Sat 7 Sep 2019
A PI Movie Review by Walter Albert: THE LADY IN THE MORGUE (1938).
Posted by Steve under Mystery movies , Reviews[5] Comments
THE LADY IN THE MORGUE. Universal Pictures: A Crime Club Production, 1938. Preston Foster (Bill Crane), Patricia Ellis, Frank Jenks, Thomas Jackson, Gordon (Bill) Elliott), Roland Drew, Barbara Pepper. Based on the book by Jonathan Latimer. Director: Otis Garrett.
I’ve never read the Crime Club novel by Jonathan Latimer on which this is based, but — according to the program notes — the film is less true to the novel than was the film version of Latimer’s The Westland Case.
This sips along with zany ease [beginning with the disappearance of a girl’s body from the city morgue], and is notable for some inventive camera work by Stanley Cortez, who also filmed The Magnificent Ambersons and Night of the Hunter. It’s the kind of camera work that calls attention to itself (some of the visual scene transitions are as wild as the plot), but it seems perfectly matched to the narrative.
Foster and Jenks are first-rate, and maybe the organizers will turn up the third Crime Club Bill Crane film (The Last Warning) for next year’s program. If The Last Warning is everywhere near as good as the first two, this would make a sensational laser disc set.
September 7th, 2019 at 2:44 pm
For more information on Universal’s Crime Club series, go here:
http://the-crime-club.blogspot.com/2010/08/crime-club-mystery-films-from-universal.html
As for the set of three Bill Crane movies being released as a package of three, as far as I know, it never happened, not even on DVD. All three are available on a collector-to-collector basis, but at the moment, I think that’s the best you can do.
September 7th, 2019 at 8:26 pm
The problem with the differences in the book and the film is that the book was far from as tame as the film. No small part of the book has a nearly nude Crane hopping in and out of bed with the heroine in her hotel bedroom with her equally unclad while they struggle to outwit the police and house detectives and fence with each other.
It’s a fairly long set piece that plays like French farce Dashiell Hammett style.
Latimer tended to have Crane and his buddies talk the way real detectives talked so that couldn’t be reproduced on screen either (and indeed plagued reprints of his works in mass market paperback for years in regard to ethnic slurs used the casual way they were actually used by many, particularly working class professional detective types, in that time period).
Where the Westland Case has many of the same problems the plot is such that they could be more easily avoided in a screen adaptation. In MORGUE the racy incidents are part and parcel part of the plot, which makes a good deal more sense in the book with all the racy shenanigans going on. It is in many ways the ultimate screwball mystery, Latimer at his best.
But even today you might have trouble filming it even though nothing much gets consummated.
September 7th, 2019 at 10:17 pm
Now you have me wondering if I’ve read LADY IN THE MORGUE or not. I don’t remember lot of what you describe, that’s for sure. I have a feeling that maybe I’ve only seen the movie and I’ve only imagined that I read the book as well. Time to dig a little deeper into my Crime Club collection!
September 9th, 2019 at 12:14 am
Steve,
It is also entirely possible you read an edition of the book that had been cleaned up a bit as many publishers did in those days even to tamer writers like Erle Stanley Gardner.
September 9th, 2019 at 1:03 am
Very very possible. Or maybe I’ve seen the movie, which I have, and only imagined I’ve read the book. Stranger things have happened.