The Thin Man Goes Home

Myrna Loy is the Star of the Month on TCM for October, presumably because of her well-known association with the horror genre that's appropriate for Halloween. Or maybe not. Anyhow, six of her movies were part of the Thin Man series with Willam Powell, and unsurprisingly TCM are showing all six of them in a row, tonight in prime time. The fifth movie in the series, The Thin Man Goes Home, comes up overnight at 3:30 AM.

Nick Charles (William Powell again) grew up in a typical-for-Hollywood small town called Sycamore Springs, where his father Bertram (Harry Davenport) is a prominent research doctor hoping to get the money to build a new hospital with more laboratory space for him. You'd think Dr. Bertram would be old enough to retire, but he still works and his wife (Lucile Watson) is alive, the two of them living with maid Hilda who seems obnoxiously nervous all the time.

Nick and Nora (Myrna Loy, again) are returning with Asta, but not with their son who was conceived at the end of the second or third movie, the excuse being that the son is in kindergarten and Nick and Nora don't want to disturb that. Just running off and leaving him with the hired help, is, however, perfectly OK apparently. Nick has father issues, or perhaps it's Dad who has Nick issues, as Dad isn't too happy about Nick's drinking and being a police detective. But in one of this film's running jokes, Nick has given up drinking for the duration, since the film was made in 1944 at the height of World War II.

And with the war on, it's unsurprising that the murder that Nick winds up investigating is going to involve the war effort, although that's not totally revealed until the end of the film. The first night Nick and Nora are in Sycamore Springs, a man shows up at the house and wants to see Nick, only to get shot for his troubles. Obviously not by Nick, although that might make for a more interesting movie. The man in question is Peter Berton, a young but not very talented artist. In fact, Nora buys one of Berton's paintings not knowing it's by the guy who got shot in Dr. Charles' living room.

As you might guess, there are several suspects. Berton was seeing a young woman, Laura Ronson (Gloria DeHaven) although Laura's father Sam (Minor Watson) doesn't exactly like Peter as a suitable romantic match for Laura. Meanwhile, when Nick goes to the auto camp where Peter is staying to investigate Peter's death, he gets hit over the head by Crazy Mary (Anne Revere). He doesn't seem to suffer much of a concussion, however. Then there's Crump (Donald Meek), the art store owner who deals Berton's paintings, as well as the Draques, who had purchased one of Berton's paintings. There's a fairly convoluted mystery that Nick solves, bringing together all of the suspects for the final reveal that this time is a bit self-referential as Nora explains to the local police how Nick brings everyone together and how these reveals generally go.

I found The Thin Man Goes Home a rather weak entry in the series. Part of it is that the murder doesn't happen until a third of the way into the movie, and it seems unlikely that anybody would be able to put all the pieces together to solve this one. The humor isn't as funny as you might expect from a Thin Man movie, with the portion before Nick and Nora arrive in Sycamore Springs as well as every scene involving Hilda being particular weak points.

Still, the movie was a success because fans were so happy to see Nick and Nora Charles back together, and it is still William Powell and Myrna Loy.

Bedside

A movie that for some reason I thought I had already written a post on that doesn't seem to be showing up either in a search of the blog, or a file serach on either of my systems, is Bedside, which seems a bit of a surprise to me since I only saw the movie a few months back and would have written up the post then. So now I'm making certain I've written up that post and scheduled it on the blog.

Warren William stars as Bob Brown. He's a man who'd like to be a doctor and by all accounts he has a promising knowledge of medicine. But somewhere along the way he ran out of money to finish medical school without which he can't get that license. So instead of practicing medicine as a doctor, he's working as an X-ray technician in a clinic along with his girlfriend, the nurse Caroline Grant (Jean Muir). Caroline, for her part, is responsible and has saved up some money, and is willing to help Bob complete his medical school education. Presumably they'd get married afterwards and be able to live a secure life.

But Bob isn't the most responsible person, and the same issues that caused him to drop out of medical school the first time screw up this second attempt to finish medical school. Bob likes to drink and, worse, gamble, with the result that he gambles away the money he should be using on medical school. How's he going to tell his girlfriend that he's been stupid and lost all of the money that was supposed to go to something important?

Well, something happens that's a great stroke of luck for Bob. Working at another of those clinics late one evening, Bob is approached by a shifty-looking Smith (David Landau), who is asking Bob to supply himn with morphine and who clearly seems to know more than he's letting on. Bob concludes that Smith must have been a doctor in a previous life who screwed up by getting into his own supply of morphine (in the 1930s, it wasn't uncommon for doctors to fill prescriptions themselves and have the medicines on hand), and is now an addict who needs to keep finding a source of morphine. Smith still has his medical school diploma, so Bob blackmails him in a way: sell me your diploma or you don't get the morphine. This will allow Bob to hang a diploma on the wall, although he still technically isn't licensed, not having passed the licensing exam.

Because Bob hasn't got an official license, he's technically not supposed to be practicing medicine. So when he opens up his tony private practice with Caroline as a nurse, he needs another doctor to do the actual medical work. He finds one in Dr. Wiley (Donald Meek), and is able to keep manipulating things in such a way what it's always Dr. Wiley who's doing the doctoring. And with the help of tout Sam Sparks (Allen Jenkins), Bob gets a lot of patients.

But of course people are going to notice that there's something not quite right, and even Caroline cottons to what's going on. But in a stunning twist, one night when she's leaving the clinic she gets hit by a car when getting off the sidewalk. When she's taken to the hospital, the only doctor who's around to operate is... Dr. Bob, who of cousre is not a doctor.

Bedside is in many ways nonsense, in that I can't help but thing that even in the 1930s in a big city, it wouldn't be possible for Bob to get away with this stuff. Maybe in a small town that doesn't have access to any real doctor, someone like Bob could serve the function of something between a nurse practitioner and a full MD. But the movie is interesting, thanks to the fine performance from Warren William as the cad and even more so David Landau as the morphine addict. It's a shame that Landau was soon to suffer the stroke that led to the end of his career and his early death, as Landau was a really good supporting actor in a whole string of movies in the three or four years he was in Hollywood.

Frank Morgan Star Vehicle?

Back in the day, the studios had access to a whole bunch of great character actors, most of whom weren't necessarily right for leading roles, at least not in the sort of prestige movies the studios put their stars in. Some of the character actors, when they did get leads, did so in B movies. Such is the case with Frank Morgan, around whom the movie Hullabaloo seems to have been designed.

Morgan plays Frank Merriweather, and as the movie opens he roaming the halls of radio station AJN looking for the talent department, as he's got a record he just knows will impress the talent scout types. But they've got enough auditions for the day, cut to bellhop Charles Holland and Virginia O'Brien of the deadpan singing routine both doing their own versions of "Carry Me Back to Old Virginny". This is really an opportunity for golfer Bob Strong (a young Dan Dailey, so young he's credited as Dan Dailey Jr.) to be introduced to the story. He's the boyfriend of Wilma Norton, daughter of one of the radio executives, who only has the job beause Wilma realizes this isn't the era where being the wife of a golf pro isn't a high-status position.

Also at the auditions, although not getting one, is Laura Merriweather (Virginia Grey), who styles herself a dancing singer, which doesn't make good radio. She tries to introduce herself to Bob, which makes Bob's fiancée jealous and basically scuppers any chance she has of getting a job. It's here that she meets Frank, who happens to be her father. He doesn't recognize her in part because he's got three ex-wives whom he hasn't seen in years because he's been trying to avoid the alimony that he doesn't have the money to pay. Together, the two go back to see Strong, who learns that Frank's talent is voice impressions. This gets him a job doing a version of Orson Welles' War of the Worlds, at which he's so good that he sets off a national panic.

This also brings all three ex-wives out of the woodwork (Billie Burke, Sara Haden, and Connie Gilchrist). Frank also fathered one child by each wife; the other two children are played by Leni Lynn and Larry Nunn. Frank needs to be able to pay off that alimoney, so all of the kids and even the ex-wives have a stake in getting Frank a job in radio. The kids, for their part, also have talent. Meanwhile, Bob has the difficult task of getting the Perkins pill company, led by Clyde (Donald Meeks) and his sister-in-law Lulu (Nydia Westman), to sponsor a new program for the network. Perhaps Frank would be a good fit for such a program. There are also all sorts of romantic complications along the way. Meanwhile, in a bit of cross-promotion for MGM, one of the episodes of the radio show has Frank doing a rendition of a scene from the then-current movie Boom Town, which Frank theoretically supplying the voices although in fact Frank Morgan was simply lip-synching to the real-life stars of the movie.

There's a fun idea behind Hullabaloo, although it's at the same time easy enough to see why MGM would only have this as a B movie and why it's not so well remembered today. Frank Morgan shows he's got talent, although he's not really a fit for lead acting. Giving audiences another chance to see a lot of routines, they way they would have in two-reelers, would have been another plus for MGM. Charles Holland, the black singer playing the bellhop, has quite a bit of talent as a singer but since this was 1940 it's obvious why he's not more famous. Virginia O'Brien's deadpan thing can be funny although I can understand why it might be an acquired taste to audiences in 2025.

Ultimately, Hullabaloo is a bit more of a time capsule than a fully coherent movie. But it's an interesting little time capsule.

Not the horrendous Fox game show

Tubi, and to an extent the other FAST services, have a wealth of obscure stuff that I'd assume fell into the public domain available to stream on demand. I've got several early talkies in my watch list, and recently saw one starring Edward G. Robinson even before Little Caesar. The movie in question is The Hole in the Wall.

Robinson is technically not given star billing here -- he's billed fourth -- but he's the male star here, playing a character called "The Fox". The Fox is the leader of a gang that fleeces the rich under the guise of using a medium going by "Madame Mystera" (an actress named Nellie Savage who astonishingly gets third billing despite only being in the movie for one or two scenes at the beginning. The reason she's in only a small number of scenes is because after finishing work one day, she gets on an el train to go home. That train derails in a spectacularly amateurish bit of special effects model work, killing any number of passengers, including Mamade Mystera.

The Fox realizes he shouldn't identify Mystera at the morgue since the gig would be up, so in a humorous sequence he suggests partner-in-crime Goofy (Donald Meek, looking as bald as he did his entire a career) put on Mystera's robes! That sure isn't going to do, but the gang is in luck as somebody comes in the door looking for a job with Mystera. That young woman is Jean Oliver, played by Claudette Colbert at the very beginning of her career. She's recently gotten out of prison, and is looking for a job, and was given Mystera's name by a mutual acquaintance.

The Fox has the sad duty of informing Jean that Mystera died, but then has a flash of inspiration, which is to use Jean as Mystera. She proves adept at learning the tricks of the trade and how to cheat the people who are going to be her clients, so the Fox hires her, going down to the morgue and identifying Mystera's body as Jean Oliver so that nobody has to worry about Jean's past coming back to haunt them. Of course, Jean has reasons of her own for wanting to work for the Fox's gang.

Some time back, Jean was working as a maid for wealthy Mrs. Ramsay (Louise Closser Hale) when she fell in love with Ramsay's son. Mrs. Ramsay doesn't approve of the relationship for class reasons, so she has Jean framed for robbing her and sent to prison, which is why Jean was just getting out of prison when she shows up at the Fox's place looking for Mystera. Jean's plan is even more sinister than anything the Fox has ever thought of. She wants to kidnap Ramsay's granddaughter and raise the little girl to hate people like the Ramsays, which is a fairly wild plot even for a pre-Code.

As you can guess, things get complicated from there, especially when the Fox finds himself having reason to believe that perhaps Jean does have real clairvoyant powers, leading to a reasonably exciting finale. There's also the obligatory-for-the-era plot device of the intrepid reporter who in this case thinks he recognizes Mystera as someone he knew from childhood; of course that chldhood friend was one Jean Oliver.

The Hole in the Wall was released in early 1929, and it has all the hallmarks of a talking picture released that early in the sound era. The pacing and the elocution feel ancient compared to what we would see even in pictures from two or three years later. On the other hand, the plot is fun, and the art direction for Mystera's apartment is excellent. Fans of early sound music will probably enjoy The Hole in the Wall.