S. S. VAN DINE – The Bishop Murder Case. Charles Scribner’s Sons, US, hardcover, 1929. Cassell, UK, hc, 1929. Reprinted many times in both hardcover and soft, including: Pocket #305, July 1945; Gold Medal T2140, no date given [1970s].

Film: The Bishop Murder Case. MGM, 1930. Basil Rathbone, Lilia Hyams, Roland Young, Delmer Daves. Directors: David Burton & Nick Grinde.

   Of all the criminal cases in which Philo Vance participated as an unofficial investigator, the most sinister, the most bizarre, the most seemingly incomprehensible, and certainly the most terrifying, was the one that followed the famous Greene murders.

   The Bishop Murder Case is not the best of the Philo Vance mysteries, but it is the showpiece of the series, a full out extravaganza that mirrors many of the strengths and weaknesses of the Classic Detective novel of its time — and particularly of the Van Dine brand that became the American model of the Golden Age Detective Story, at a time when Van Dine’s (art critic Wilfrid Huntington Wright) Twenty Rules became as faithfully entrenched on this side of the Atlantic as those of the British Detection Club were on the other.

   The Bishop Murder Case finds the supercilious Philo Vance up against his most dangerous adversary, a Mother Goose Nursery Rhyme killer who calls himself the Bishop, and whose crimes have rhyme, but seemingly no reason.

   With District Attorney Markham, Sgt. Heath, and Dr. Doremus, the dour Medical Examiner, in tow and loyal secretary Van Dine recording it all, Vance plunges right into the murder of Joseph Cochraine Robin, by arrow at the Riverside Archery Club, who died shortly after meeting with Raymond Sperling, Sperling being German for sparrow.

   The clues lead them to the home of Professor Dillard which runs alongside the Archery Club, and an intellectual who’s who of suspects including a physicist, an astronomer, a mathematician, and a chess master.

   And we’re off with a second murder out of Mother Goose as John Sprigg is murdered.

   Clues include a knowledge of Ibsen’s plays, and the Reiman-Christofell Tensor for determining the Gausian curvature of spherical and homolodial space… And it wouldn’t hurt if you were familiar with world class chess, abnormal psychology, the Einstein-Bohr theory of radiation, and the implications of modern mathematical theory that would boggle the mind of Newton and Leibnitz…

   But knowing who the killer is and proving it are two different things, and after the rescue of the young victim of the next planned killing, Little Miss Muffet, Vance turns to the most high-handed action since the great days of Sherlock Holmes to unveil the killer and serve justice, resulting in perhaps the most famous passage in the Vance canon:

   If there is a more perfect example of the Nietzschean superman as detective other than M.P. Shiel’s Prince Zaleski I can’t think of one.

   The film with Basil Rathbone as Vance is a major disappointment. Rathbone is flat and reserved as Vance (and it’s hard to take him seriously in that bowler hat), and despite some decent attempts at atmosphere, the whole Mother Goose nursery rhyme motif is used to little effect. It certainly can’t hold a candle to the William Powell Vance films from the same period. Incidentally the Delmer Daves listed in the credits is the future director of films such as 3:10 to Yuma and Jubal.

The Bishop Murder Case hasn’t so much as a moment of reality in it. It is the classic detective novel in its most artificial form, but it is also, for all of its posing and intellectual pretense, a splendid example of the form and Van Dine and Vance at close to their best.

   The Greene Murder Case is likely the best puzzle and formal detective novel of the Vance canon, but Bishop is more fun. Reading it you may understand why Philo Vance once dominated the field and influenced such major writers as Ellery Queen, Rex Stout, and Anthony Abbot.

   Nash may well have been right, but I think for this one, both he and Van Dine also deserve to take a well deserved bow — without risking that inviting boot to the rear end. The Bishop Murder Case is the game played full out and to splendid effect.

THE MAN WITH THE CLOAK. MGM, 1951. Joseph Cotten, Barbara Stanwyck, Louis Calhern, Leslie Caron, Joe De Santis, Jim Backus, Margaret Wycherly. Based on the story “The Gentleman from Paris,” by John Dickson Carr. Director: Fletcher Markle.

   When I watched this movie late last month, it had to have been for the first time in over 50 years, probably back then as a film on late-night TV. I had good memories of it, and even though I discovered that I’d completely forgotten the basics of the plot line, the memories I had held up fairly well — surprisingly so, in fact.

   What I remembered most: Joseph Cotten as a shabbily elegant, almost perfect player of a dissolute poet in Manhattan who befriends a young girl from Paris (Leslie Caron) with a letter from her fiancé to his uncle, whom she’s come to visit. Cotten goes by the name of Dupin in the movie, but we all know better, don’t we? Back in the late 1950s, I’m not so sure I did!

   The uncle (an aged Louis Calhern) is almost as close a friend to drink as Dupin, even though he knows it will kill him.

   He is equally suspicious of his three servants, primarily Lorna Bounty, his housekeeper (Barbara Stanwyck), a faded beauty whose eyes simply glitter with anger and resentment when she sees the prize for which she’s worked so long (his money) for about to be whisked away by this bravely innocent chit of a girl (another fine performance).

   I thought (this time) the setting fine, the dialogue most excellent and the pace slow, but not so much so as to be annoying.

   The bit about Dupin finding a missing will (from the actions of a dying man unable to speak or move more than his head) I found not as satisfying as I might have at an earlier age. I may have to read the story again to see if the movie people improved upon it, or the contrary. I suspect the latter.

DAY OF WRATH. 2006. Christopher Lambert, Brian Blessed, Blanca Marsillach, Szonja Oroszlán, James Faulkner, Phillida Law. Written and directed by Adrian Rudomin.

    This has nothing to do with the classic Carl Theodor Dreyer film Der Vredens Tag (1943), but instead is a Hungarian production that’s set in Spain of 1542, fifty years into the Inquisition and its terrors.

   Taking place in a world of opulence and degradation and the excesses of religious zealotry, the film is supposedly based on a true story.

    Lambert plays Ruy de Mendoza, a minor noble, and the newly appointed sheriff of a Spanish province, who finds his life and that of his family at risk when he refuses to ignore a murder on his watch.

    Despite efforts by everyone, including the governor, Lord Francisco del Ruiz (Brian Blessed) to the head of the Inquisition Friar Anselmo (James Faulkner) to keep a conspiracy of silence, Mendoza pushes forward in his investigation.

    In the world of Spain during the Inquisition, birthright was everything, and the slightest taint of Jewish blood was a ticket to financial ruin, torture, and a heretic’s death by fire.

    As Mendoza delves into the mystery, he begins to uncover secrets he should not know and a conspiracy among the leader of the local Inquisition to extort money from noble families with the Jewish taint — including the newly appointed and vainglorious governor, but the truth is darker and more complex than mere religious persecution and zeal.

    A series of murders with the letters D R (for the Latin Day of Wrath) carved into the victims is related to these secrets, and massive keys left on the bodies are part of the answer.

    Finally Mendoza has to put his duty and his family against his blood and his honor in order to survive.

    This is an attractive film, and the story is fascinating, but the script is disjointed and despite some interesting touches (at one point Lambert uses an early form of ballistics to identify a bullet used in a murder), it doesn’t hold together.

    Day of Wrath is a decent time passer, a B movie at heart, with a few “A” touches in costuming and set decoration.

    There is a bit of nice swordplay, a hint of sex, and a masked killer in black and silver, but a better script and direction would have been more helpful in dealing with a conspiracy this complex and with problems this dark.

    The movie ends in a blood bath and a new conspiracy with Lambert’s Mendoza at its head, as it only could, but you have to wish a surer hand had been at the helm. Even with its flaws, there is a good idea here. It just lacks the skilled input needed to develop it fully.

    And I couldn’t help but think while watching it, it might have made a better novel than movie. A little structure would have been a major improvement.

    

THE CIRCUS QUEEN MURDER. Columbia, 1933. Adolphe Menjou, Greta Nissen, Ruthelma Stevens, Dwight Frye, Donald Cook, Harry Holman, George Rosener. Based on the novel About the Murder of the Circus Queen (1932) by Anthony Abbot. Director: Roy William Neill.

   More stylish than Dear Murderer [recently reviewed here ] but less intelligent, The Circus Queen Murder offers Adolphe Menjou as Anthony Abbott’s Thatcher Colt, crusading District Attorney essaying that pre-doomed enterprise, a vacation from crime.

   Colt and his Gal Friday (An actress with the unlikely name Ruthelma Stevens, very good in a Glenda-Farrell-ish way.) quickly hook up with a traveling circus that just as quickly turns into one of those hotbeds of passion celebrated in cheap movies and paper-backs: threats, killing, more threats, murder and impersonating-a-cannibal ensue before things sort themselves out.

   Under the sure hand of director Roy William Neill (he of Universal’s “Sherlock Holmes” series) this moves along quickly and with a certain amount of class, filled with catchy camera angles and some surprisingly subtle touches.

   I particularly liked Stevens reporting a conversation to the investigators: “He called her a lying little [micro-pause] cheat,” and a few minutes later, Menjou looks at her knowingly and says, “So he called her a lying little [same micro-pause] cheat, did he?” leaving our fertile minds to conjecture just what he really called her.

   Unfortunately, there’s more style than sense here. I kept waiting for the legendary Thatcher Colt to come up with some brilliant deduction, surprise us with some clever twist or maybe just shoot something, but (WARNING!) there are no bombshells here: no surprise about the killer, the victim, none of that, and we pretty much just watch Adolphe Menjou watch things turn out the way they would have if he’d never stepped in.

   Something does finally lift Circus Queen out of its rut, though, and that’s Dwight Frye, the spiritual progenitor of Elisha Cook Jr. and a cult actor if ever there was one, here cast perfectly as the maniacal cuckold.

   Frye was perhaps a limited actor, but he was unforgettable in Dracula and Frankenstein, and here, given a meaty part, he takes it in his teeth and runs with it, turning this into a pretty satisfying time.

DEAR MURDERER. General Films, UK, 1947; Universal, US, 1948. Eric Portman, Greta Gynt, Dennis Price, Jack Warner, Maxwell Reed, Hazel Court, Jane Hylton. Director: Arthur Crabtree.

   By one of those fruity coincidences that happen only in real life, I followed up Othello [with my comments posted here] with two movies about cuckolds driven to murder.

   The first of these, Dear Murderer, offers Eric Portman as a clever but self-deluded husband out to win back his wife’s affections by murdering her seducer — and getting the victim to help him plan the crrime.

   What follows is a twisty-turny cat-and-mouse game between the killer, his victim, his wife and the police, done with wit and sophistication in the vein of Dial M for Murder, which it pre-dated by five years.

   To say any more about the story would give away secrets, but I should mention that the writing, playing and direction are all first-rate.

   Based on a play by St John Legh Clowes, who adapted No Orchids for Miss Blandish for the screen, and scandalized England in the process, Murderer moves along beautifully, with a twist in the story every ten minutes or so, but it’s the acting that really gets attention: Eric Portman and Dennis Price play killer and victim as if they’d just stepped out of an Oscar Wilde comedy, with civilized manners that border on savagery.

   Maxwell Reed and Hazel Court offer a nice counterpoint as innocent lovers caught up in all this, and the real standout is Greta Gynt as a disputed-wife-cum-femme-fatale.

   Writer Clowes and actress Gynt take a standard noir figure and create a portrait, not so much evil as sinfully self-indulgent: delightfully annoyed at a plot that interrupts her own pleasure, and rather fetchingly flattered by the notion that her husband would kill for her.

   A compelling turn in a film I recommend highly.

CRIME BY NIGHT. Warner Brothers, 1944. Jane Wyman, Jerome Cowan, Faye Emerson, Charles Lang, Eleanor Parker, Stuart Crawford, Cy Kendall, Charles Wilson. Based on the novel Forty Whacks by Geoffrey Homes (Daniel Mainwaring). Director: William Clemens.

   All of the fire power in this 1940s private eye movie is on the female side: Jane Wyman, who receives top billing: four Oscar nominations, one win (Johnny Belinda, 1948); Faye Emerson: two Emmy nominations; three Oscar nominations, one Emmy nomination, one Golden Globe nomination.

   Jerome Cowan, who plays PI Sam Campbell (named Humphrey Campbell in the book), gets my nomination in a Top Five William Powell look-alike contest, but he has little else going for him but more than enough charm to get by. I regret to say that I haven’t read the book itself, unless I read it long ago when it was reprinted in paperback by Bantam as Stiffs Don’t Vote way back in 1947, so I can’t tell you one way or another about the similarities (or the lack thereof), but one thing I can tell you is that there’s plenty of plot.

   And not all that much comedy relief, I am relieved to be able to tell you, but Cy Kendall as the semi-corrupt local Sheriff Max Ambers, overweight and alternately a jovially unctuous sycophant then a resentful small town cop, nearly steals the show. Sam Campbell is supposed to be the kind of guy who girls can’t keep their eyes off of, including the girl at the hotel switchboard who can’t keep her eyes on the job, but I’ve decided to simply chalk that up as just another Hollywood fiction.

   Dead is the father of Campbell’s client’s ex-wife, with whom he’d had a vicious argument some time ago (and losing a hand by means of an axe in that particular incident).

   This is motive enough, one supposes, and according to the local law, it is, but (a) clients are supposed to be innocent, and (b) there is another matter of some secret chemical formulas that are missing as well.

   There is a pretty good attempt on the killer’s part to leave both a false trail and a delightful assortment of false clues. As I say, there’s plenty of plot, and plenty to enjoy in this movie, another highlight of which is …

   I forgot to tell you. Jane Wyman plays Robbie Vance, Sam Campbell’s very charming and very possessive assistant in this movie, and you should see the claws come out when she thinks Faye Emerson’s character is poaching on her territory. Rowrrrr …

              

[UPDATE]   Later the same day.   As soon as I can get to it, I’ll post Bill Pronzini’s review of Forty Whacks from 1001 Midnights. As I suspected, there’s only a brushing acquaintance between the book and movie, or as my family used to say when I was growing up, they’re only shirttail cousins.

   On TCM tomorrow, an all-day marathon. They’ve shown these movies many times before, but here’s your chance to watch (or record) them back to back to back …

         Monday, October 5th —

6:00 AM Whistler, The (1944)
A grieving widower hires an assassin to kill him only to have his late wife turn up alive. Cast: Richard Dix, J. Carrol Naish, Gloria Stuart. Dir: William Castle. BW-60 mins, TV-PG

7:15 AM Power of the Whistler, The (1945)
A young woman seeks an amnesiac’s true identity in the clues in his pockets. Cast: Richard Dix, Janis Carter, Jeff Donnell. Dir: Lew Landers. BW-66 mins, TV-PG

8:30 AM Voice of the Whistler (1945)
A dying millionaire marries his nurse for companionship, only to experience a miracle cure. Cast: Richard Dix, Lynn Merrick, Rhys Williams. Dir: William Castle. BW-60 mins, TV-PG

9:45 AM Mysterious Intruder, The (1946)
A detective discovers the woman he’s been hired to track down is the key to an unusual inheritance. Cast: Richard Dix, Barton MacLane, Nina Vale. Dir: William Castle. BW-62 mins.

11:00 AM Secret of the Whistler, The (1946)
An artist plots murder when his rich wife when she catches him in an affair with one of his models. Cast: Richard Dix, Leslie Brooks, Michael Duane. Dir: George Sherman. BW-64 mins, TV-PG

12:15 PM Return of the Whistler, The (1948)
When a woman goes missing on the eve of her wedding, her fiancee hires a detective to track her down. Cast: Michael Duane, Lenore Aubert, Richard Lane. Dir: D. Ross Lederman. BW-63 mins, TV-PG

1:30 PM Whistling In The Dark (1941)
A radio detective is kidnapped and forced to plan the perfect murder. Cast: Red Skelton, Ann Rutherford, Conrad Veidt. Dir: S. Sylvan Simon. BW-78 mins, TV-G, CC

3:00 PM Whistling In Dixie (1942)
A radio detective’s southern honeymoon is cut short by the discovery of a murder. Cast: Red Skelton, Ann Rutherford, George Bancroft. Dir: S. Sylvan Simon. BW-74 mins, TV-G, CC

4:15 PM Whistling In Brooklyn (1943)
A radio sleuth infiltrates the Brooklyn Dodgers to solve a murder. Cast: Red Skelton, Ann Rutherford, “Rags” Ragland. Dir: S. Sylvan Simon. BW-87 mins, TV-G, CC

THE CRIME OF THE CENTURY. Paramount, 1933; Jean Hersholt, Wynne Gibson, Stuart Erwin, Frances Dee, Gordon Westcott, Robert Elliott, David Landau, William Janney. Screenplay adapted by Florence Ryerson from the play The Grootman Case by Walter Maria Espe Director: William Beaudine. Shown at Cinevent 41, Columbus OH, May 2009.

   Jean Hersholt, a well-known “alienist,” comes to the police to beg them to arrest him. If they don’t, he is going to kill a man, one of his patients who works for a bank and whom he’s ordered while under hypnosis to bring him 100,000 dollars.

   (This would appear to contradict what I have always understood about hypnosis, which is that subjects won’t obey orders that are against their basic nature. But I suppose that the doctor knows his patient better than I do.)

   The cast of characters consists of an adulterous wife, a nosy reporter, two very incidental servants, a missing son, and the wife’s lover who seems to be almost everybody’s choice for the killer.

   This is not one of those legendary Paramount pictures that turn out to be long unseen gems, but a stagey, hokey melodrama that not even some good actors can save. Not a bomb, but a bottom-of-the-bill filler.

THREE GIRLS ABOUT TOWN. Columbia, 1941. Joan Blondell, Robert Benchley,, Binnie Barnes, Janet Blair, John Howard, Hugh O’Connell, Frank McGlynn Sr., Eric Blore. Director: Leigh Jason.

    What this movie is, if I may be allowed to say so, is a screwball comedy that is not only not screwball, but for the most of its 75 minutes of running length, not even funny.

    Robert Benchley always cracks me up, though, no matter what movie he’s in, and as Wilburforce Puddle, the manager of the hotel for which Joan Blondell and Binnie Barnes work, he’s no exception here. Even his name is funny.

    Joan Blondell and Binnie Barnes (as Faith and Hope Banner) are hostesses for the hotel, which caters to conventions, but the wholesome kind. One wonders, though, what the local women’s civic league thinks they have been doing, marching in on the manager to deliver their complaints in person.

    Puddle has other problems. There is a magicians’ convention that is just closing, and a morticians’ convention that is coming in, and never the co-mingling should meet. Not to mention the upstairs ballroom where a defense-oriented corporation and an angry employees union are waiting for a government mediator to arrive, and worst of all, a dead man in the room next to our two ladies.

    Whose sister has just arrived, naturally named Charity (Janet Blair, in her debut film), who’s delinquent from the school where they’re sending her and a delinquent in more ways than that, the way she has eyes for Faith’s fiancé, who’s in the hotel covering the labor battle but who discovers that he has another story on his hands, if the body would ever stay in one place long enough for the police to do anything about it. (Charity also gets what’s coming to her at the end of the movie. Rather remarkably, too, that’s all I can say.)

    Getting back to the main proceedings, also worth mentioning is the wandering Charlemagne, a drunken magician (Eric Blore) who interrupts the proceedings looking for his good friend Charlie wherever the laughs seem to be dying out — which is something like every five minutes.

    It is hard to say what exactly goes wrong, that this movie isn’t more fun than it should be. Everyone tries hard, but it’s tough slogging when the jokes just aren’t as funny as whoever thought them up thought they were. Either that, or my taste in humor and theirs just don’t jibe.

CASTLE IN THE DESERT. 20th Century-Fox, 1942. Sidney Toler (Charlie Chan), Arleen Whelan, Richard Derr, Douglass Dumbrille, Henry Daniell, Edmund MacDonald, Victor Sen Yung (Jimmy Chan). Based on characters created by Earl Derr Biggers. Director: Harry Lachman.

   Fox Movie Channel has decided to air the Charlie Chan films after all, and everyone should take advantage of this chance to see a really fine print of Castle in the Desert, Fox’s last Chan film and one of the best, thanks to the astute direction of Harry Lachman.

   Lachman was a French Impressionist painter who fled Europe ahead of the Nazis and found work in Hollywood, mostly at 20th Century-Fox. He stayed primarily in B-movies, not all of them much good, but his work showed a consistently interesting visual style and fluid pacing that elevated many a pre-doomed project (such as Dr. Renault’s Secret, a Mad Scientist meller in which Arthur Shields(!) plays a French Gendarme).

   His Dante’s Inferno (1939) is particularly interesting: the film itself is a rather awkward rise-and-fall-of-Spencer-Tracy morality tale, built around ten minutes of silent footage of Hell from an old Italian movie (hence the title), but Lachman’s handling of scenes in Tracy’s fun-house, and a shipboard fire prove more interesting than celluloid Hell itself.

   Getting back to Castle in the Desert, it is, as I said, a pretty entertaining effort, what with Lachman’s punchy direction, a clever script (including a surprisingly intelligent use of the old guy-hiding-in-a-suit-of-armor gag) and the presence of Henry Daniell and Douglas Dumbrille, giving it their sinister all as suspects in the game.

   Dumbrille especially seems to enjoy himself here, given a part slightly more sympathetic than normal. He was — like Laurence Harvey — one of those actors who never made any claim on our sympathy, but where Harvey came across as emotionally constipated, Dumbrille was always just stuffy; except in his personal life, where at age 70 he married the 28-year-old daughter of his friend and fellow-actor, Alan Mowbray.