Miss Pinkerton

Not too long ago, I mentioned the movie While the Patient Slept. As part of Joan Blondell's turn as TCM's Star of the Month, I recorded Miss Pinkerton, a movie that bears a passing resemblance.

Joan Blondell plays Miss Adams, a nurse at the city hospital who frankly finds her job growing boring. It's always the same old same old with nothing ever happening, except to the patients. Thankfully, she's about to get a bit of change in her life. A wealthy woman in one of those big mansions, Julia Mitchell (Elizabeth Patterson), faints when she sees one of her young relatives apparently shot himself. With Julia in shock, she needs a nurse to look after her, and Adams' boss thinks Julia is perfect!

Of course, there's a bigger reason for Adams to be there. The police are investigating since there's a good probability of murder what with the dead guy having had a substantial insurance policy. Inspector Patten (George Brent) wants more eyes in the house, but nobody's going to act other than proper with the police around. So Patten gets Adams to be a sort of acting detective, on whom he bestows the title Miss Pinkerton. Her job besides looking after Julia will be to try to do what she can to gather clues for Patten.

It should be unsurprising that in this sort of house there's all sorts of strange characters. The doctor himself (C. Henry Gordon) seems a bit off at times, while the butler Hugo (John Wray) keeps acting suspiciously, just so viewers will suspect him as a suspect. There's the maid Mary (Blanche Friderici), a lawyer, and then halfway in, a young woman Paula (Ruth Hall) who claims to have been married to the dead guy although she's carrying on a relationship with another guy. She's also trying to get away from Miss Pinkerton to snoop around the house despite our nurse's sticking her head out to let Paula in the house.

So there's a bit of a convoluted mystery here, and in many ways it really doesn't matter who did it or even if it was suicide. Instead, this is a bit more for Joan Blondell's performance, and her interactions with George Brent. In that regard, it's OK, although some people will probably want a bit more of a story, or at least one that makes sense.

Miss Pinkerton is available on one of the Warner Archives' Forbidden Hollywood box sets, although as far as those sets' pre-Code sensibilities goes, this is one that more than a lot of the other movies could have been made after 1934 without much change. Not that there's anything wrong with that; just that it doesn't feel all that much like what one thinks of when one thinks "pre-Code".