Tue 8 May 2012
Movie Review: THE HAT BOX MYSTERY (1947).
Posted by Steve under Mystery movies , Reviews[17] Comments
THE HAT BOX MYSTERY. Screen Art Pictures, 1947. Tom Neal, Pamela Blake, Allen Jenkins, Virginia Sale. Director: Lambert Hillyer.
There are a few remarkable things about this 45 minute movie, and the first is that it is a 45 minute movie, obviously the quick second half of a double feature on a Saturday matinee. The second remarkable thing is the opening scene, in which the four above-mentioned actors introduce themselves to the viewing audience and the characters they play. I’ll get back to that in a minute.
One other remarkable thing, at least to me, is that this movie was produced and appeared in 1947. While watching it, I was assuming all way through that it was a much earlier film, one from perhaps around the time that Chester Morris was beginning his run of Boston Blackie pictures (1941), but no. It must have been the story line, which is straight from the budget B-mystery movies of the even earlier 1930s.
Tom Neal plays private eye Rush Ashton, while Pamela Blake is his girl friend, secretary and assistant, Susan Hart. Allen Jenkins is “Harvard,” no last name given as I recall, is Ashton’s second-in-command, strangely enough, since “Harvard,” unable to get into Yale, seems barely able to steer himself across the street, where his girl friend Veronica Hoopler (Virginia Sale) owns and operates a hamburger joint.
Not too surprisingly, it is only Miss Hoopler who has any common business sense, as it is from her that Ashton’s struggling PI agency must keep borrowing money to keep afloat. You must have come to the thought by now that at least half of this movie is played as a comedy, and if I’d kept track, I’d be willing to say that you are correct.
Here’s the mystery portion: While Ashton is out of town on another case, a man in obvious disguise (glasses, phoney goatee) hires Susan to take his wife’s photograph with a camera disguised in turn as a hat box.
Little does Susan know, but happily accepting the man’s thirty dollars, that inside the hat box is not a camera, but a gun.
I’ll not say more. But surprisingly enough, Ashton does do some detective work in the case, the D.A. not being all that unfriendly, and the story is not a total disaster. If the script had been been revised so that the clues could have incorporated more into the story, instead of lumped into one great expository dump at the end — more viewers probably having figured it all out on their own anyway — this movie might have been — a contender? No, but something better than the (in all likelihood) throwaway second half of a double feature.
Also surprisingly enough, the four players got to play the same roles all over again the following month, in a follow-up film titled The Case of the Baby-Sitter. While The Hat Box Mystery is readily available on DVD, copies of the second movie do not seem to exist, although one reviewer on IMDB must have seen it, as he complains in passing that Allen Jenkins may have gotten more screen time than Tom Neal.
That’s rather discouraging news, but if a copy came along, would I watch? I don’t know what this says about me, but you bet I would.
[UPDATE] 05-08-12. This review was first posted on this blog on May 30, 2008. I’ve bumped it up in time because a lively discussion has been taking place in the comments section over the last day or so. Not only has the conversation been lively, but it’s also been very informative. I thought the rest of you might like to know about it, rather than keep it buried, as it were, nearly four years in the past. I’ve altered and (hopefully) improved the selection of images, too.
May 7th, 2012 at 12:30 pm
To anyone scrolling here, greetings from May 2012!
Seriously, I was scrolling back here, looking for items of interest that I might have missed back in the day, and lo and behold, I find this!
Since no one commented back in 2008, I’ll now chime in with the news(?) that The Caes Of The Baby Sitter is indeed available on DVD as part of VCI’s Forgetten Noir Collection, Vol. – forgot which volume, either 3 or 4 *darndarndarndarndarn*
I havent watched it all the way through, but I can tell you that it’s also 45 mins., is heavy on Allen Jenkins’s comedy, and shares almost identical tech credits.
The short running time combined with the ’47 release date set me to wondering:
Could the producers have possibly been anticipating the slowly burgeoning arrival of television? A 45-minute movie with commercials added would come to just about an hour, which would be long for 1947-TV, but might pass as planning ahead.
This would fit in with theories we’ve all been developing ath the threads about Eddie Drake/Jeffrey Jones and other such early TV shows.
And it is a fact that short second features were among the first properties to be sold to TV stations as quick-&-easy timefillers.
I remember seeing The Hat-Box Mystery late one night on a low-budget UHF station circa the mid-60s (might have been ch26, as I referenced in another thread); it fit a TV hour like a glove.
So now let’s see how far back newcomers to this site go when they get curious …
May 7th, 2012 at 2:14 pm
Or have comments on a RSS feed.
Mike, I agree with your thoughts. TV was experimenting with all forms, so both could have been made with an eye on TV.
But 47 minutes may have been too long for TV. This was the period of 15 minute and 30 minute shows, with many believing the TV audience would not be able to handle watching one show for more than thirty minutes.
It took awhile for series TV to attempt the 60 minute story that was not a movie or play.
Could HAT BOX and BABYSITTER have been made at the same time? I remember reading that some production companies paid the cast and crew for a certain amount of days and if one film finished with days still left, the producers would do a second film using the same cast and crew, often with cast billing flipped.
May 7th, 2012 at 5:13 pm
Of course, 30 minutes was then the outside mark for show length (at least for drama) back in ’47. That’s what I meant by “planning ahead”. The rules were just coming into form; whether theatrical movies would become likely TV fare was still up in the air, and the hour-long programmers were under scrutiny for such use. Thus, a Poverty Row outfit like Screen Art might offer up Hat Box and Baby Sitter as – what shall we call it? – a new form for the new medium – sort of like “novelettes for television”.
It would follow that the two shorties would most likely have been filmed back-to-back, much as many early half-hour series were, in the time-honored Poverty Row tradition.
If there were ever a ripe field for research, this would be it. But where do you start? The companies involved are for the most part long defunct, the films are long since in public domain, and the makers, both in front of and behind the cameras, are disappearing.
It seems that the only ones interested are civilians like us, who fill these blogs with our semi-educated guesses. It’s fun to play detective with these movies … but it’d sure be a blast to know, wouldn’t it?
May 7th, 2012 at 7:23 pm
I agree, though sometimes the fun of mysteries is the guessing and the answer can be a letdown.
My frustration is when we do know the answer such as watching EDDIE DRAKE and JEFFREY JONES and seeing there was no connection, only then to have the databases ignore us.
Due to poor health and location, I am limited in my research and enjoy seeing others such as you add to what I have found. I begin at Wikipedia. It gives me the common knowledge about the show and more important, it can cite its sources. That was where I found the Darren McGavin site that was great for my review of THE OUTSIDER. Then IMDb for episode guides and cast. Then TV.com or TV Tango to confirm IMDb. The “Broadcasting” magazine and “Billboard”. The I use the google search at google books. Then a general search. I watch all the episodes I can find. Then do the review.
I wished I still lived in Los Angeles and was able to visit UCLA and Paley Center. Many of the answers could be there or in the trades archives. I would love to spend my day watching old shows and doing episode guides.
1947 is considered the birth of network TV. But network TV was like baseball was then, regional – each with its own history. People have looked at the East with NBC, DuMont, CBS, and finally ABC; but the West and especially the Mid-West and South have been too often ignored.
Then there was the period before the TV network of stations. There are books about the evolution of TV as a device, as a business; but too few examining the evolution of the program.
I can only hope more complete archives get to the internet. The Los Angeles “Times” archive has been available, then not, then for a fee, then for a fee with the archive incomplete. I need to see where they stand now as they are considering following the NY “Times” and be a some free/ some fee site.
But, yeah…it is a lot of fun 🙂
May 8th, 2012 at 11:37 am
May we take a brief break from the wailing wall?
Last night I went to my DVD wall to look up Hat Box & Babysitter, thta I might double-check my assertions above.
As noted, Babysitter is in one of VCI’s Forgotten Noir And Crime collections – the third set, to be specific.
The VCI collections come mainly from Lippert Pictures: Hat Box and Baby Sitter, but many others that share common casts and credit lists.
In particular, I call your attention to three Lipperts from 1951: Danger Zone, Pier 23, and I can’t think of the third one *darndarndarndarndarn*.
All three star Hugh Beaumont as Denny O’Brien, who runs a boat shop/private eye service at the eponymous Pier, while sharing BOQ with a tosspot ex-professor played by Ed Brophy.
Here’s the point of interest: each of the one-hour films contains two stories – half an hour each.
Add to that that the source of this series is Jack Webb’s old Johnny Modero – Pier 23 radio show (one of the VCI sets includes a Modero episode for comparison purposes) –
– well, there are the dots, waiting to be connected.
As with the movies mentioned above, the tech credits are virtually identical, indicating that the filmings were, if not simultaneous, at least tightly consecutive.
The year is 1951, so TV has pretty much taken root, while the double feature is slowly vanishing. Lippert would seem to be retooling his operations, with a clear eye on TV for the immediate future.
Unless, of course, I’m wrong …
So, Michael Shonk, if you don’t already have these VCI collections, a ton of phun awaits.
The sets include many fun features, mainly about the Lippert stars like Hugh Beaumont, Richard Travis, Pamela Blake, Sheila Ryan, and the ever-popular Tom Neal, among others.
And on that cheery note …
May 8th, 2012 at 11:41 am
And right after I hit submit, I remembered the name of the third Hugh Beaumont-Denny O’Brien movie:
Roaring City.
Beaumont, Brophy, and the whole Lippert gang in two half-hour mysteries for the price of one hour-long programmer.
What more could you want?
May 8th, 2012 at 2:39 pm
Over at one of my collector to collector site I visit (Thomas Film Classics) they offer all three and claim PIER 23 was sold to TV and as a theatrical release.
The fifties were a time when TV series would stick episodes together for release to drive thru movie theaters and overseas.
But these were 30 minute episodes stuck together. The 1947 shows at 47 minutes, two minutes over exactly half of 90 minute movie time, leads me to believe the original intent was movie theaters, but then creatively sold to desperate TV stations.
The 47 minutes plus commercial would not make an hour because there was not enough advertisers to sustain it. Hour programming at the time lasted longer than 47 minutes.
1947 NBC and DuMont had a TV schedule. 1948 CBS joined. ABC was later. 1952 TV syndication exploded as the FCC ban on new TV stations ended and stations popped up everywhere.
What happened leading up to 1952 was all new and with few rules. Anything and everything was tried. Maybe someone needs to do a book about Lippert.
May 8th, 2012 at 5:01 pm
For What It’s Worth (as Paul Harvey used to say {and on another plane possibly still does}):
Back in the early days of commercial tv, the commercial weren’t always strictly limited to one minute. Many of tv’s earliest advertisers bought their time by the half-hour, and if the surrounding program didn’t fill the whole time, they were more than happy to make up the difference by expanding their sales pitches. Automobile dealers were particularly astute at this, especially within the contexts of live variety and wrestling shows.
In the case of the low-budget movies that were the first ones made available to the new medium, the time allotted for sales was always remarkably flexible; all that mattered was getting on and off on the clock.
Car dealers weren’t the only ones who worked this way; many of tv’s early advertisers bought blocks of time to hawk their wares – and if they didn’t have a program to show, they just sold the stuff for the whole half-hour (in case you thought the infomercial was a development of the recent past; anybody my age who remembers the name “Charles Antell” can tell you otherwise).
And that’s our history lesson for today!
(See what happens when you get me started?)
May 8th, 2012 at 5:51 pm
And who wants you to stop?
So what do you think HAT and BABYSITTER was more likely made for, the double feature/drive-in market or TV market or with the idea for both?
May 8th, 2012 at 9:45 pm
By going to theTCM web site and searching Tom Neal some interesting pieces of insight emerge. The guess is the films were done concurrently and as part of a potential series, film not television. They appear to have been shot over an eight or ten day span.
May 8th, 2012 at 11:49 pm
Barry got me wondering what my research sources said about these two short films.
There is a great deal of information about Robert Lippert. I would wish there was a bio of his life working low budget genre films all his life.
But here is our answer, from “Famous Movie Detectives II Volume 2” by Michael R. Pitts, “While THE HAT BOX MURDERS got the Screen Guild series off to a good start, the second featurette THE CASE OF THE BABY SITTER was so poor that it brought the grouping to a halt.”
The book quotes from the “Variety” review of BABY SITTER which hated it.
Screen Gems dropped the Russ Ashton (Tom Neal) movie series.
May 9th, 2012 at 10:18 am
This answer is based on:
– The timeline: 1947 (when the broadcast networks started to form their regional tv networks) to 1951 (when the regional tv nets finally were connected coast-to-coast):
– What I’ve been able to learn about Robert Lippert.
Lippert was owner of a chain of theaters – an exhibitor, and thus attuned to box office action. He’d have known that once WWII ended, television (which had been on hold during the war years) would be primed to take off – slowly at first, then gaining momentum as it went national. As both exhibitor and producer, he would keep an eye on how his own pix were doing at the gate, particularly in cities (like Chicago) where tv was first taking hold, as well as those regions that couldn’t get a signal yet.
As exhibitor, Lippert also would be aware that the Big Studios were fighting tv, and actually believed that it wouldn’t last.
So the answer is: Both. A smart man always hedges his bets.
And as things turned out, Lippert was right.
As to the Tom Neal-Allen Jenkins series, attribute that to missed timing.
A few years later, with the split-hour format used in the Hugh Beaumont-“Denny O’Brien” movies, they might have had slightly better luck.
Of course, if they’d waited just a couple more years, they could have all regrouped and gone for weekly syndicated tv, as Ziv and others were doing.
(And maybe Tom Neal could have dodged his later fate by becoming a tv star instead of a second-feature has-been …)
*or not*
Thanx to Steve for the location upgrade.
Mr. Shonk and I can look at this and say “We did that!”
May 9th, 2012 at 11:55 am
Both is a good answer.
Lippert was one of Hollywood’s stereotype producers, always hustling the next deal. But in 1948, he was interested in moving up in the movie producing world. He signed Sam Fuller to a three picture deal. The pictures were I SHOT JESSE JAMES, THE BARON OF ARIZONA, and STEEL HELMET.
He worked with Screen Gems, releasing mainly 60-65 minute Westerns and other genres, designed for the second half of the bill. The budget was usually around $75,000 – $100,000, with no stars, and shot in three weeks or less.
After Screen Gems, he worked with 20th Century Fox under his Regal banner. There he played a role in the making of the original THE FLY.
“Billboard” 3/29/52 reports Lippert had made a deal of 19 features produced in 1949-50 to TV. He could no longer produce films as he owed SAG (actor’s union) money.
At 19 he wanted to marry a 17 year old girl whose father objected. It went before a judge who asked the father why he wanted to stop the marriage. The father said they were too young and Lippert did not have a steady job. Lippert pulled $2000 in cash out of his pocket and asked the father how much he had.
Lippert had a long career and was loyal to his workers. A very interesting man of his time.
As for the Tom Neal series. I am sure Lippert sold it to TV, he was a deal maker more than movie producer. But Russ Ashton was a movie series sold to TV, where Denny O’Brien was a TV series sold to theaters.
From “Death On the Cheap: The Lost B Movies of Film Noir” by Arthur Lyons, “Another company that cropped up in the late 1940s and that was devoted solely to the production of cheap B movies was Screen Guild/Lippert Pictures.”
And it is nice to see how powerful the Mike group is here (with valuable help from a Barry whose middle name is most likely Mike).
May 9th, 2012 at 11:56 am
Mike, Michael and Barry
Thank you all for the comments, reference notes and well thought out hypotheses. It’s all been fun to read. I’m sorry I haven’t had time to add anything myself, but between you three, you’ve covered all the bases.
I now have that DVD collection of Forgotten Noir films that contains TCOT BABY SITTER, but I haven’t watched it yet. From the sound of it, its only saving grace may be that it’s so short. Sometimes Forgotten Noir films are better off forgotten.
Back in Comment #4, Michael said:
“My frustration is when we do know the answer such as watching EDDIE DRAKE and JEFFREY JONES and seeing there was no connection, only then to have the databases ignore us.”
This is true. I’ve been able to add links from IMDB to the reviews on this blog, but when I’ve tried to add or correct basic factual information there, I’ve been ignored. Perhaps some persistence is needed, and/or better knowledge of the proper formatting.
I have a Wikipedia account, and I used to make corrections there, but the people who monitor the pages there are really adverse to anyone using blogs as a source of reference. It takes time, but they can be persuaded.
Some time ago, though, I decided the time I had to spend on this blog was better spent doing this blog. I wish I could do more, but at the moment, more is out of reach.
May 9th, 2012 at 5:09 pm
Screen Guild was the company Robert Lippert hooked up with to release his theatrical films.
Screen Gems was the brand that Columbia Pictures used, at first for some of its off-brand theatrical shorts, then around 1950 (approximate – correction welcomed) for its early television productions.Indeed, Columbia held onto that name all the way to about 1970; Jackie Cooper, who was running the operation at that time, tried to get the Columbia brass to change it, but that didn’t happen until after he left the company.
“… and the hits just keep on comin’ …”
May 9th, 2012 at 5:38 pm
I may have to start proofreading my comments with the intensity I do my reviews…or have Steve do it.
Oh, there is this from “Billboard” (1/30/54), Robert Lippert Productions owned Tele-Pictures. Tele-Pictures was run by Joseph Smith. Lippert used it to sell his movie work to TV. The report was about Lippert’s decision to sell Tele-Pictures. The interesting part was Smith had been trying to convince Libbert to take his experience making low budget movies and produce TV shows. Lippert had always refused, “his allegiance steadfastly remained with theatrical motion picture production.”
January 4th, 2023 at 4:49 pm
Question: was this movie based on the Pearl Lusk/Olga Rocco/Alphonse Rocco case? The timing is right, and the method is identical, it I can’t find any information in depth enough to cover this. I’d read about the Rocco case some years ago and when this movie started I thought “You are KIDDING me.” I, too, thought it was from about 1941 (too early for Rocco) but when I was the date, I started looking.
VERY interesting movie.
Don H.