BEDELIA. British National Films, 1946. Margaret Lockwood, Ian Hunter, Barry K. Barnes, Anne Crawford, Beatrice Varley, Louise Hampton, Jill Esmond. Co-screenwriter: Vera Caspary (with Herbert Victor and Isadore Goldsmith) based on her novel of the same title. Director: Lance Comfort.

   I’m not sure if anyone could review this film without giving away more of the plot than you’d like to know – certainly more than I’d care to read myself – so take this as a [WARNING] that there’s a good strong possibility I may cross some sort of line you’d rather not have crossed, as far as you’re concerned.   (Personally I like to know as little about a movie I’m watching or a book I’m reading as I can get away with.)

   In one sense this is a straightforward and relatively minor crime novel, but if you have the chance to see this movie, I am willing to wager that you will agree that this is not so.

   We quickly learn that Margaret Lockwood’s character has just married Ian Hunter’s character, Charles Carrington. She’s young and beautiful; he’s an older, well-established type. Not exactly rich, but well enough off that we quickly know why she married him, or we think we do.

   Following her (and then them) around during their honeymoon in Monte Carlo with unknown intentions, however, is Barry Barnes’s character, Ben Chaney (on the right), insinuating himself into their life first with a small dog, then as an artist who’d like to paint her portrait. (She, Bedelia, does not like to have photographs of herself, but agrees to sit for Chaney to please her new husband.)

   We’d like to know that Bedelia is innocent of any wrongdoing, since Chaney’s persona is that of a sneaky weaselly sort of fellow, but she is far from convincing in the falsehoods she tells, and we fear the worse, even back in England when Charles needs to get back to work, where he’s assisted (and more than likely, secretly loved) by his secretary Ellen (Anne Crawford).

   Straightforward enough, as I said up top, but there is also a strange undercurrent going on in this movie. Eventually Bedelia’s lies catch up to her, but who will her husband believe? Bedelia, or the artist who’s also living under false representation?

   If you don’t sense what’s not precisely stated in the story line, you probably won’t make much of this movie, translated from Connecticut in 1913 in the book to England perhaps 25 years later. (The manor house snowed in during a storm makes one think of the standard cliche of the Golden Age of Detection, but no, that’s not the kind of mystery this movie is.)

   But there’s more to the story than exactly meets the eye, and as I said in my opening remarks, I hope I haven’t said more than I should have. And to their discredit, the other reviews I’ve read on this movie have almost always said more. I’m glad I didn’t read them before I watched the movie for myself. I enjoyed it.

Note:   To watch the first eleven minutes of the film, check out this YouTube clip here.

NINE GIRLS. Columbia, 1944. Ann Harding, Evelyn Keyes, Jinx Falkenburg, Anita Louise, Leslie Brooks, Jeff Donnell, Nina Foch, Lynn Merrick, Shirley Mills, Marcia Mae Jones, Williard Robertston, William Demarest, Lester Matthews, Grady Sutton. Director: Leigh Jason. Shown at Cinecon 39, Hollywood CA, Aug-Sept 2003.

   This was the third of the Leigh Jason films that have become an eagerly awaited event at Cinecon. (The earlier films were Dangerous Blondes and Three Girls About Town.)

   A bevy of sorority sisters, chaperoned by Ann Harding (recovered from her tragic demise in East Lynne), drives to a mountain lodge where almost immediately Anita Louise, the most unpleasant member of the group, is murdered. Nina Foch and Evelyn Keyes are the prime suspects as the cops arrive and the entire crew is prevented from leaving by a convenient storm.

   The humor is somewhat broader (and less effective) than in the other two films, but this was still a delightful film. The screenwriters (Karen DeWolf and Connie Lee) also wrote for the Blondie series, one of my early affections (or rather, Penny Singleton was the affection).

Editorial Comments:   My own review of this film appeared earlier on this blog. Check it out here. Of the three lobby cards shown below, only the first two are (as I recall) from the movie itself. I have a feeling that the one at the bottom (with the girls in bathing suits) is only a promotional pose.

PLEINS FEUX SUR L’ASSASSIN. Champs-Élysées Productions, France, 1961. English title: Spotlight on a Murderer. Pierre Brasseur, Pascale Audret, Marianne Koch, Jean-Louis Trintignant, Dany Saval, Philippe Leroy. Screenplay: Pierre Boileau & Thomas Narcejac. Director: Georges Franju.

   Boileau and Narejac are to me the most recognizable names in the credits above, but truthfully I know very little about either, except for the fact they wrote the novels on which the films Diabolique and Vertigo were based. They have a long list of other credits on IMDB (here or here ) but the two mentioned will probably catch your eye right away too.

   Georges Franju, the director, may be known to those who have been following the French film industry longer than I have. His most famous film may be Eyes Without a Face (1960), known in the US as The Horror Chamber of Dr. Faustus. I assume that if anyone knows more about him, they will tell us more in the comments. (Please do!)

   As for the players themselves, I shall embarrass myself even further, and say that only the name of Dany Saval is familiar. She made one or two films in the US, but no more than that. The one that came to mind right away was Boeing Boeing, a sexy comedy from 1965 with Tony Curtis and Jerry Lewis in the two leading roles.

   Moving on to the story. When an aging French aristocrat realizes that he’s dying, he hides away in small room behind a one-way mirror, the better to watch his befuddled heirs after his death. His motive is not clear, but perhaps he holds a grudge against all of them, as they cannot inherit until his body is found.

   There are six or perhaps eight of them at first, their number gradually begins to dwindle, their deaths occurring in mysterious ways, perhaps of accidents or natural causes, but more likely not. Strangely enough, the police do not seem to be suspicious, as there is no investigation to speak of.

   To obtain the funds they need to maintain the castle where they are now living, their plan is to produce a spectacular Son et Lumière show based on an old legend of a cuckolded husband and lord of the estate hundreds of years before.

   The story line itself, as described above, is fragmented and difficult to follow. Neither the screenwriters nor the director care to give any of the players any personality. They are only players in a game. If this were all the film had to offer there is no way I could recommend it to anyone — even those who have read this far!

   But the setting, the black and white photography, the atmosphere: all splendid, indeed. A spooky old castle filled with large and well-appointed rooms, staircases spiraling upward in the gloom, a sound and light show without parallel — including a suicidal fall from the highest tower at the climactic moment — hidden motives and fearful, wary eyes, that’s what I will remember, not the very basic story line — not even who the killer is, not at all.

NOTE:   A short three-minute clip can be found on YouTube here.

NIGHTMARE. United Artists, 1956. Kevin McCarthy, Edward G. Robinson, Connie Russell, Virginia Christine, Rhys Williams, Gage Clarke, Marian Carr, Meade “Lux” Lewis, Billy May and His Orchestra. Screenplay by Maxwell Shane, based on a story by Cornell Woolrich. Director: Maxwell Shane. Shown at Cinecon 39, Hollywood CA, Aug-Sept 2003.

    “We welcome Kevin McCarthy with a screening of this nifty noir mystery than (sic) crackles with the sense of paranoia that pervades much of Cornell Woolrich’s fiction.”

   Oh, my. The film was scheduled when the program committee was unable to get permission to show Death of a Salesman. It was neither nifty nor did it crackle, but the Woolrich novel at least provided an interesting plot (musician/composer McCarthy dreams he’s committed a murder and eventually discovers the dream is apparently true), and Robinson, somewhat miscast but making the best of it, plays the detective brother-in-law of McCarthy who sifts through the damning scenario to unravel the plot that has ensnared and almost brings down McCarthy.

   The location filming in New Orleans added some color to the film, and the appearance of Meade Lewis and Billy May spiced the film for their fans.

   McCarthy was interviewed at some length about his film and theater career, and he was less obstreperous as an interview subject than he was reputed to be in his Hollywood years. He’s probably best known for Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but I don’t recall that he had much to say about the film.

   As prolific as Edward D. Hoch was — with over 900 short stories to his credit — the movie and TV media have made virtually no use of his output. The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) lists just 9 films derived from his works (9/900 = 1 percent). No more eloquent testimony against the obtuseness of Hollywood can be adduced.

1. “Off Season.” The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, May 10, 1965. With John Gavin, Richard Jaeckel, and Tom Drake. Based on Hoch’s story “Winter Run,” this is a nice little crime drama with a nasty twist. This show was the final one of the Hitchcock series.

2. It Takes All Kinds. Film, 1969, based on the story “A Girl Like Cathy.” With Robert Lansing, Vera Miles, and Barry Sullivan. Film critic Leonard Maltin describes it this way: “Fair double cross drama about Miles’ shielding of Lansing when he accidentally kills sailor in a brawl in Australia. Nothing special.”

3. “The Ring with the Red Velvet Ropes.” Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, November 5, 1972. With Gary Lockwood, Joan Van Ark, and Chuck Connors. I’m sure I saw this one but don’t remember a thing about it.

    The TV series McMillan & Wife (1971-77) made good use of Hoch’s stories:

4. “Cop of the Year.” November 19, 1972. With Rock Hudson, Susan Saint James, John Schuck, Nancy Walker, and Edmond O’Brien. Based on “The Leopold Locked Room,” with John Schuck’s character doubling for Captain Leopold. Neat little impossible crime plot, with Schuck accused of murdering his ex-wife.

5. “Free Fall to Terror.” November 11, 1973. Guest stars: Edward Andrews, Tom Bosley, Barbara Feldon, John Fiedler, Dick Haymes, James Olson, and Barbara Rhoades. Based on one of Hoch’s best stories (“The Long Way Down”), a businessman evidently crashes through a plate glass window, disappears in mid-air, and hits the ground — three hours later.

6. “The Man without a Face.” January 6, 1974. Guest stars: Dana Wynter, Nehemiah Persoff, Stephen McNally, Donna Douglas, and Steve Forrest. Cold War espionage with a mystery slant.

    The French produced a mini-series in the mid-’70s:

7. Nick Verlaine ou Comment voler la Tour Eiffel. Five episodes, France, July-August 1976. If anybody knows anything about this production, please inform us.

   The British horror/fantasy series Tales of the Unexpected used a couple of Hoch’s stories as inspiration:

8. “The Man at the Top.” June 14, 1980. Introducer: Roald Dahl. With Peter Firth, Rachel Davies, and Dallas Cavell.

9. “The Vorpal Blade.” May 28, 1983. With Peter Cushing, Anthony Higgins, John Bailey, and Andrew Bicknell.

    — and, unless the IMDb list is woefully incomplete, that’s the extent of the film industry’s use of Edward D. Hoch’s stories.

CRIMINAL INVESTIGATOR. Monogram Pictures, 1942. Robert Lowery, Edith Fellows, John Miljan, Jan Wiley, Charles Jordan, George O’Hanlon, Vivian Wilcox. Director: Jean Yarbrough.

   There are a few reasons to watch this terrifically inept murder mystery movie, but the plot is not one of them. In recent months I’ve come to enjoy Robert Lowery’s performances, and seeing juvenile star Edith Fellow’s last movie before her comeback in television in 1949 comes as a distinct pleasure as well. (She was Polly Pepper of Five Little Peppers fame, for example, as well as one of Mrs. Wiggs children in the Cabbage Patch movie.)

   Lowrey’s a brash newspaper reporter in this movie, but he got the job only because his father is the commissioner and he has it only until he messes up, which his editor suspects is going to be right away. But luckily Bob Martin (that’s Lowery), college grad, knows sign language, which he uses to talk to a formerly uncommunicative prisoner after sneaking his way into jail to interview him. Unlucky for him, though, the guy behind the bars pulls a fast one, and uses a phony story to send a message in code to his lawyer.

   Why the elaborate scheme? Don’t ask. Martin’s next assignment is even more mind-boggling. He arrives too late to see Joyce Greeley being released from prison on parole, and she ends up dead, dumped on a suburban lawn and found by Martin as he nonchalantly walks by. Who’s Joyce Greeley, you ask? None other than the girl who was the subject of the coded message in the previous paragraph.

   Wait, wait, there’s more. Martin then happens across the dead man’s sister (Edith Fellows) in the bus station waiting for his sister to show up. Totally by accident, of course, and the sister has no idea why the bad guys are after her, nor even that her sister was in jail. (A propos of nothing, Ellen Farrell was at least a foot shorter than Robert Lowery, but they do make a good team together.)

   Some of the action takes place in a theater where a musical revue is being rehearsed, which gives Jan Wiley a chance to sing a couple of songs while some long-legged beauties show off their talents in the background.

   I’ll give this movie two stars (out of ten) and give you a break by telling you no more about the plot, which I admit had some promise, but as you know full well, not all promises are always kept.

MICHAEL SHAYNE, PRIVATE DETECTIVE. 20th Century Fox, 1940. Screenplay by Stanley Rauh and Manning O’Conner based on the novel Dividend on Death by Brett Halliday. Director: Eugene Forde.

   Lloyd Nolan plays Mike Shayne; Marjorie Weaver is the spirited female protagonist; Joan Valerie plays the femme fatale; Donald MacBride is the irascible, incompetent police chief (Peter Painter) with an even dumber but less irascible sidekick, Michael Morris; Walter Abel, Douglas Dumbrille, Clarence Kolb, and George Meeker impersonate a quartet of heavies and candidates for chief murder suspect.

   Irving Bacon, who was regularly flattened by Arthur Lake as he tried to deliver the mail to the Bumstead residence in the popular Columbia series has a cameo as a fisherman neatly manipulated by Shayne into concealing testimony that would have implicated the latter in the murder.

   This is a race-track, night-club mystery and is notable for two things:

   Some really dumb situations for Shayne (his car stalls at the murder scene as the police are arriving; he throws what he believes to be the murder weapon — his own gun — into the bushes from which he handily retrieves it the next day after the police have presumably searched the area; he sticks his head into a dark room into which a man with a gun has just fled and is knocked out by the mug; and in the hoariest and most predictably resolved plot gimmick in the film, he stages a mock murder using ketchup as blood, and when he attempts to play out his mini-drama, discovers that the ketchup has been enriched with some very real blood, from a fatal bullet wound).

   …And the introduction of a Little Old Lady detective (Elizabeth Patterson) whom he embraces at the end as his “partner” while he whispers to her, “And we’ll split the money.”

   I have not seen one of these Lloyd Nolan Shayne films in forty years. I would hope the others in the series have aged better. Patterson is a graceful actress who makes the best of an awkward role. She has read all the Ellery Queen mysteries and the Baffle Book and she keeps wanting to share a particularly difficult “baffle” with Shayne.

   Superior to The Gracie Allen Murder Case, to take an contemporaneous example, but you may not see that as a recommendation.

ARSÈNE LUPIN. MGM, 1932. John Barrymore, Lionel Barrymore, Karen Morley, John Miljan, Tully Marshall. Adapted from the stage play by Maurice Leblanc and Francis de Croisset. Director: Jack Conway.

   John Barrymore plays Lupin and Lionel Barrymore is Inspector Guerchard, with Karen Morley playing a criminal who agrees to help Guerchard trap Lupin in exchange for her freedom.

   There is some disagreement among, the various characters on the proper pronunciation of “Arsène,” with Lionel the must skillful at mispronouncing it, but this is a charming film climaxed by a spectacular theft of the Mona Lisa from the Louvre.

   Morley, predictably, falls in love with Lupin; the Lupin character is laundered in the final scene to provide a conventional ending, and the transition from play to movie is not always successful. But John Barrymore plays the gentleman master criminal with an ease and casualness that give the film an illusion of freshness and spontaneity, while Morley is a beautiful and elegant foil to the two brothers.

GUILTY AS HELL. Paramount, 1932. Edmund Lowe, Victor McLaglen, Richard Arlen, Adrienne Ames, Henry Stephenson, Elizabeth Patterson. Screenplay by Arthur Kober and Frank Partos, based on the play Riddle Me This by Daniel N. Rubin; photography by Karl Struss. Director: Erie C. Kenton. Shown at Cinevent 40, Columbus OH, May 2008.

   Perennial battling comrades in What Price Glory and its several sequels, Lowe and McLaglen are once again costarred, with Lowe as as a McLaglen-baiting, brash reporter, undercutting police Lt. McLaglen’s murder investigation in an attempt to prove that Richard Arlen did not kill his mistress, wife of a prominent physician played by the cultivated, unflappable Henry Stephenson.

   Richard Arlen is the convicted murderer and Adrienne Ames his sister who believes in his innocence. We see the murder and the framing set-up at the beginning of the film, so there’s no mystery for the audience to solve. Just the pleasure of watching an intricate cat-and-mouse game, with the murderer one step ahead of his pursuers until the final, tense confrontation.

   A fine little crime drama, with the two stars lighting up the screen, with strong contributions by the supporting players, with the possible exception of Richard Arlen, whose lethargic performance Jim Goodrich attributed to miscasting.

LADY ON A TRAIN. Universal Pictures, 1945. Deanna Durbin, Ralph Bellamy, David Bruce, George Coulouris, Allen Jenkins, Dan Duryea, Edward Everett Horton, Jacqueline deWit, Patricia Morison. Original story: Leslie Charteris. Director: Charles David.

   This is a fun little comedy with noir elements, made late in Deanna Durbin’s career when she was trying to escape from the girl next door roles she apparently felt trapped in. After only a few more films she pulled a Garbo and retired from public life. (Durbin later married the film’s director and they retired to live on a farm outside Paris.)

   Debutante Nicki Collins (Durbin) is on a train from San Francisco, on a visit to her aunt. When the train is about to pull into Grand Central Station in New York she glances up from the mystery she is reading and out the window of the train. She sees into the window of the building opposite and watches as a man with his back to her strikes another man in the head with a blunt object.

   When she reaches New York she goes to the police (William Frawley as the desk sergeant) to report a murder but he thinks she is a crank. She contacts Wayne Morgan (David Bruce), the writer of the mystery she was reading, but he doesn’t want to help her either.

   So she decides to investigate on her own. Here she becomes Nancy Drew — she discovers the identity of the victim, and goes to his house, where during the reading of the will she is mistaken for a night club singer who was having an affair with the victim and who also is his major heir.

   She gets to meet the victim’s nutty family and his sinister servants, one of whom may be the killer. This mistake allows her to assume the identity of the singer at the nightclub The Circus and seamlessly sing several numbers including “Night and Day.”

   What is very rare for a movie of the period, she is not the companion of the male writer; she leads the investigation, and shows no fear even when she gets herself into dangerous situations. It doesn’t hurt the story any that she is also very pretty and has a terrific voice.

   The black and white photography is very good, with major noir overtones featuring scenes of dark shadows, unlit rooms, and sections filmed outside at night. About the only drawback to the movie is some very mild racial stereotyping of the writer’s black servant. If you have never seen this before, give it a try.

Rating:   B Plus.