IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 3 minutes, rated 6.5 by 39 cinematizens.
Genre: Mystery.
Verdict: Too many change-ups.
Mr D is the ace of the pitching staff of the World Series team in town to see how the Bums will beat themselves this time. He walks the streets of New York City alone and enters Baghdad Way (aka Coney Island) , a fictional and exotic part of the Big Worm where all nations mix and the streets are lined with sideshows because there is no main event.
Two young baseball fans recognise Mr D, and he obliges at a throwing booth where he meets Her. She is hiding there in plain sight from evil saboteurs led by a kindly, crippled spinster later called Achilles. (I kid you not.)
Pointless back and forth occurs as the clock slows to Dali time. The whole is less than the sum of parts. Lloyd bubbles with energy as Mr D. Irene Hervey as Her gives a good performance of someone frightened, confused, and determined. J. Carrol Naish is on the money as the Professor (Emeritus) who is crazy like a fox. And Ann Gillis as Joey (Josephine) the baseball nut steals the show. She made her first film when she was seven and her last was Space Odyssey: 2001 (1968).
Despite the players, the whole thing dragged and dragged. There was a nice twist toward the end with Achilles but even that was undercooked.
There is no baseball in it, though it ends with a charming scene as Mr Dynamite pitches a game for Joey. I started to say it ‘regrettably’ that there was no baseball in it, but when I think of the hash made of baseball in other movies, perhaps that was for the best. Though how the ace of the staff visiting from distant St Louis for the World Series could wander the streets alone, smoking, was a mystery to me. No friends, no roommate, no manager, no curfew, no nothing to interfere with his gallivanting around day and night.
IMDb meta-data is run time of 1 hour and 34 minutes, rated 6.6 by 379 cinematizens.
Genre: Mystery.
Verdict: Snappy.
The usual suspects gather for the Otranto train at the Gare de Lyon, the British aristocratic wife making off with an oily paramour, a twitchy Pomme who never lets go of a battered briefcase, the American glamour puss with her brassy manager, a moustachioed French police officer, an arrogant British business stereotype who bullies his grovelling assistant, a languid Major Strasser with a reluctant offsider, a Scots golfer who won’t shut up, a woman of a certain age with a dachshund, and assorted boors and bores. No boars were sighted.
We see much hustle and bustle at Le Gare as luggage is loaded, provisions for the restaurant car are manhandled into place, cabins are primped, engine valves are checked, moving parts oiled, dining car tables set, and as one baggage cart rolls along an attendant pastes on destination labels for Rome, including one carefully applied to the tag on dachshund who is riding along on top. There are many such touches from director Walter Forde.
As passengers gather reading material, all of them having forgotten their iBooks, over the shoulder of one we read in a newspaper that a Van Dyke painting has been stolen. Several passengers, it emerges, have an interest in Dick’s painting. The police officer is insulted that such a priceless work should have been stolen in Paree! The business stereotype had been thwarted in the attempt to buy it and has schadenfreude in seeing that it has been stolen from the successful purchaser. Twitcher who thought he was being so cool and nonchalant has to be the thief. No one but a thief could try so hard to appear indifferent.
Then there is Major Strasser who followed Twitcher with the knowledge that he is the thief, and Strasser proposes to relieve the Twitter’s guilty conscience by stealing the painting from him. His offsider is game for that but it emerges that Strasser also plans to use Twitcher as a literal cut-out. [Figure it out.] The offsider is not happy at that prospect, less so when he bumps into Glamour Puss in the corridor and they remember old times before the movie began.
There is a marvellous scene when Twitcher is lured into a card game to pass the time, and meets Strasser — again, recognising each other, without a word, for what they each are: the Twitcher a clever thief, and Strasser a satanic villain. Strasser’s malevolence behind the charming smile is tour de force acting.
The briefcase is mislaid that brings the business stereotype into the action along with his groveller. Offsider decides to split. Strasser kills Twitcher. The police officer investigates and Strasser charms his way into the suspension of belief in another remarkable gambit.
When finally cornered he either tries to escape by jumping off the train or committing suicide I could not tell what the screenwriter’s intention was. Maybe the director just yelled ‘Cut!’
Throughout the momentum of the hurdling train is cross-cut into the action to give a sense of urgency. It passes through Swiss border control and enters Italy where the carabinieri board the train to assist the French police officer to comb his moustache.
This is one of the first mystery train films, and many more have since followed in its tracks. It was re-made in France in 1950.
Conrad Veidt played the villain, Strasser, perfectly. Connie been in the German Imperial Army on the Eastern Front in World War I, and as he recovered from wounds he hung around the theatre where his wife worked, and in time became himself an actor on the stage and then in silent films. When race registration begin after 1932, his wife was Jewish, and so he claimed that he was, too, to support her, though he was not. In his words, ‘to do otherwise was to renounce her,’ and this he would not do.
This stand ended his film career in Germany within a matter of minutes and the pair of them started to learn English and fled to London. Along with a number of British and expatriate actors later he moved on to Hollywood to promote films that might help persuade neutral America into the war on the English side. He played evil Nazis more than a dozen times. This was an easy step since in his silent movie career he had played the Devil in None of the Woman Born [1918] and Kurfürstendamm [1920], Lucifer in Satan [1920]), and Death in Unheimliche Geschichten [1919]. He died in 1943. He would have been a perfect foil for Max in the Seventh Seal.
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 5 minutes of runtime, rated 5.9 by 467 cinematizens.
Genre: Mystery.
Verdict: Foggy.
In a dense fog on the Golden Gate Bridge walking from There to Where, Nina Foch sees a man set upon by thugs and screams….herself awake to find that the noise has brought to her hotel room door the very man of whom she dreamed! Seeing Nina lying there, Dreamboat has enough sense not to rock.
She is an Army nurse on R and R, albeit nothing is made of her experiences, perhaps, in the Pacific. The bloodbath at Iwo Jima had ended only a fortnight before the release date of this balderdash, so maybe she is on leave from that inferno. DreamBoat is a Top Hush-Hush guy who cannot shut up.
Because he can speak Hollywoodese, DreamBoat is charged with a super secret mission to Japanese occupied Hong Kong to buy jade for Otto. Sure he will fit in. Abstracting that jade will crush the Nips, intones Otto as only he could, and lead to final victory. There is a reference ‘to our allies, the Chinese.’ Recognition of Allies is rare in Hollywood and so noteworthy. (It is altogether unknown in Washington D.C. with one exception: The haunting Korean War Memorial.)
DreamBoat and Nina
Though DreamBoat can tell her nothing of his mission and does so at great length, Nina pledges to stay dry until he returns, but no sooner does he set off than he is set upon. It is child’s play in trapping him.
Nina knows something is up and goes to the secretive Otto by finding him in the telephone book under SPIES but Otto feigns ignorance and leaves it at that. No wonder the Japanese held out so long with spies like this. Then as scriptwriting would have it, the opening dream sequences is played out for (un)real. With me so far? Still Otto smokes his pipe.
The man Trappers are Caucasians with enemy accents who hole up in ChinaTown. They Nina-nap her to blackmail DreamBoat into handing over the super-duper top secret jade order, and he would if he could, but… In the stunt fight on the Bridge it fell into the void.
There are some nice touches as both sides try to dredge it up from that void. Once again it is child’s play to outwit DreamBoat, though by this time Otto’s pipe has gone out and he is stirred to action. Why DreamBoat did not turn to Otto in the first instance is down to SOP which in this case means Stupid Operating Procedure, a favourite of scriptwriters.
Nina seems indifferent to being trussed up and threatened, but none of that is related to her experiences as an Army nurse. More’s the pity.
With the help of some local Chinese, our allies, Otto rescues her as DreamBoat postures.
It was Budd Boetticher’s first director’s credit and it shows around the edges. Budd later made some of the best Westerns that are bleak in style and complex in morality. These include Decision at Sundown (1957), Buchanan Rides Alone (1958), Ride Lonesome (1959), and Comanche Station (1960). Each of these titles is discussed elsewhere on this blog. He developed a fascination with bullfighting and directed and wrote at least five movies on that theme.
The film at hand was released on 5 April 1945, four days after the start of the Typhoon of Steel on Okinawa that cost 77,000 US casualties and even greater number of Japanese. There would have been plenty of nursing needed there.
IMDb meta-data is 1 hour and 3 minutes, rated 6.2 by 77 cinematizens.
Gerne: Mystery.
Verdict: Lord Peter appears.
We know from the get-go in this inverted krimi who dun it, where, how, and why. How long will it take Plod to get there is the question?
The story open in a boat-train hotel in Old Blighty as Blackmailer is coercing Married Woman to abscond to France with him by referring to the amorous emails she wrote to him. He is short, overweight, warty, and rude. No wonder she forsook the tall, dapper, polite, forthright John Loder for this tripe. Credibility starts low.
The pace accelerates when a second victim confronts Blackmailer and after some useless dialogue throttles him. Victim proceeds to stuff corpse into a steamer trunk left behind by the Marx Brothers and he then carries the trunk downstairs as if he were a porter, bent under the weight and obscured by the bulk past the reception desk, where Lord Peter Wimsey is making fatuous remarks. His Lordship does notice that the porter’s trousers have a well-ironed crease in them and that is most unusual for a navvy.
The trunk is labeled for Married Woman and shortly her Absent Husband catches up with her and they have a reconciliation of sorts. He goes upstairs to settle the hash of Blackmailer in the room where he mistakes murderous Victim for Blackmailer and fisticuffs ensure. Blackmailer gets away.
Husband and Woman take the train to Southampton and then the ferry to Le Havre where French officials cannot levy an import duty on the corpse in the trunk and send it back to England along with Husband and Wife. Lord Peter who has observed all this joins them in returning with his man Bunter.
While the circumstantial evidence against Absent Husband is great, after seeing his Eton tie Inspector Parker (Wimsey’s brother-in-law) does not believe him guilty.
Spoiler ahead.
Parker and Wimsey decide to investigate further and enlist the aid of the railroad which assigns to the case…. wait for it… the murderous Victim who is a company employee. He can hardly believe his luck. Only Absent Husband saw him and now Victim is in a position to shift the blame on him.
He has his wife, who evidently is complicit in both the blackmail and murder, chat up Married Woman and plant seeds of doubt about Husband’s guilt. Just causal like. Being a screenwriters twit Married Woman swallows the bait, but both Husband and Wimsey see a set-up in that causal conversation and re-double their efforts. Husband chases around and Wimsey makes fatuous remarks non-stop. Whew!
There is a superb scene in a nocturnal rail yard where Victim and Husband duke it out, and accidentally release the brake on a gigantic steam engine which then rolls ever so slowly, silently, and implacably onward. This attack on Husband convinces everyone the Victim is the Villain and in time he is netted after another barrage Wimsey’s verbiage.
There are some nice procedural touches as when Wimsey realises that the railroad detective (psst, Victim-Villain) knew the room number was 9, even after the numeral was removed. Likewise the denouement in the railway baggage car with the geese is a keeper.
Does the title refer to the body in the trunk which is removed in the first fifteen minutes, or what? It seems an early talkie because often the characters face the camera square in closeup to deliver the lines.
This was the first film adaptation of Dorothy Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey. Many more followed. I particularly liked the Ian Carmichael personifications 1972-1974 in part because of the bond between his Wimsey and Bunter. While Bunter appears in this film he is not developed, nor Wimsey’s attachment to him explained.
IMDb meta-data is runtime 59 minutes, rated 6.1 by 63 cinematizens
Genre: Mystery
Verdict: Neato
When tall, distinguished-looking, baritone Colonel Hicks goes to hire a Private Dick he brooks no nonsense. Though he has no appointment he wants to ‘see Mr. B. Prentice right here! Right now!’ as he pushes past Iggy (on whom more below) in the anteroom and bursting into the inner office….to find that the ‘B’ is for Belinda! ‘Holy scriptwriting,’ he cried! ‘A dame!’ Giving himself a full-body shake he pressed on since Prentice came highly recommended by the police. [Psst, her father is captain of detectives. Is this insider trading?]
Hicks wants to know what his son is spending so much money on, but Hicks does not want to pry by asking the scion. He would rather hire a spy. Hicks is a lot of things but one of them is not smart.
Earlier we had seen Belinda dust off Canino, and that is no easy task, but she handled his gat with the ease of practice. The director sent Canino back to thug school to revise his act. On whom more below.
No sooner does Belinda hit the bricks than Hicks bites the dust alone in his study. It was a case of overkill, there was a heart attack, there was syringe, there was a very sharp letter opener, there was a television broadcast of Pox News. No one could survive a conjunction of events that lethal.
Iggy en route.
Now B turns her talents to figuring out who dun it. There is some to’ing and fro’ing and Iggy, the muscular ex-Marine offsider, is as quick on the update as B herself is. It is a good team and I am sorry to say this was a once-off pairing. Iggy is not played for laughs and comes through for her more than once and she he. This was one of the few times William Haade got to do anything but flex the pecs. He turned bad after this gig and was a villain in Key Largo (1948).
She starts with the obvious, the handsome, confident, wealthy young son who is as clueless as a Murdoch Bot Prime Minister.
There are many herrings: a sister who is secretive and pouty, a butler who looks shifty when the police are around, a shyster lawyer, an emeritus professor, and the family doctor who missed the syringe and the letter opener when he signed the death certificate as a heart attack. Then there is Canino. Is he an entrepreneurial, franchise, or a contract thug?
There are some nifty lines as when Canino invites himself to sit at Belinda’s table in a restaurant and put his snap-brim fedora carefully on the table. She tells him, she does not ask, to remove the hat because she is allergic to dandruff. He then gives her a glimpse of the gat among the dandruff under the hat. She is as cool as ice, and soon deals with him.
Here are a few other bon mots:
‘Trying to keep a stiff secret is like hiding the Statue of Liberty in a phone booth.’
‘Even lambs become lions is the stakes are high enough.’
‘Don’t get frisky or I’ll put this gun where he least expect it.’ [Still puzzling on that place.]
Waitress: ‘He’s a bad egg.’
Belinda: ‘I’ll scramble him good.’ [And she did.]
I never did figure out who did what and the explanation she gives at the end was no help, but they mostly lived happily ever after. The handsome male lead does nothing but posture in a neato switch with the duties usually assigned to the female lead.
‘Canino,’ you ask? He was the unforgettable villain in The Big Sleep (1946) played by Bob Steele. He went up against Bogey again in The Enforcer (1951). Bob racked up more than 244 credits on the IMDb. He could make the word ‘Please’ sound like a mortal threat. Whenever his name appears in the credits a good dose menace follows. Believe it or not, Ripley, he started out in comedy.
It was a studio mill production from Republic before its president bankrupted the company trying to make the statuesque but wooden Vera Ralston a star. This affair is discussed elsewhere on this blog. Get clickin’ for the goss. It is also the studio with which John Wayne started.
IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 13 minutes, rated 7.1 by 21,656 cinematizens.
Gerne: Horror
Verdict: Masterpiece
A ruminative tale of undying love perfectly directed by Karl Freund, a cinematographer who conveys meaning, emotion, and conviction through lighting, silence, and stasis. No strange camera angles, framed shots, or cross cuts. The titular Mummy is never seen entire. This film has nothing to do with the host of derivative imitators that followed.
While mummies (but not daddies) had a prior history in a novel by Bram Stoker and a 1918 silent film by Ernst Lubitsch, it was only after Howard Carter found Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922 that the Egyptian craze occurred, and with it Mummies went big. There is a recent episode of Lord Bragg’s podcast on In Our Time about this finding for the cognoscenti.
Brit boy reading what he shouldn’t.
In the film a bumptious Brit reads out the sacred ritual, which his elders advised him not to do, so we knew he would do it, and that precipitates the events that follow. Imotep was consumed by love for Zita but she was an anti-vaxxer and when measles killed her, Immy stole the sacred scroll to re-animate her, but just as he was about to utter…. The cops busted him and he was sentenced to be buried alive or watch the President in Thief talk. He chose burial.
We see the start of his burial when he is being wrapped in linen and it is enough. Whew! (Note no fly was included when he was wrapped and that caused a problem because even mummies have to go.) The scroll he violated is buried with him in an unmarked hole in the ground. The Brits find this and as above, set the ball rolling. Then time passes.
Ardath Bey appears from nowhere a decade later and tells another Brit crew where to dig to find the good stuff. They do and they do. Strangely Arath wants no baksheesh and slips away only to return when all the accoutrements are displayed in the Cairo museum (which Kate has visited). It is an other-worldly portrayal of this leathery man with the posture of a sergeant major and the manners of a European diplomat, yet before whom dogs recoil and a Nubian warrior swoons, that carries the picture.
When Zita appears Ardath is sure she is the reincarnation of his love of three plus millennia before and sets about joining with her. [Down, fraternity brothers, not like that!]
Ardath makes eyes at her as only he can. Move over, Bela. Ardath has an iTV cleverly concealed in a cooling, reflecting pool where he observes others. When senior Brit decides to burn the animating scroll, Ardath, finishes him off with murderous thoughts! Good thing the fraternity brothers cannot do that to the professors who keep failing them for being drunken dolts.
Likewise David Manners, as the hero, is threatened. Zita falls under Ardath’s hypnotic sway and…
The sepulchral atmosphere throughout is suffocating. One almost feels the drying heat and congestion. When the young Brit goes nuts, that seems the right reaction. The lighting and camera use details, like a single eye opening, the dog balking, or Ardath’s glowing stare, to suggest menace. These are silent, static images from which the viewer cannot turn away. Karloff as Ardath manipulates the Brits with ease. The three thousand seven hundred year flashback in the iTV reflecting pool is a movie within a movie worthy W. D. Griffith. Zita is exotic and divided. She is both captivated by Ardath and repelled by him.
She is saved in the end not by Hero but by a direct appeal to the ancient Egyptian gods whom Ardath offended in the first place: Marvellous irony in that. Even when they have finally figured it out the Brits, mighty colonists that they are, cannot stop it.
It was released on 22 December in time for Christmas 1932 in the Great Depression. Karl Freund concentrated on cinematography and shot Metropolis (1927), All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Dracula (1931), The Good Earth (1937), Tortilla Flat (1942), Key Largo (1948) among many others. He also developed techniques for filming television programs that remain current despite all the technical changes.
At the time Universal was making Horror its genre of choice with Dracula (1931) and Frankenstein (1931), followed by Island of Lost Souls (1932), and Republicans in the Senate, but these films — apart from the last one — had literary antecedents, whereas The Mummy sprang whole from the screenplay by Nina Putnam. If only she had residual rights to the hundreds of imitations that followed, including some recent egregious examples, she would have been a zillionaire. She was an accountant by day and some say she devised the IRS 1040 tax form when she worked at Treasury. It is still in use, sad to say.
IMDb meta-data is 59 minutes of runtime, rated 6.0 by 301 cinematizens
Genre: Horror
Verdict: Some nice touches
A world weary Bar Owner (BO) in the heart of the Dark (because is little is known about it) Continent in Bakunda on the Unseen River, perhaps, in southern Chad speaks in riddles. We know from the get-go he is…The Vampire. What else could explain his clean clothes, perfect diction, and shy mien.
BO is urbane, European, hyperthyroid, patient, and oblivious of either money or sex. ‘What is wrong this guy, indeed,’ chorused the fraternity brothers! Meanwhile, locals — not the Europeans — are dying from bites in the throat. Got it, so far?
While the six Hollywood Europeans we see, including the studio-contracted woman who has the screaming and fainting duties of the era, stand around, the natives are sure a demon is loose. They use their iDrums to communicate. The Europeans are sure it is an animal and set out to trap it. Fewer return none the wiser.
Meanwhile, we see that the BO can bug his eyes out something incredible, even more than the fraternity brothers do when a professor assigns r-e-a-d-i-n-g! (‘As if!’) When bug-eyed, BO is dangerous.
It takes Hero a while to figure it out and then he falls sway to the bug-eyes himself. His will is so weak he might have been acting the part written for the screamer. That is nice since it is usually the woman who succumbs, though to be unfair she, too, does later but Hero was first to go all silly putty.
There is a neat shot when we, along with the native servant, see the tea cup in the mirror but not BO’s hand holding it. Though surprised Native does not go all stereotype but instead begins to realise well before the Europeans what has to be done, namely calling Buffy! This is another nice touch endowing the black servant with wit, self-control, and insight. Credit the writer for this touch.
‘You are in my power!’
Another very noir scene has BO’s shadow following a minor ruffian and encompassing him as he — BO — has a bite to drink. This is the first European to get it. Had this scene been in an A-film, it would be studied in film schools for the superb staging. Credit the director for this touch.
BO plays his role as the life-weary (ghost) vampire straight with no melodrama, if anything it is under-acted, and the more effective for it. Credit the actor for this touch.
The natives are shown to be well ahead of the Europeans in sussing the deal and acting against it, however Africa is presented as a sensational mash-up of witchcraft, voodoo, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Bunkimism, rather like an ABC news report.
Leigh Brackett
The screenplay was a rarity of 1940s Hollywood: written by a woman, Leigh Brackett, who also wrote the Big Sleep (1946), Rio Bravo (1959), Hatari! (1962), and Stars Wars (1980), and many episodes of TheRockford Files. She also published a host of Sy Fy short stories, and was married to Captain Future himself, Edmond Hamilton.
The gaunt and ever morose John Abbott played the Ghostly Vampire BO with measured ennui. He did many television program and will be recognised by viewers without knowing his name. He was delightful as the embezzling Shakespeare quoting Studio Head in The Falcon in Hollywood (1944). Despite a mien of MittelEuropa he was born Albert Chamberlain Kefford in Kensington, London England and worked in the British Embassy in Moscow during World War II before landing in Hollywood. Regrettably his service in Moscow haunted him later when the real Monster of Hollywood HUAC went looking for cheap headlines and he was blacklisted for a time.
This film was released on 21 May 1945 in the middle of the Typhoon of Steel on Okinawa which saw 75,000 American casualties on this tiny island. The Japanese losses were equal if not even greater. That action was taken to indicate what an invasion of Japan would be like. Beyond hyperbole.
IMDB meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 6 minutes, rated 4.7/10 by 511 cinematizens.
Genre: Boring
Verdict: Ibid.
The audience is restless and Captain Storm with no first name tries to tame it riding off into the Mojave desert with Miss Canfield. Ziva appears and disappears into and out of nowhere which leads Storm to close questioning, but not as close as the fraternity brothers had hoped.
Out there in the Burbank backlot they find …. sand, a lot of it. While all the accoutrements are allegedly British (see below for more on the accoutrementa) all of the principals are Yankee Doodle but at least they do not affect pretend-accents. Storm is impossibly handsome but remains stiffly correct at all times with Miss Canfield.
They find the diggers desecrating tombs and stealing, ah, exporting, ancient Egyptian artefacts, even a tomb with many dire threats in the cartouches that adorn it does not stop them. The Europeans dismiss such superstition, but not the mandatory Egyptian present who goes all pale and wobbly like a Republican Senator getting orders from President Putin.
By the osmosis of screenwriting the spirit of the long dead Pharaoh passes into the body of this Gypo who goes all mummy right down to the linen wraps and proceeds to drink blood, first from the horses then the Red Coats: Red Coats = red blood. See, just like the aforementioned Senator: A bloodsucker. The stalwarts chase him around the one-set corridor as their number dwindles, along with any interest of viewers, to … the End.
After all the chasing Mummy is revealed to be wearing striped pyjamas! No wonder he did was angry. Will no one respect the ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign on the hotel burial chamber door? The desecraters get their deserts, slurp, and then the swaddled Gypo retires, or something.
The medic says ‘eviscerated’ when he means ‘ex-sanguinated.’ The Brit uniforms in this 1902 setting are American WWII Army surplus. They venture into the trackless desert of Bronson Canyon on horses, not camels. And so on and on. There are able supporting actors in the cast like Ben Wright and Guy Prescott who have nothing to do. It is a throwback in story and staging to 1940s curse of the Mummy films done so badly it is wonder it had a theatrical release in February 1957 in the same month that a mesmerising Seventh Seal opened. How’s that for a comparison: 4.7 for this and 8.2 for the latter. Even so, 4.7 seems way too high for something that cannot be watched, though reading the User Reviews on IMDb confirms my faith in the idiocracy.
IMDB meta-data is runtime of 1 hour and 16 minutes, rated 6.3 by 229 cinematizens.
Genre: Old Dark House wanna be.
Verdict: Femme très fatale.
Holding court in an Old Dark House, elderly Russian mother Putin confronts her two adult sons, both Republican Senators, one a retard and the other a spineless alcoholic. Decisively she decides then and there to leave her considerable fortune, acquired how is unknown, to the spineless alcoholic who has a very blonde wife in slinky silk and cosy furs. Elderly Mother is hale and hearty and it may be many years before she croaks. (Not now, sniggered the fraternity brothers.)
Fearing pre-mature internment in the gigantic family mausoleum across the street Elderly Mother has a baleful horn installed there for her to trigger if she wakes up dead. Well, anyway.
She signs the will in front of the assembled leeches and so signs her own death warrant. Blonde wife with the subtlety of a sledgehammer reminds sodden husband-son that Elderly Mother may live on for years before they see a thin dime so that she can buy new shoes and a sofa. The prospect of years and years and years of Blonde nagging is more than he can bear.
He comes home the next day to tell her that he has murdered his mother. Another day at the office. Blonde feigns shock and surprise but speeds to her paramour to encourage him, without quite saying it, that now is the time for him to murder the husband, which he does. Then she turns to the retard and encourages him to murder the paramour without quite saying it in express words. She will do anything to get those $5,000 Christian Louboutin stiletto shoes encrusted with blood diamonds! Move over Imelda! And that sofa of human skin.
Paramour is new to murder and does not quite finish the job on husband so Blonde takes over (and makes a rookie mistake herself).
Wiles at work.
While all these bodies are piling up Plod is nosing around, and Blonde tries her wiles on him, but he is a eunuch and his first friend does not respond. Her full frontal advances convince him she is up to no good, after all he has looked in the mirror and he knows that he is not in her looks league. Thereafter follows a cat-and-mouse game between Blonde and Plod. Bernie Olds figures as a beat cop before he got promoted to plain clothes in the Maltese Falcon (1941) and dropped the phoney Irish accent. Plod never does find the one secret passage in this wanna be Old Dark House, and has to be lead to it by someone or other.
The mausoleum horn figures in the denouement, after which Blonde goes off in cuffs to suborn the judge and jury into a not guilty finding, so she can find someone to murder Plod. Say what you like about her, she doesn’t quit.
Lilyan Tashman as Blonde is ruthless, unscrupulous, and selfish enough to be Republican Senate Leader. Plod is hopeless enough to be Barnie.
In 1931 talkies were still developing and it shows here. Each actor stands still and articulates the lines slowly and clearly. Movement and dialogue are kept separate.
