Sometimes I'm in favor of the sky

A movie that sounded somewhat interesting from the TCM synopsis was Men Against the Sky. So I put it on my DVR, and recently got around to watching it.

Richard Dix gets top billing, although one of the plot threads has him absent for a fair bit of the movie. We see him at the start, however: he's Phil Mercedes, a stunt pilot who used to do the mail route in the days when pilots flying air mail was considered adventurous and romantic. But Phil drank too much, which is why he's reduced to barnstorming. Not only that, but he's stupid enough to get in the cockpit drunk, crashing his plane and gettin his pilot's license suspended. Perhaps his sister Kay (Wendy Barrie) can get a job to support the both of them.

Cut to the McLean aircraft company, owned by Dan McLean (Edmund Lowe). The US government is looking at re-arming, since there's a war going on in Europe, and they're interested in trying new aircraft designs. It would be a lucrative market, if only the McLean company could come up with anything that the government is interested in buying. If they can't get any good planes for the government, they'll go bankrupt.

The two plots come together in two ways. First, Kay has been studying drafting, and she tries to get a job working on technical drawings for the McLean company, working under engineer Martin Ames (Kent Taylor). The other way is that when Phil learns about the problems that McLean has. Phil has ideas, even though he's just a (former) pilot and not really an engineer. Still, he's able to come up with drawings that Kay can present to Martin and perhaps the company can try them.

The company is desperate enough that they are willing to try the new design. But as the test pilot is putting the plane through its paces, he realizes that it has a fatal design flaw if it goes through certain stresses. At this point, Phil comes out of the woodwork because he wants his idea to go through, and gets in the plane after the test pilot says it's not airworthy. Phil flies it, only to discover that the test pilot was right. One of the wings is shorn off during a dive, and Phil has to parachute to safety.

Now, Men Against the Sky is the sort of movie that you know is going to have at least a somewhat happy ending, so you might be asking yourself how the movie gets to that happy ending. I'm not going to reveal the answer here, other than to say that the plot contrivance they use is a bit ridiculous and strains all credulity. It also doesn't help that the special effects for the aerial scenes aren't very special, even by the standards of 1940. But then Men Against the Sky was a B movie.

One interesting thing to note is the screenwriting credit for Nathanael West. West was better known as a novelist, and his works Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust have both been turned into films. He was also married to Eileen McKinney, who was the Eileen in My Sister Eileen. I think I mentioned it at the time I wrote a post on My Sister Eileen, but the two were killed in a car crash not long after the release of Men Against the Sky on their way to F. Scott Fitzgerald's funeral.

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.