.

1:08 Courage

A have a tendency to record the movies that Eddie Muller picks for Noir Alley in part because of the likelihood they'll be interesting, and in part for Eddie's presentation of the movies. One that I hadn't seen before was Two O'Clock Courage, which ran several months back. I've finally gotten around to watching it, so now it's time for the review.

The movie opens with a man on a corner of two city streets at night, with a cut on his head from which he's bleeding. He seems a bit out of it and, in trying to cross the street, is nearly run down by a taxi. The driver, Patty Mitchell (Ann Rutherford), gets out, and realizes that there's something wrong with this man. This becomes even more obvious when we learn that the man (Tom Conway) is an amnesiac! (As Eddie mentioned, amnesia seems a way overused plot device in noirs, although Two O'Clock Courage is really more of a mystery than a noir.)

To help the man figure out who he is, Patty has him look through his pockets; perhaps he's got some ID or something that will help jog his memory as to who he is. The somethings suggest that his initials might be D and R, and that he's been to the Regency Hotel. That's not much, so Patty offers to take the man to a police station, where they're more likely to be able to help. However, when they get to the local police precinct, they see someone hawking a newspaper. The screaming headline announces the murder of one Robert Dilling, famous theater producer. The story gives a description of a possible suspect, and that description fits our amnesiac fairly well!

Patty decides to do something that gives us a movie. If she just turned the man over to police, we wouldn't have much of a movie, so she suggests that the man get out of town. He feels he has to prove his innocence, so stays in town, and she decides to spend her shift helping the man as the two of them go about trying to solve the mystery. It seems like a daft idea, should cost Patty a day's pay at least since she's not picking up any fares, and ought to get her charged with aiding and abetting or obstruction of justice. But as I said, we wouldn't have a movie otherwise.

Needless to say, it's not too long before Patty and the amnesiac are found by others, investigating police detective Brenner (Emory Parnell) and reporter Al Haley (Richard Lane). Patty makes matters worse for her and her companion by making up a giant lie about the two of them having just gotten married and him being Clarence Smith, a reporter from Dayton who just stumbled on his case and decided to mix business with pleasure. But at least it's a way not to get thrown off the case.

The murder mystery gets ever more complicated, although at least our amnesiac is able to discover his identity halfway through the movie, one Ted Allison. Ted was in town over a play that a now deceased man (not the murder victim) wrote, and which is now the subject of a royalty dispute. Perhaps all of that might have had something to do with the murder. But who killed Dilling, and why? And was it Allison?

To be honest, you probably shouldn't think too hard to try to solve the murder mystery in Two O'Clock Courage. It's convoluted, and not particularly realistic. The movie straddles the line between post-war noirs with the amnesia (hence why Eddie selected this one for Noir Alley and the comedic murder mysteries that had been a big thing in the late 1930s and early 1940s. (The movie was released in mid-1945.) Being a B movie at only 68 minutes, Two O'Clock Courage doesn't try too hard, but that's something that really works in the movie's favor. It's the sort of thing you should sit back and relax with, rather than the closer attention that prestige movies demanded.

Tom Conway is good in his role; it's a shame that he didn't become quite as succesful as his brother George Sanders. Ann Rutherford also does well. And well down the credits as Helen, one of the beautiful young things Allison knows at the Regency, is a woman credited as Bettejane Greer. If you didn't guess it from the opening credits, that is indeed a young Jane Greer, who would go on to at least one big thing with Out of the Past.

Two O'Clock Courage is definitely worth watching if you can find it.

Don't look for the Titanic

The comic mystery, especially with a husband and wife more or less solving the case together, was a thing back in the 1930s and 1940s, starting with The Thin Man and not really losing steam until World War II changed public tastes. A movie from later in the cycle was A Night to Remember.

This time out, the married couple is played by Brian Aherne and Loretta Young. Aherne plays Jeff Troy, a mystery writer, while Loretta Young is wife Nancy. As the movie opens, Nancy has just rented out a basement apartment in Greenwich Village which looks like it could have been rented by Ruth and Eileen from My Sister Eileen, both movies having been made at Columbia. Nancy has picked this apartment because she thinks it might give Jeff some ideas. This being Greenwich Village, there are bound to be a bunch of quirky people living in the building.

The couple gets to the apartment early, before the electric has even been turned on or anything has been delivered. That serves as a plot device for the apartment to be empty and dark for the first several scenes, with some humor about bumps in the night and somewhat. It also gives an excuse for the couple to leave the apartment long enough to get dinner, and for someone else to come into the apartment while they're at dinner.

While they're out, they find a couple of things. One is Polly Franklin (Lee Patrick), who owns the restaurant next door; she also lives in the building they do. But they also overhear a guy on the telephone making a call to meet somebody. The thing is that the meeting location is in the basement apartment they've rented. They get home and find some strange things have gone on while they've been out. But that's not the strangest thing of all.

The next morning, the police come knocking on the door saying there was a complaint of somebody sunbathing out in the courtyard. That's a euphemism, as it's actually a murder victim, and the reveal is done in such a way that Jeff and Nancy each believe that it was their spouse who died. In fact, it's the guy they overheard in the restaurant saying to meet in the basement apartment.

So now there's a murder case. And pretty much anybody who lives in the building could be a suspect. Jeff, being a mystery writer, starts investigating, and we fairly quickly hear the various residents conspiring together. Obviously they all know something about the dead guy, and they all perceive that Jeff might be a danger. But who did it, and why?

I have to admit that this A Night to Remember isn't my favorite of the films in this husband-and-wife murder-mystery genre. I think it's because the plot doesn't really work in the sense that the clues don't fit together in a satisfying way, while Jeff solves the case much too quickly. I can see why a movie like this got made, however. With World War II going on and with the genre having been popular for several years, why not another comic mystery to try to keep the homefront entertained opposite all that tough news going on in real life? It's just a shame that the movie doesn't quite gel.

The Preview Murder Mystery

TCM ran a month-long spotlight on B movies back in July, and as I've mentioned, I recorded a bunch of the movies they showed as part of the spotlight. So now it's time for another of those movies. This time out, it's The Preview Murder Mystery, which really is a mystery.

The movie starts off as a movie-within-a-movie, The Song of Toreador is wrapping production. Starring Neil Dubeck (Rod La Rocque) and Claire Woodward (Gail Patrick). It's a remake of a film from the studio's silent days, but unfortunately, the silent movie's star, Edwin Strange, is not around to see the remake. He disappeared just as movies were transitioning from silents to sound, and he's presumed dead. Meanwhile, there's been some debate over whether or not the studio should even be remaking the old silents.

So it's a stressful shoot, and it's only about to become more stressful as Neil receives a letter with a death thread. We soon learn that this isn't the first death threat he's received, and they all inform him that he's never going to live to see the success of Song of the Toreador. He's understandably jittery about it all. There's also the question of what to do about these death threats. Neil's been telling everyone at the studio about them, but the press have kept the story under wraps at the request of the studio bosses. This even though PR people like Johnny Morgan (Reginald Denny) think that if the story went public, it would be tremendous publicity for the new film.

Needless to say, Neil isn't thrilled about going to the preview, as he'd rather stay in hiding. But he does go into the theatre, sitting next to his co-star and the director, E. Gordon Smith (Ian Keith), who is also married to Claire. The preview is a smashing success. But, at the very end of the preview, it's discovered that Neil has dropped dead during the showing! It's an overdose of some narcotic, which brings up the question of whether it's suicide (possible but not likely), accidental overdose (which I think would be the most likely in real life), or murder. Since I'm reviewing The Preview Murder Mystery, as you can guess everybody soon thinks it might be murder.

And it's fairly quickly established that there are lots of possible suspects, starting with the director who could easily be portrayed as being jealous of the relationship between his wife and Dubeck considering the love scenes they had in Song of the Toreador. Things quickly go from bad to worse when somebody gets shot for real on the set of Claire's next movie due to real ammo being put in the prop gun. (Alec Baldwin is not in the movie.) The police investigating the murder order the lockdown of the entire studio, with nobody getting out since the murderer must still be on the lot.

It's at this point that the movie really becomes fun, as we get to see the Paramount back lot and a lot of Hollywood inside jokes if you will at the way studios were making films in the 1930s. The mystery itself isn't the greatest thing in the world; it's the atmosphere behind the mystery that makes this movie so much fun to watch. That and the movie running at breakneck speed.

But the fact that The Preview Murder Mystery was a B movie, and made in the mid-1930s at Paramount so that the rights were sold to Universal, that combine to make it a movie that's largely been forgotten. Indeed, I had never heard of the movie before seeing it show up in TCM's B-movie spotlight. That's a shame. It's the sort of movie that probably should have gotten a release on some box set of lesser-known content in the days when studios were still putting out box sets. The Preview Murder Mystery is absolutely worth watching. It's a hell of a lot of fun.

Murder in the Private Car

Back in July, I think, TCM ran a spotlight on B movies. I recorded a whole bunch of them, not having seen a lot of their selections. Another one that was new to me despite it being an MGM movie was Murder in the Private Car. Having recorded it, I finally got around to watching it and now I can do the review on it here.

May Carlisle plays Ruth Raymond, who works the switchboard at a stock brokerage in Los Angeles, in the days when it wasn't easy for people to buy stocks, especially if they weren't in New York. No electronc trading or mutual funds. She works with her best friend Georgia (Una Merkel), and has a boyfriend John who loves her. One day, a strange guy walks into the office where the switchboard operators work. Not long after that, Ruth is called into her boss' office.

It turns out that she's not in trouble at all. In fact, Ruth is now at the heart of a mystery. Luke Carson (Berton Churchill) is a railway magnate who many years ago lost his daughter when she was kidnapped by his brother (ie. the young girl's uncle). Ruth always thought she was an orphan after her dad died young, but somehow an old fingerprint of the little girl who was kidnapped survived, and Ruth's fingerprint matches that one. Ruth being confirmed as the biological daughter of a titan of business, she's in line to become a very wealthy woman.

However, a lot of people know that she's set to become wealthy. Indeed, some of them have plans to kidnap her again, although we don't know who's behind it. Indeed, she's picked up by a car that's trying to kidnap her, but that car is followed by a taxi, and who is the passenger in the taxi but one Godfrey Scott (Charles Ruggles). We already saw Godfrey, in that opening scene when he was talking to Ruth and Georgia. Godfrey is a detective, but not one who solves crime; instead, he focuses on preventing crime from happening in the first place, and he's the one who foiled the first kidnapping attempt on Ruth.

We then get a scene of the telegraph agency receiving a telegraph for Ruth from her biological father, saying he'll be coming to Los Angeles to get her. But somebody intercepts that telegram, and replaces it with one saying that Mr. Carson will be putting a special car, the private car of the title, on a train from Los Angeles bound for New York. So we already know that something is going to happen on that train, although of course Ruth and her friends don't.

Sure enough, the lights go out and a murder takes place, along with a bunch of other mysterious happenings of the sort you'd see in the old Scooby-Doo cartoons. Who's causing them, and why? Will Ruth get to meet her father and inherit the money? Will she and John be able to live happily ever after?

This being a B movie, Murder in the Private Car is breezy and extremely fast-paced. Sure, it's not completely well developed, but these B movies generally weren't since they had to be finished quickly. It is, however, quite a bit of fun, and definitely worth watching if you get the chance to see it.