Thu 13 May 2021
A Mystery Movie Review: MURDER AT THE WINDMILL (1949).
Posted by Steve under Films: Comedy/Musicals , Mystery movies , Reviews[4] Comments
MURDER AT THE WINDMILL. Grand National Pictures, UK, 1949. Released in the US as Murder at the Burlesque by Monogram Pictures (1950). Garry Marsh (Detective Inspector), Jon Pertwee (Detective Sergeant), Jack Livesey, Eliot Makeham, Jimmy Edwards, Diana Decker, Donald Clive. Screenwriter/director: Val Guest.
The Windmill Theater, that is, a real life performance hall in London, known at one time for a nude girls revue, permitted by the authorities as long as the girls did not move. This being a movie, the closest it comes to anything as risque as that is the inclusion of a fan dancer as one of the acts, with very large feathery fans.
The movie begins as the theater is closing down for the night, and the cleanup crew finds a dead man sitting in the front row, killed by a bullet shot by someone on the stage, or so the inspector from the Yard quickly deduces.
His method of finding the killer? Have all of the acts from that night’s program recreated onstage, even if it takes all night.
And as an immediate result, most of the movie’s 65 odd minutes are taken up by singers, dancers, one lone comedian, complete with trombone, and the aforementioned fan dancer. This is not a bad thing, mind you, as many of the performers on stage are members of the actual singers and dancers at the Windmill at the time of the movie’s making. Finding the killer – for of course this really is a mystery movie – doesn’t happen until the end of the very last repeated number.
Of some note, perhaps, is seeing Jon Pertwee, a future Doctor Who, as the rather diffident police sergeant on the case, or at least he is in comparison to Garry Marsh as the blustery inspector in charge. It all makes for very light family entertainment, especially resonant to those who still remember the era, now long gone by. You needn’t go out of your way for this one, but on the other hand, it’s easily found on YouTube.
May 13th, 2021 at 6:35 pm
The Windmill was famous for much racier acts than seen here, but the various business show are good examples of the racier side of the Music Hall tradition, the girls are well characterized, the plot somewhat better than usual, and the mystery not bad.
Jimmy Edward, the comic was a staple of British comedy films in the era often as a star, and still going into the late sixties. I don’t know if he really did an act like that on stage, but I wouldn’t be surprised. He also did a long running series as the idiot headmaster of a public school.
Marsh was a staple playing cops and crooks.
May 14th, 2021 at 12:34 pm
Jimmy Edwards was an RAF pilot in WWII and the moustache covered facial injuries and the plastic surgery to deal with them. He specialised in parodies of ultra-macho characters – lecherous, dishonest, egotistical and aggressively heterosexual – and shortly before his death it was revealed that these characters were even more parodic than they seemed, as Edwards himself was gay.
He appeared with Eric Sykes in BIG BAD MOUSE, a comedy which was a flop and received lukewarm reviews until Sykes and Edwards began improvising their own version and turned it into a hit.
May 18th, 2021 at 5:49 pm
A Personal Reminiscence:
Jimmy Edwards and Eric Sykes brought Big Bad Mouse to Chicago, live on stage at the Studebaker Theatre downtown, in the early ’70s. (Can’t recall the exact date, darn it.)
It was during a particularly rough Chicago winter, with the lakefront winds (“The Hawk” as we call it here) at their most severe.
That said, the Studebaker was packed that Saturday afternoon.
Jimmy Edwards and Eric Sykes gave it their all; Edwards disregarded the fourth wall right from the start (“I scarcely call that an ovation!”), and the other company members (who’d been on the national tour for a while) gamely went with the flow.
As for Sykes, he played as though he wasn’t quite aware of what was going on, which as I understood it was his standard style.
The frozen Chicagoans in the theater loved what they were seeing, especially as Jimmy Edwards played to them shamelessly: “Please try to remember that this is not cinema or the television: WE are actually HERE!”
During Act II, there was a “musical interlude” where Edwards & Sykes were joined on stage by Henny Youngman, who “just happened” to be in the audience that day (I’ll make the guess that this sort of event happened at most performances).
At the curtain call, Eric Sykes donned a cape and gestured hypnotically at the audience: “You will all go to the box office – and book again!”
And we all would have, too …
Except …
See, Mayor Daley the First was running for reelection that year, and the Board of Health was suddenly conducting inspections, and they found “violations” in the Studebaker Theatre and shut the place down – just at the point when Big Bad Mouse would have had its run extended by four weeks.
Edwards & Sykes spent the rest of their time in Chicago appearing on every local talk show to proclaim their plight:
“The play DID NOT CLOSE! It was the BLOODY THEATAH that closed!”
Years later, Eric Sykes wrote of this adventure in his memoir; I always wondered if he’d ever had a chance to revisit Chicago (you know, when the weather was nicer and there was no election to worry about …).
(I’ll make the guess that Jimmy Edwards would likely not have made such a return.)
May 18th, 2021 at 6:35 pm
Some of the reviews I’ve read of the movie have mentioned Jimmy Edwards’ comedy routine in it, and I was surprised it was almost uniformly called lame and unfunny. Personally I thought he was hilarious. I’m glad to know he went on to what sounds like a much greater success.
And in Chicago of all places! 😉