House of the Seven Gables (1940)

Some months back, I mentioned the horror anthology Twice-Told Tales, based on three stories by mid-19th century American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne. The last of the stories is an adaptation of Hawthorne's novel The House of the Seven Gables. There was a full-length movie version of The House of the Seven Gables made in 1940, which TCM also ran last October even though it's not quite a horror movie in the sense that the version in the anthology movie is. Not having seen it (and, I should add, I haven't read Hawthorne's original book either), I recorded it to be able to watch it and do a review.

The movie opens with the device of showing pages from a book to give us establishing information since, after all, the movie is based on a book. In 17th century Massachusetts, Jaffrey Pyncheon engaged in some subterfuge to get some land from a Matthew Maule, and as a result, the Pyncheon house is thought by everybody else in town to be cursed, even though the Pyncheon descendants still live there.

Fast forward 150 years. Another Jaffrey Pyncheon (George Sanders) is a lawyer in Boston, and rising in the legal world. But he's been summoned home by his father. Also living in the house is Jaffrey's brother Clifford (Vincent Price) and their cousin Hepzibah (Margaret Lindsay), who is in a relationship with Clifford, since cousin marriage isn't quite the taboo it might be today. Clifford is a musician, a profession that Jaffrey looks down on, and you suspect that the brothers have disliked each other for years.

Dad called Jaffrey home because he's planning on finally selling the house. Not that he wants to; it's more that Dad and Jaffrey have been borrowing against the house to make risky investments that haven't paid off, and now they finally have to pay off the debts, with selling the house being the only way to do so. Clifford doesn't care so much since he's planning on going to New York to pursue his career in songwriting. Jaffrey, on the other hand, is deeply unhappy, since he believes in the family legend that there's some sort of hidden fortune in the house.

Clifford and his father get into an argument over selling the house, and in the course of that argument Dad suffers a fatal heart attack. This gives Jaffrey an idea. He accuses Clifford of having done something to cause Dad's death, with the result that Clifford is put on trial, convicted, and sentenced to a harsh prison sentence; the house is never sold.

Hepzibah pines for her cousin, and works on getting the governor to commute Clifford's sentence. He returns home, but he's not out of the woods yet. All these years, Jaffrey has been continuing to make risky investments, and Clifford's presence throws a monkey wrench into those plans. So Jaffrey comes up with a dastardly scheme to get Clifford out of the way once and for all.

As I said at the beginning, I haven't read Nathaniel Hawthorne's original book, so I can't compare this movie to the book. Supposedly, there are substantial differences between the two, but I can only judge the movie on its own merits. In that regard, it's not a bad little movie. Vincent Price unsurprisingly gives a good performance, as does Sanders as the villain of the piece. The production, however, feels like Universal, where it was produced, could have given it a little more TLC. This is the sort of material that probably should have been more of a prestige picture, but as produced, it has more of the look and feel of a programmer. Not that it's bad by any means, however. It's definitely worth a watch.

One wonders what happened to the first 61 detectives

Some time back, I purchased a box set of William Powell at Warner Bros., since I hadn't actually seen any of the four movies in the set. Recently, I watched another film off the set, Private Detective 62.

The film starts off with a prologue in France, as Powell plays Donald Free, a spy with a cover as a newspaper correspondent. His current job is to steal some French secrets, but he gets caught and declared persona non grata, and the US government can't really defend him since that would give the game away. So he's deported back to America, but just before the cargo ship is about to dock, the captain gets a radiogram that the French government wants him back in France in order to investigate him more fully.

Don jumps ship and swims to shore, ending up at some sort of beach house that he breaks into in order to dry off. Except that he's not alone, as there's a couple having a tryst: the woman in the relationship is married to another man. A shady detective, Dan Hogan (Arthur Hohl) comes in more or less unnanounced, with his secretary Amy Moran (Ruth Donnelly) as a witness. Don provides the couple with a cover story about this being his house, and he wants Hogan to pay for the damage Hogan did! Don even gets some money out of it.

However, there's a depression on, the movie having been released in 1933, and Don finds himself unable to get a job -- you'd think the feds or whoever was paying him to do his spying in France would have another job lined up for him, but that's not quite fully explained. After a long, futil attempt to find employment, he decides he's going to debase himself and look for a job with Hogan's detective agency, Don still having the business card.

Hogan is asleep (and probably drunk) in his office, so when one Harcourt Burns (Hobart Cavanaugh) comes in looking for somebody to investigate his wife, Don has an idea. Hogan has a license and no clients, while Don has a client but no license, so the two should form a partnership together. It's the only way they'll both survive.

Not that Hogan is particularly competent at doing regular detective work. But he is able to get a wealthy backer in the form of casino owner Tony Bandor (Gordon Westcott). Bandor bankrolls the place, which moves uptown and starts getting all sorts of wealthy clients, although a lot of what they're doing makes Don a bit queasy in terms of ethics, with Amy beginning to take his side.

Don gets a big-time job in the form of investigating Janet Reynolds (Margaret Lindsay). She's been gambling at Bandor's club, and somehow winning a ton of money at roulette. She's already taken Bandor (and by extension the detective agency, which is technically a partner in the casino although Hogan hasn't told Don this) for over $40,000, a very large sum in the early 1930s, and Bandor wants to find out how she's cheating. Don starts to investigate, but he falls in love with her and one of Janet's friends recognizes Don as a detective from a previous case. There goes Don's cover.

So Don decides he's going to help Janet from the other end as he's beginning to discover just how corrupt Hogan is. Janet has reached the point that she wants to cash in and go to Europe. But Bandor claims he doesn't have the cash at the casino, an excuse to try to buy time to stiff Janet. The scheme that he and Hogan come up with will have her go to Bandor's apartment alone the next day, where Bandor will cause a scene that will get Janet to shoot him with her gun. Except that Bandor has replaced the bullets with blanks, so while he'll play dead, he won't be injured but Janet will think she's killed him.

Hogan, however, is much slimier, realizing he can use this to double-cross Bandor, and have somebody else actually shoot Bandor after Janet leaves. Can Don unravel the mystery?

Well, with the sort of movie this is, you can probably figure out that William Powell is going to come out all right in the end, although the fun of it is seeing how he gets there. The movie is little more than a programmer, running a little over 66 minutes, but Powell does his usual consummate job and makes the movie well worth watching. The story more or less works, not being either a negative or anything particularly noteworthy. Ruth Donnelly probably comes off second-best among the cast and deserved a slightly bigger part, but she's not the romantic female lead. Hohl kept working in Hollywood for another 15 years although he understandably never became a star.

I'm glad that a movie like Private Detective 62 is on a box set. It's definitely worth seeing for anybody who likes either 1930s programmers or William Powell, but it's not big enough to merit the higher price of a standalone.