Dick Tracy Returns (1938 serial)

Dick Tracy Returns was the second of Republic’s Dick Tracy serials. It came out in 1938. This time it’s directed by William Witney and John English and nobody did serials better than those two. It also means that the cliffhangers will be above average.

Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy comic strip began its run in 1931. It’s still running today.

In this serial Dick Tracy has become an F.B.I. agent.

Dick’s latest case puts him up against Pa Stark and his five sons (obviously a reference to Ma Barker and her notorious boys).

And Pa Stark is played by Charles Middleton, Ming the Merciless himself. He is always a joy to watch. In this serial he’s not a wildly colourful villain but he is ruthless and menacing.

Ralph Byrd plays Dick Tracy and it’s fair to say that he was the definitive screen Dick Tracy. He makes Tracy a square-jawed hero but not too much of an an exaggerated comic-book hero. He resists the temptation to go over-the-top. His Tracy is a remorseless but quietly efficient crime-fighter.

Pa Stark dabbles in various kinds of criminality, from a relatively straightforward armoured car robbery to extortion and even espionage. His plans are elaborate but his boys don’t always execute those plans successfully.

A major problem that arises for Pa Stark early on is that his youngest son “Kid” Stark falls into the hands of the police and is facing a murder rap.

That murder rap is a personal matter for Dick Tracy. The murdered G-Man was one of his protégés.

Pa’s solution is to eliminate the witnesses, but that solution just seems to create more witnesses to more crimes. Dick Tracy becomes a witness but eliminating him is going to prove to be quite a challenge.

The science fictional elements of the first Dick Tracy serial have been dropped but there is still plenty of technology. 

Naturally there is some aerial action - aviation was a 1930s obsession so any crime serial worth its salt was going to include aerial adventure. You know there will be narrow escapes from doomed aircraft.

The Republic serials directed by Witney and English are always fast-moving. Never give the audience time to worry too much about the plots, just make sure that there is always something breathlessly exciting or tense happening. Have lots of things getting blown up. Witney and English always did superior action scenes.

Naturally Pa Stark’s criminal schemes tend to involve cars, aircraft and explosions and some modern technology (just as a new high-powered astronomical telescope), and abandoned mines and all the stuff that makes 1930s/40s serials so much fun.

Dick Tracy Returns is fine entertainment. Highly recommended.

VCI’s released a DVD boxed set containing three Dick Tracy serials. It offers perfectly acceptable image and sound quality and it’s a very good buy.

The first of the Republic Dick Tracy serials, Dick Tracy (1937), was not directed by Witney and English and has a different feel but it’s very enjoyable. I’ve also reviewed the two best Witney-English serials - Daredevils of the Red Circle (1939) and the magnificent Spy Smasher (1942).

The Pleasure Girls (1965)

The Pleasure Girls is a 1965 Gerry O’Hara movie and if you’re familiar with his work you’ll be guessing that these girls are not going to be getting much pleasure. In the world of Gerry O’Hara’s movies looking for pleasure (or fun or emotional fulfilment) just leads to misery so the smart thing to do is to throw yourself under a bus at the first opportunity.

This movie is an interesting antidote to the popular image of Swinging London. Swinging London was great for a tiny minority of people in the worlds of entertainment, art and fashion but for most people it was the same old grind. A desperate struggle against poverty and despair. If you tried to get ahead you’d just get knocked down and as for sex, forget it. That leads inevitably to ruin.

This was an era in which politicians and the media were constantly fretting over the evils of the “permissive society” which was about to engulf Britain in a tidal wave of immorality.

With this movie you have to bear in mind that it reflected the sexual mores of most of society at that time. Unmarried sex was something that pop stars and people on the Continent did. Nice English people didn’t do such things. The very word pleasure was a sign of behaviour of which respectable people disapproved. The Sexual Revolution had not yet filtered down to the masses.

The Pleasure Girls is centred on a group of girls living in a block of flats in London. Sally (Francesca Annis) has just arrived in London from the country, hoping to make a career for herself as a model while guarding her virginity like the Crown Jewels. She meets Keith (Ian McShane), a cheerfully irresponsible sort but basically pretty nice.

Keith would like to sleep with her but she wants him to wait, just for a little while. Just until her career is established and they have enough money to get married. It will probably only be five or six years. Surely if he loves her he won’t mind waiting such a short time.

Sally is a good girl.

Marion (Rosemary Nicols) lives with Prinny (Mark Eden) in the flat below. They’re not married so we figure Marion has some suffering in store for her. Once we get to know Prinny we’re even more sure of that - he’s a loser, a hopeless gambler and a louse. But he’s charming and Marion loves him. We have some doubts as to whether Marion is a good girl.

We have doubts about Dee (Suzanna Leigh) as well. She’s having an affair with a married man, Nikko (Klaus Kinski). She seems nice, but we suspect she might be in line for some suffering as well.

One problem with this movie is that there are too many characters which makes things a bit unfocused. Some of these characters seem like they might be important but they end up playing no significant part in the story. A bit more emphasis on the central characters would have allowed for their personalities to be a bit more fleshed out. The narrative drive is also a little weak.

Nikko is actually the most interesting character. He’s a successful hard-driving businessman whose ethical standards are loose to say the least. We assume he’s being set up as the villain of the piece but as we get to know him we discover that his business ruthlessness doesn’t reflect his true character. He doesn’t mistreat Dee. In fact he’s affectionate and gentle with her and he has a generous side. He’s really quite a nice guy.

Francesca Annis gives a solid performance but it’s a somewhat thankless part. Sally really is rather prim. Anneke Wills is charming (as she would be later in her starring role in the excellent offbeat TV series The Strange Report) in a part that doesn’t really go anywhere.

Rosemary Nicols is the standout performer among the women. In the same year this movie was released she landed the lead role in the excellent and very underrated sci-fi TV series Undermind although she is of course best known as one of the three leads in the wonderful 1969-70 Department S TV series. She manages to give Marion some real substance. At times we despair at the choices she makes but we understand those choices.

Klaus Kinski gives a very restrained performance. Yes, you read that right. Kinski giving a restrained performance. But it’s quite effective. He is able to persuade us that there’s more to Nikko than outward appearances would suggest.

Ian McShane is fine as Keith although there’s not a great deal of depth to the character.

This one is mostly worth watching for the fine performances by Rosemary Nicols and Klaus Kinski. It’s definitely an intriguing time capsule of Swinging London without the glamour. It’s worth a look.

Of the three Gerry O’Hara movies I’ve seen this is the least depressing. It’s not exactly upbeat but the sense of doom isn’t quite so relentless. Worth a look if only as a time capsule.

The BFI have released this movie in one of their Blu-Ray/DVD combo packs. The transfer is very satisfactory.

Other British movies of this era that are interesting for their bleak view of sex are All the Right Noises (1970), That Kind of Girl (1963),
Baby Love (1969), Her Private Hell (1968) and Permissive (1970).

Fate is the Hunter (1964)

Fate is the Hunter, released in 1964, is a kind of aviation disaster movie (a favourite genre of mine) and also a kind of mystery. And fate may or may not be a crucial factor.

An airliner crashes a few minutes after taking off from Los Angeles. 53 passengers and crew are killed. Due to a couple of unexpected misfortunes the cause of the crash is not easy to determine. The aircraft’s flight recorder was destroyed. There are audio tapes of messages passed between the doomed airliner and ground control but the messages end at a vital moment, apparently due to a radio failure. The evidence, such as it is, is ambiguous.

The airline’s flight director, Sam McBane (Glenn Ford), believes that the pilot is, quite unfairly, going to be blamed.

There is evidence that one of the aircraft’s two engines exploded. That evidence is strong but not absolute. There is some evidence that the second engine failed as well but the evidence for that is more shaky.

So much of the evidence is not merely ambiguous but puzzling. The second engine was later found to be entirely undamaged but a survivor insists that both cockpit warning lights were on, indicating failure of both engines. That survivor is one of the stewardesses, Martha Webster (Suzanne Pleshette). Martha is a sensible young woman. She is an experienced stewardess and is therefore perfectly well aware of the meaning of the cockpit warning lights. As a stewardess she has been trained to keep her head in a crisis. She did not suffer any head injuries. There is no reason to think that she was likely to be confused or in a panic. Sam is very much inclined to believe her story even though it conflicts with other evidence.

This was 1964, a time when flying was still glamorous and exciting. ln those happy days airliners had no flight attendants. They had stewardesses. The stewardesses were pretty, because having pretty airline stewardesses made flying seem more glamorous. They were well-trained and extremely competent. They just happened to be pretty as well. It is clear that Martha Webster is very good at her job and very professional.

The worrying thing is the suggestion that the pilot, Jack Savage (Rod Taylor), may have been drinking shortly before the flight. Sam does not believe this could have been the case. On the other hand we have to take into account Sam’s fierce loyalty to his pilots, and the fact that he and the pilot were old friends. He had been Jack’s co-pilot during the war. To complicate things, Sam’s attitude towards Jack is a bit ambivalent - a mixture of hero-worship and disapproval. Sam considers Jack to have been an outstanding pilot, but perhaps less outstanding as a man.

This movie was made at a fascinating time in Hollywood history. The Production Code was crumbling rapidly. The studios were tentatively experimenting with a radical new concept - making movies that took a grown-up attitude towards sex. Jack’s sex life becomes an important plot point. He sees to have shared his bed with a succession of attractive young ladies. If a decision is made to cast Jack as the scapegoat the newspapers will certainly suggest that he was a man of dubious sexual morals, and they are likely to suggest that a man with such a deplorable lack of sexual self-restraint might have a similar lack of self-restraint when it comes to booze.

It is possible that Jack will be judged not on his skills as a pilot but on his morals. And it is obvious that the press is gunning for Jack.

Glenn Ford is in fine form as a decent man who might possibly be allowing his personal feelings to interfere with his judgment. Ford could play tortured characters extremely well without resorting to Method acting histrionics. The underrated Rod Taylor is also excellent as another man who might have been wrestling with some inner demons. These are the two performances that matter.

Suzanne Pleshette is very solid, and Nancy Kwan and Constance Towers are very good as two of Jack’s girlfriends. It’s fun to see Jane Russell doing a cameo as herself. It’s also fun that her garters are important pieces of evidence!

There are a lot of flashbacks which give us insights into the personalities of both Jack and Sam.

This is a movie that plays fair with the viewer. A sufficiently alert viewer can certainly solve the mystery before Sam does (I did).

This movie was based on a novel by Ernest K. Gann who also wrote the source novels for two of the best aviation disaster thriller movies ever made, The High and the Mighty (1954) and Island in the Sky (1953).

Fate is the Hunter is both a fine aviation thriller and a decent puzzle movie. Highly recommended.

I have the Spanish Blu-Ray which offers a superb transfer and includes both Spanish and English language versions (the latter with removable Spanish subtitles). I can recommend this Blu-Ray without any reservations.

The Benson Murder Case (1930)

The Benson Murder Case, released in 1930, was the fourth of the Philo Vance movies. The history of the film adaptations of S.S. Van Dine’s novels is rather complicated. Van Dine did not sell the rights to the whole series of novels to a single studio, but sold them individually. As a result there were Philo Vance movies made by several studios. The Benson Murder Case was the third of the Paramount adaptations and the third to star William Powell.

S.S. Van Dine was a hugely popular author at that time. His reputation has not lasted particularly well compared to other popular detective fiction writers of the era which is rather unfair. The Philo Vance novels are huge amounts of fun.

One thing that you have to bear in mind when judging Van Dine’s novels and the movies based on them is that the plot devices they utilised were not clichés at the time. The Benson Murder Case, the first of the novels, was published in 1926. At that time the fair-play puzzle-plot murder mystery represented a new, fresh and exciting approach to detective fiction. The Benson Murder Case uses a formula that became very common in English detective fiction - the country house murder in which a small group of people are staying in a country house when a murder is committed. The murderer must be one of that small group. There are usually no more than half-a-dozen suspects.

In this case the setting is a hunting lodge not very far from New York but the formula is the same.

This is a story that uses the 1929 Wall Street Crash not just as background but as an essential plot point. The story of the Crash is told in a superb and imaginative opening montage.

The Crash has wiped out the fortunes of many of the clients of stockbroker Anthony Benson (Richard Tucker). He has ruthlessly sacrificed his clients in order to protect his own interests. They have lost everything. He hasn’t lost a dime.

For various reasons several of his clients happen to be at Benson’s lodge the night after the Crash. All of them have motives for murder. Money is the obvious motive but there are complicated romantic and sexual entanglements which could also provide motives. Genius amateur detective Philo Vance just happens to be present (another cliché which had not yet become a cliché).

There is of course a murder. Some of the people at the lodge have alibis but the alibis are not necessarily rock-solid. There are some clues - an unusual gun and the possibility that there was something very unusual indeed about the gun.

The clues may be helpful but Vance believes that psychology is of more use in solving crime than physical clues.

Vance’s friend, District Attorney Markham, also happened to be present at the time of the murder. Naturally Detective Sergeant Heath (Eugene Pallette) is on hand as well.

In keeping with the conventions of the puzzle-plot mystery the number of suspects is small. There is Harry Gray (William 'Stage' Boyd), a man long suspected of involvement in large-scale crime. There is Mrs Banning (May Beatty), a rich middle-aged lady, and her much younger lover Adolph Mohler (Paul Lukas). Mohler is quite clearly a gigolo. And there is a younger woman, Fanny Del Roy (Natalie Moorhead). Fanny has been having romantic adventures with both Benson and Mohler. 

And lastly there’s Benson’s manservant Albert (Mischa Auer) - he’s unlikely to have been the murderer but he may have been involved.

All of them had monetary motives and perhaps motives of both revenge and jealousy.

All of the supporting players are fairly solid (and Eugene Pallette is extremely good) but of course the movie belongs entirely to William Powell. Not everyone like the Philo Vance of the novels (although I do like him). Powell softens and humanises the character and makes him much more likeable. In fact he makes him very likeable. And Powell has the charisma that the role requires.

Frank Tuttle is once again the director and bearing in mind the technical difficulties associated with very early talkies he does a fine job and makes the visuals as interesting as he can. It does have to be said that visually this movie is less impressive than The Greene Murder Case.

The Benson Murder Case is thoroughly enjoyable. It does play fair with the viewer. The clues are there. The plot is ingenious but plausible. William Powell is a joy to watch. Highly recommended.

Kino Lorber’s Blu-Ray transfer looks very good and this is a rare case of a release with an audio commentary that is actually worth listening to.

I’ve also reviewed other Philo Vance movies - The Canary Murder Case, The Greene Murder Case, The Kennel Murder Case (1933), The Casino Murder Case (1935) and The Bishop Murder Case (1929).

To Catch a Thief (1955)

If ever a movie was a surefire commercial hit it was Alfred Hitchcock’s To Catch a Thief, released by Paramount in 1955.

Cary Grant and Grace Kelly were huge stars at the time. Hitchcock had worked with both of them before. He knew they would have the right onscreen chemistry and that Cary Grant and Grace Kelly in love would be box-office gold. He knew the story had all the right ingredients for a lighthearted suspense movie/romance. He knew that that was the sort of thing he could do, and do very well. It could not fail. And it was indeed a major hit.

John Robie (Cary Grant) lives in the south of France. He is a retired cat burglar. Now someone has been pulling off robberies using Robie’s standard modus operandi. The police will obviously believe he is guilty. They do believe he is guilty. Even his friends assume he is guilty.

It’s obvious to Robie that his only chance of proving his innocence is to catch the real cat burglar himself.

He gets hold of a list of women who own very expensive jewels. They’re the mystery cat burglar’s obvious next targets. Robie (who is pretending to be an American lumberman from Oregon) intends to set a trap for the burglar.

One of the women on the list is Jessie Stevens (Jessie Royce Landis). She has a daughter, Francie (Grace Kelly). Francis has had the finest education money can buy. She is poised and sophisticated. She’s also a bit of a spoilt brat. She seems to have set her sights on Robie. She doesn’t believe he has ever been anywhere near Oregon. She believes he’s the cat burglar. This excites her (she’s that kind of girl).

They spend the night together. This scene is a great example of Hitchcock making it blindingly obvious that two characters have had sex whilst somehow never quite technically stepping outside the bounds of the Production Code.

While Robie hopes to trap the burglar he has a whole bunch of people out to trap him. There are the police. There are his olds friends from the Resistance. They were all criminals as well. They fear that Robie will cause them problems with the flics. And of course the real cat burglar is out to trap John Robie as well.

The identity of the actual burglar is very obvious but I won’t say any more for fear of revealing spoilers.

To be honest To Catch a Thief, apart from the obviousness of the criminal’s identity, is not a great suspense thriller. It’s more like his wonderful early film Young and Innocent - the real focus is on the romance. It’s a terrific romance movie, and manages to be rather sexy for 1955. There’s plenty of romantic and sexual tension. Cary Grant and Grace Kelly get to trade some very witty very risqué dialogue.

Grace Kelly is superbly dressed and is breathtakingly beautiful and glamorous.

This movie looks gorgeous. The colours are not just stunning, they’re used imaginatively to give a weird other-worldly feel to the strange rooftop world of the professional cat burglar. The sets and costumes are magnificent.

Hitchcock was determined to have as little as possible to do with the deplorable fad for location shooting. Despite the exotic setting the film has that classic shot-on-a-sound-stage look. There are lots of process shots. These are not flaws. Hitchcock did not make movies set in the real world. He made movies set in Hitchcock World, a much more attractive and interesting world. This movie is not supposed to look realistic.

There was one tricky element in the plot. The Production Code was still in force. The movie had to have an unequivocal crime does not pay message. On the other hand to make John Robie an entirely innocent man would be boring and would be a misuse of Cary Grant’s talents. It would be much more fun to make Robie a retired, rather than a reformed, criminal. It would also be much more fun to make him totally unapologetic about his criminal past. Cary Grant had a particular knack for playing likeable rogues and he was at his best playing a character who was a genuine rogue.

The solution was to emphasise over and over again that Robie had fought with the French Resistance during the war. He was a hero who had risked his life for freedom and democracy. As long as it was also made clear that Robie had given up his criminal career Cary Grant could get away with playing him as a man who had enjoyed every moment of his life as a cat burglar. He could also get away with playing Robie as anything but a Robin Hood figure. John Robie did not steal from the rich to give to the poor. He stole from the rich to give to John Robie.

This solution allowed Grant to have some real fun with this role. It also allowed him to be a handsome sexy bad boy.

This is Hitchcock Lite but it's a visually stunning romance movie with Grace Kelly absolutely at the top of her game. Highly recommended.

This movie looks terrific on Blu-Ray - this is one of those rare cases where it really is upgrading to Blu-Ray.

Twisted Nerve (1968)

Twisted Nerve is a 1968 British suspense thriller starring Hayley Mills, although it’s a bit more than just a straightforward suspense film.

Martin Durnley (Hywel Bennett) is a slightly odd young man. His brother Georgie had to be put away in a home. Georgie suffers from a genetic abnormality. He still has the mind of a toddler.

There are perhaps a number of reasons for Martin’s oddness. His father died, his mother remarried, and he hates and despises his stepfather. The family is extremely rich, so Martin has always been coddled and spoilt and the family money has always come to his rescue when he gets into scrapes. It’s also possible that he has suffered from anxiety, fearing he might be abnormal in some way as well. HIs mother has always feared that might be the case - perhaps her anxieties have rubbed off on Martin. Martin is in fact rather intelligent, but he’s irresponsible, difficult, rebellious and trouble-prone.

Quite by accident he encounters a very pretty very charming young woman, Susan Harper (Hayley Mills), in a toy shop. Martin steals a very cheap toy and is caught. He pretends to be simple-minded and pretends that his name is Georgie. In fact he has in a way adopted his brother’s identity. It works. The store manager is sympathetic and Susan feels sorry for him that she pays for the stolen toy. Martin has no difficulty in fooling people into thinking that he has the mind of a five-year-old.

Martin starts following Susan. He meets her again. Susan lives in a slightly unusual household as well - she lives with her mother Joan (Billie Whitelaw), a young Indian medical student who is the lodger, and also Joan Harper’s live-in lover Gerry Henderson (Barry Foster).

Martin turns up on the doorstep, in the pouring rain, more child-like than ever and apparently with nowhere to go. Susan insists that he be allowed to stay. So he moves in.

This is where the movie gets interesting, with all sorts of disturbing sexual tensions. Both Susan and her mother Joan think Martin has the mind of a small child but they also cannot help noticing that physically he is a very attractive young man with a rather nice body. Susan isn’t at all sure how she feels. Martin does get a bit physically affectionate at times. Joan is definitely sexually attracted to him, which of course makes her rather confused and uneasy.

We know this is not going to end well. What makes it more interesting is that we really don’t know at first just how genuinely child-like Martin is. Intellectually, in some ways, he’s an adult. Physically he’s an adult. We always have to keep in mind the complexity of the characterisation. Martin is pretending to be child-like both intellectually and emotionally but he really is child-like emotionally.

It’s obvious that his mother has never wanted him to grow up, and it’s obvious that he has discovered certain advantages in not growing up. He can get away with being irresponsible. He can behave like a naughty small boy (as he does when he steals the cheap toy) and get away with it. He can remain in many ways a spoilt little boy.

It’s very clear that this has had consequences for his sexual development. He has never learnt to deal with women on adult level. He has never even got as far as dealing with girls on the level of an awkward teenager. He deals with females on the level of a small child but he is physically mature and has normal male sexual urges. It’s obvious that he regards sex with guilt, shame and fear.

He is not only probably a virgin - he appears to have major guilt, shame and fear in regard to any kind of sexual arousal, so he cannot even satisfy his sexual urges through self-pleasuring. The early scene with the mirror, and the final scene with another mirror, make it obvious that a soon as he becomes sexually aroused the guilt, shame and fear kick in and he can go no further. He has at least two opportunities for sex in the movie and in both cases he cannot go through with it.

As a result he feels inadequate, which accounts for his odd fixation on Tarzan and on bodybuilding. They’re wish-fulfilment fantasies of normal masculinity.

The writing credits include two very notable names. Roger Marshall was one of the greatest of all British television writers, the man who created the best TV private eye series ever made, Public Eye. Leo Marks wrote the notorious (and superb) Peeping Tom and there are definite similarities between Peeping Tom and Twisted Nerve. The experienced and reliable Roy Boulting directed.

This was an incredibly fascinating era in British cinema. British censorship in the 60s was draconian. This started to relax right at the end of the decade. By the late 60s British filmmakers were increasingly restive under these restrictions. They wanted to make grown-up movies, and they wanted to deal with love, sex and human relationships honesty and openly. This led to a spate of fascinating movies including All the Right Noises (1970), Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (1968), Baby Love (1969) and the superb I Start Counting (1969). And although it’s usually dismissed as a sex comedy I would add Pete Walker’s excellent Cool It, Carol! (1970) to the list.

It was also a time of media frenzy about the “permissive society” which led to interesting if depressing movies such as Her Private Hell (1968) and Permissive (1970).

Twisted Nerve is a very dark extremely well-executed suspense thriller with a nicely subtle sense of creeping menace. Highly recommended.

Umbrella’s Blu-Ray offers a lovely transfer with a number of extras.

The Greene Murder Case (1929)

The Greene Murder Case was the second of Paramount’s Philo Vance murder mysteries and the second of four outings for William Powell as Philo Vance. Many other actors later got to play the role but truly there was only ever one screen Philo Vance and that was Bill Powell.

The detective story had been around for quite a while but in the early 1920s a new variant appeared - the fair-play puzzle-plot mystery. It was understood that the clues had to be there to allow the reader to solve the mystery. It was up to the author to provide enough misdirection to make sure this didn’t happen. This new type of murder mystery first appeared in Britain. S. S. Van Dine (real name Willard Huntington Wright) has a strong claim to having introduced the form to American readers. He was certainly the one who popularised this new type of detective story in the United States.

It didn’t take long for Hollywood to get interested. Van Dine’s first novel was published in 1926. The first movie adaptation, The Canary Murder Case, came out in 1929.

It’s worth pointing out that this movie was released before the Wall Street Crash. At this stage Hollywood was still booming and it’s obvious that Paramount spent quite a bit of money on The Greene Murder Case. It’s technically quite ambitious with some rather nifty shots. I love the overhead shots of the roof garden. The sets do not look cheap. There’s a well-conceived well-executed action finale.

The Greene family is very rich and clearly very dysfunctional. Old Tobias Greene left one of those nasty wills calculated to cause his heirs a lot of inconvenience and misery. To inherit his money they have to live in the Greene mansion for fifteen years, not a very pleasant prospect since they all hate each other. Old Tobias’s widow is paralysed. She’s miserable and querulous. The elder son, Chester (Lowell Drew), is a good-for-nothing layabout. The younger son, Rex (Morgan Farley), is a neurotic mess. The elder sister Sibella (Florence Eldridge) is a bit of a party girl. The younger sister Ada (Jean Arthur) is adopted. She’s sweet but nervy. There’s also the family doctor Dr Von Blon who seems to spend most of his life at the Greene mansion.

Now somebody seems intent on killing off the family one by one. Gentleman dilettante detective Philo Vance handles difficult cases for District Attorney John F. X. Markham on a semi-official basis. He is invariably assisted by Detective Sergeant Heath (Eugene Pallette). Lots of things about this case puzzle Vance. The killer seems to be staying one step ahead all the time.

It’s a neat plot. Anybody in the Greene household could be a suspect, given that they certainly all hate each other enough to start killing each other. This is pretty much a fair-play mystery. The clues are there.

William Powell is of course marvellous. Not everybody likes the Philo Vance of the novels but Powell softens the character a bit, taking the edge off his arrogance. And he has that William Powell charm.

One thing I really like is that the film resists the temptation to make Sergeant Heath a comic relief character. Heath is often wrong but his reasoning is far from foolish. He’s a competent policeman and Vance clearly respects his professionalism. At no time does Vance make Heath the butt of jokes. It’s obvious that despite their very different backgrounds these two men like each other.

Jean Arthur is good as the perpetually somewhat frightened Ada. The supporting performers are all quite good, with Morgan Farley as Rex being the only one who goes a little over the top at times.

Director Frank Tuttle is sometimes dismissed as a hack which is a bit unfair. He handles things here with reasonable skill and he keeps the pacing taut.

The Greene mansion itself becomes a character in the movie. The layout of the house is important, as is the atmosphere.

Very early talkies have a reputation for being clunky, with too many excessively static shots. That’s not the case here. Frank Tuttle’s directing is rather lively. The actors on the whole seem quite comfortable with the new sound format.

The Greene Murder Case is a fine murder mystery. Highly recommended.

This movie is included in Kino Lorber’s three-movie Philo Vance Blu-Ray boxed set. The Greene Murder Case gets a very nice transfer. As is usually the case these days the audio commentary is best dispensed with.

I've also reviewed the wonderful The Kennel Murder Case, also with Powell as Vance.