Fri 25 Mar 2011
Movie Review: THE CRIME NOBODY SAW (1937).
Posted by Steve under Mystery movies , Reviews[3] Comments
THE CRIME NOBODY SAW. Paramount Pictures, 1937. Lew Ayres, Ruth Coleman, Eugene Pallette, Benny Baker, Vivienne Osborne, Colin Tapley, Howard C. Hickman, Robert Emmett O’Connor, Jed Prouty, Hattie McDaniel. Based on the play Danger, Men Working, by Manfred Lee & Frederic Dannay. Director: Charles Barton.
As I understand it, the play (mentioned above) that the Ellery Queen cousins wrote never made it anywhere near Broadway, and if the movie that it was made of it instead resembles it in any way, it’s no surprise.
Not that the movie is bad, if you’re in the right frame of mind, and forgiving. It just isn’t very good. It opens with three frustrated playwrights (Ayers, Pallette and Baker) struggling with their latest opus, a mystery play that’s supposed to start next week, and they, in spite of all their efforts, can’t get any farther than Page One.
Enter their drunken neighbor from the apartment across the hall. When he collapses on the floor and passes out, they go through his pockets. A little black book is filled with names and suspicious numbers. He’s not a lecherous lothario, they quickly decide, he’s a blackmailer!
Call the police? No, not they. Determined to take the situation and turn into the play they have not been able to right, they… Did you guess? They disguise themselves as policemen and call three of the names in the black book, important individuals all, and invite them over to hear the final accusation from the man who owns the book.
Well, OK, this is really a lot of fun – if you’re in the right frame of mind – but things get out of hand when (you guessed it) the lights go out (and guess again) the unconscious man is mysteriously murdered.
There are a few twists that follow, and now that I think about it, perhaps more than a few, but (still thinking about it) none that make any sense. I might have to watch the movie again, if you wanted me to be more definitive than that, and I probably will, someday, and even perhaps someday soon, but not immediately. Forgive me.
One last thing. Hattie McDaniel, a black actress who often played the same variety of lady’s maid as she does in this movie, is also a key witness. Without her, the three wanna-be playwrights wouldn’t have had a clue.
March 25th, 2011 at 10:04 pm
Lew Ayres was always a favorite of mine — ironically my childhood doctor could have been his twin brother — but he did do a lot of slightly off beat films as if the studio didn’t quite know what to do with him outside of Dr. Kildare and ALL’S QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT.
I saw him in a little oddity just the other day, NO ESCAPE, written and directed by Charles Bennett, a mid fifties noir set in San Francisco co-starring Sonny Tufts. It should have been great — Ayres is a down on his luck songwriter who hustles bar patrons with his girl friend and ends up on the run accused of a murder, but it just didn’t work — hard to see Ayres as a cheap guy hustling drinks.
A friend who knew him in later years said he wasn’t particularly bitter about his career hitting a major bump in the road when he was a concientious objector during the war (he served as a medical corpsman with some distinction but that didn’t help), his only complaint was that now he was older his character tended to die in every movie or television show he did.
March 26th, 2011 at 5:08 am
I remember being rather annoyed when they killed off his schoolteacher character in the Tobe Hooper version of SALEM’S LOT. He is much more important in Stephen King’s book, but here he’s just dispatched as quickly as possible.
Ayres was cast in the original pilot film of BATTLESTAR GALACTICA as the pacifist Galactic President. Despite repeated warnings from Lorne Greene he insists that the bad guys are serious in their desire for peace, and gets himself and most of his people zapped. I always wondered whether that piece of casting was deliberate or not. By the 70s, Ayres conscientious objection was a distant memory, but it’s not impossible.
March 26th, 2011 at 6:18 am
Likely they were doing a rather tired rehash of Neville Chamberlain considering the level of hackneyed writing and tired stereotypes Glen Larceny (as he was widely known for his habit of ‘borrowing’ others ideas) programs usually achieved. I doubt anyone involved with GALACTICA was subtle enough for that kind of casting — unless Steve Cannell or Roy Huggins had done it first and Larson borrowed the idea. Originality was never his strong suit.
Between Dr. Kildare and his Oscar nomination for JOHNNY BELINDA Ayres was pretty much stereotyped as a doctor — even playing one in DONOVAN’s BRAIN.
Truth was the Hollywood community pretty much had to embrace Ayres after he served with distinction in the Medical Corps in the Pacific, even fighting to be allowed in to do so. Considering how many of Hollywood’s most notable chickenhawks avoided any kind of service before during or after the war they couldn’t really say too much to someone who had been in actual combat — pacifist or not.
I think Ayres health had something to do with his character dying so quickly in SALEM’S LOT though. I’ not sure they felt he was up to the bigger role.
He did often get typecast as doctors and or idealist, but that was as much his personality and quiet dignity and strength on screen and his years as Kildare as his politics. He also played a fair share of cops and did some westerns and noir films after the war.
One of his better late roles was as the soft spoken unassumng Vice President to Franchot Tone’s dying President in Otto Preminger’s film of Allen Drury’s ADVISE AND CONSENT.