Tue 2 Mar 2010
Movie Review: QUIET PLEASE: MURDER (1942), Book and Film.
Posted by Steve under Mystery movies , Reviews[11] Comments
QUIET PLEASE: MURDER. 20th Century-Fox, 1942. George Sanders, Gail Patrick, Richard Denning, Lynne Roberts, Sidney Blackmer, Kurt Katch, Byron Foulger. Screenplay: John Larkin, based on the story “Death Walks in Marble Halls,” by Lawrence G. Blochman. Director: John Larkin.
According to IMDB, the Blochman story that this 1940s crime and mystery film wass based on was one titled “Death From the Sanskrit,” but other than IMDB, neither David Vineyard nor I have found a reference to a Blochman tale anywhere else by that name.
We may be wrong about this, but we’re sure (say 99.99%) that Quiet Please: Murder was adapted instead (and loosely so) from “Death Walks in Marble Halls,” a short novel that first appeared in The American Magazine, September 1942. It appeared later in EQMM as “Murder Walks in Marble Halls,” and was reprinted under its original title in 1951 as #19 in Dell’s short-lived series of slim-sized 10-Cent paperbacks.
Says David, who may be the only person to have both watched the movie and read the book:
The plot turns on a musical score that may or may not be original. Kilkenny is a local cop on the case, and Dr. Rosenkohl the medical examiner. The main similarity is they are all trapped in the library with a murderer while the police investigate, but in the novella it is the real police and the forgery business is mere plagiarism.
As always with Blochman, it’s a well written mystery and moves rapidly, and while there isn’t a lot of it in the film you can see bits and pieces of it there. Some of the names from the novella are used in the film, and some of the details of library operation.
Me again, Steve. I’ve watched only the movie, and what follows is the basic outline of the plot. As you’ll see, other than the basic library setting, there isn’t a lot in common, as David says. The forger in the film who isn’t in the book, as he mentions, is Jim Fleg (an oilier than usual George Sanders), who’s stolen a rare copy of Shakespeare’s Hamlet from a downtown library and who’s planning, with the able assistance of femme fatale Myra Blandy (Gail Patrick), to make multiple copies and sell them to equally unscrupulous collectors as a continuing source of income.
Unfortunately Myra makes the mistake of selling one of the forged copies to a Nazi agent (Sidney Blackmer), who wants his money back. At which point enters PI Hal McByrne, a lanky womanizer played by Richard Denning, causing Myra (the femme fatale he falls for) to realize she can kill two birds (at least) with one stone.
At which point the rest of movie moves to the aforementioned library, where several murders do occur, as the title of the film suggests (I confess I lost track of how many), along with many well-constructed chases of one character by another between the stacks of books, plus a very timely blackout monitored by a comically excitable librarian cum war raid warden played to perfection by Byron Foulger, a name long-time old movie fans will certainly remember.
Either the movie was actually filmed in a library — and believe it or not the Dewey Decimal System, carefully explained earlier on, is part of the plot — or the producers of this film raided the shelves of several nearby furniture stores. (The library is said to have two miles’ worth of books, but naturally we do not get to see them all.)
The plot is a complicated one. You have to pay attention every minute of the way. (My usual technique of watching the movie a second time did not help, and in fact I only found myself confused in other ways.) In terms of production values, they’re probably only par for the course in terms of black and white mystery movies made in 1942, but the film itself is surely an entertaining one.
PostScript: Mike Grost reviews the novella, not the movie, on his Classic Mystery and Detection website. He says of it, in part, and I quote:
The characters in the story do not merely stand around and expound on their intellectual specialty. Each has a job, and each is busy producing something as part of it. This beehive of work is integrated into the mystery plot. Both the Library and the knowledge work are part out the main productive output of New York City, its work as an industrial center of the mind. […]
The unfolding patterns of this tale make it a very satisfying reading experience. Blochman weaves them out of several different “colors”: the personal relationships of the characters, their professions; their physical positions in the library architecture; and their relationship to the murder plot.
March 2nd, 2010 at 7:34 pm
I’ve seen this film a couple times and it certainly is a movie that all book collectors would be interested in viewing. Plus you can’t go wrong with George Sanders as the book forging villain.
March 2nd, 2010 at 7:43 pm
You’re right on both counts, Walker. What I found amusing, and I forgot to say so in my review, is how casually a small stack of books worth $150,000 is handled and moved from place to place. It’s what convinced me that they really came from a furniture store!
— Steve
March 2nd, 2010 at 8:51 pm
At least, unlike some later Hollywood productions I’ve seen, the rare books weren’t all Readers Digest Condensed Books collections.
Sanders Jim Fleg is an interesting character, his relationship with Patrick and his personality both fairly kinky. The movie hints — and fairly openly — that he is getting a near sexual kick from the danger the attempt at defrauding Blackmer has put him in. Patrick virtually says as much.
The opening scene when Sanders murders the security guard protecting the Burbage Shakespeare is well done. That security guard plays a large role in the novella.
John Larkin was an interesting writer and director who also did THE BERMUDA MYSTERY.
March 2nd, 2010 at 9:11 pm
Yes, indeed, kinky is the right word for Fleg, and flagrantly so. He follows a life of crime for the sheer anticipation of being caught and being punished.
And just where did that come from? Fleg as a character wasn’t in the novella. It must have been something Larkin, the director and screenwriter cooked up.
If anyone by chance is interested enough to look, which includes anyone interested enough to read this far into the comments, I should think, I reviewed BERMUDA MYSTERY way back here on the blog:
https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=1189
Larkin directed only one other full length movie, Circumstantial Evidence (1945), but he wrote stories or screenplays for entries in both the Lone Wolf and Charlie Chan series, among many others, and in the 1950s and 60s was the producer for such TV series as FABIAN OF SCOTLAND YARD, M SQUAD and RIVERBOAT.
March 2nd, 2010 at 9:20 pm
I should mention the characters of the detective Kilkenny and Dr. Rosenkohl both appear in Blochman’s Dr. Daniel Coffee series of stories and novels, though the novella is not otherwise related to them.
March 2nd, 2010 at 9:43 pm
I hadn’t realized that Kilkenny and Rosenkohl had small roles (I am presuming) in the Dr. Coffee series.
They were the featured detectives of record in Blochman’s See You at the Morgue (Duell, 1941), however.
Not many people seem to remember it, but Blochman’s Dr. Coffee series was made into a TV summer replacement series in 1960. IMDB doesn’t give Blochman credit for the characters nor even mention who played the recurring characters.
There were only nine episodes, but for some reason, I remember the series about as well as anything that happened in 1960 comes back to me.
Tise Vahimagi said of the series:
https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=300
“…a lesser-known genre author also had his works (or at least his characters) produced — as Diagnosis: Unknown (CBS, July-September). Lawrence G. Blochman’s police pathologist Dr Daniel Coffee was played by Patrick O’Neal (with Cal Bellini as Dr Motilal Mookerji and Chester Morris as Captain Max Ritter) in a series of only 10 hour-long episodes.”
He might be right about there being 10 rather than 9 episodes, but so far, he’s the only one besides myself who remembers seeing it.
(Somehow I recall Phyllis Newman being the female member of the medical staff, but as a memory, it’s an awfully frail one.)
March 2nd, 2010 at 9:46 pm
I was right! I only had to keep looking, and where more obvious than Wikipedia?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnosis:_Unknown
Nine episodes were aired in all, while being pre-empted on two eveings for political conventions, and yes indeed, my memory’s (almost) as good as it used to be. Phyllis Newman was indeed one of the recurring stars, and maybe she’s the reason I remember it.
Well, one of them, anyway. It was a good show.
— Steve
March 3rd, 2010 at 11:25 am
Steve,
Thank you for the quote!
I saw the movie, too, but hardly remember it.
It is very hard to interpret movie credits of being “based on a story by”. Is the IMDB claiming “Death From the Sanskrit” is a commercially published story in a magazine? Or do they mean that Blochman submitted a treatment to a Hollywood producer by that title. Or could it be a radio play? This sort of thing tends to get lost in the mists of time.
Pronzini and Muller published this in a fine anthology called “Chapter and Hearse” of biblio-mysteries. IIRC, they claimed it as the source of the movie you review here. In any case, that’s where I read the tale.
Sleuths Kenneth Kilkenny and Dr. Joseph Rosenkohl appear in Blochman’s novel See You at the Morgue (1941). I don’t recall them in any of the Dr. Coffee tales – which means nothing! If David Vineyard knows where they appear in Dr. Coffee, I’d be glad to know.
March 3rd, 2010 at 12:54 pm
Mike
You’re right. There’s more going on about the source of the movie than I’m sure there’s any way of finding out now.
The big problem, of course, is the vast difference between the magazine novel and the screenplay, with only occasional similarities.
I wonder if “Death from the Sanskrit,” in the form of an unpublished story treatment, might have been the source of both. Note that in his description of the novella, David refers to “…the only clue a scrap of paper in what appears to be Sanskrit.”
So “Death from the Sanskrit” might also have been Blochman’s original title for the story, one that the AMERICAN MAGAZINE changed, figuring that the general public wasn’t going to know the difference between Sanskrit and a Sandbox.
Either way, there’s no Sanskrit in the movie, nor a Sandbox, for that matter.
Lots of conjectures, no real answers, and maybe the 99.99% percentage of sureness is way off base.
March 3rd, 2010 at 7:36 pm
I know Blochman had a career in television involved with the series SUSPENSE, so it is possible he sold a screen story based on his novella. His novel BOMBAY MAIL had already been a 1934 film with Edmond Lowe (remade as LAST TRAIN FROM BOMBAY with Jon Hall), so he may have had the contacts to make a sale. Despite the differences DEATH WALKS IN MARBLE HALLS has characters that occur in the movie including that security guard I mentioned, and one of the clues is described as Steve and I mention as apparently being in Sanscrit.
Mike,
If you say Kilkenny and Rosenthal aren’t in the Coffee stories I’ll take your word — I’m afraid my Blochman’s are where I can’t get to them right now — the Dr. Coffee’s anyway.
You are right about trying to determine the source of a movie. In some cases you have writers throwing out a story for a movie and later turning it into a novel or novella and of course books in one series being adapted as an episode in a different series of films (Chandler inspiring films in both the Falcon and Michael Shayne series).
And as you mention Hollywood doesn’t always distinguish between a story written for the screen and one published elsewhere. As far as I know neither Steve nor I have been able to resolve whether the story credited to Louis L’Amour and Jack Natteford for the film EAST OF SUMATRA is an original story, one of L’Amour’s adventure tales, or an original story based on one of L’Amour’s originals — and it isn’t as if L’Amour was obscure.
As I’ve said here before simply determining true screen credits on any film can be a mystery Sherlock Holmes would find daunting. Between script doctors (who are seldom credited), studio politics, and the rules of the Writer’s Guild it becomes a guessing game on some films.
November 16th, 2010 at 2:47 am
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