Philo Vance Round-up

William Powell and fog-horned voiced character actor, Eugene Pallette in The Kennel Murder Case.

TCM recently showed a Philo Vance marathon featuring films from the thirties about this fictional detective all made by Warner Bros./Vitaphone. The movies are enjoyable if slight--most of the films clock in at a lean, mean 75-80 minute length. The studio employed a string of actors including William Powell, Basil Rathbone, Warren William, Paul Lukas, Edmund Lowe, Wilfrid Hyde-White and Grant Richards in the 1930s alone. There was another series of Philo Vance films in the 1940s, which I haven’t seen.

The closest thing we have in our times to the Philo Vance phenomenon is the British TV series Doctor Who which continues to survive decades into its run by replacing the leading actor every once in a while. Like Doctor Who, each of the actors I watched in the series brought their own spin to the character.

By far the most enjoyable Philo Vance movie of the three I watched was The Kennel Murder (1934) case, starring William Powell. His fourth and final Vance outing, Powell was on the cusp of major stardom. The next year he played Nick Charles in The Thin Man. Powell has same charm he has in the later more famous detective series all the while hiding a sharp mind with a soft-easy going manner. While he lacks a Myrna Loy with whom to trade witty lines, or indeed witty lines, he does have a cute Scotty Dog, who is perhaps the inspiration for Asta. This movie seemed more lavishly produced than the other two movies I watched. It’s possible that since it was the latest of the three chronologically, the budgets had increased, but it’s equally possible that it was all just Powell’s superior star power rubbing off on the flimsy sets.

Warren William had an enjoyable outing as Vance in The Dragon Murder Case, about an absurd homicide in which the chief suspect is a mythological giant lizard. Like Powell he was more famous for playing a different detective in a later series, The Lone Wolf. If the X-files existed in 1933, The Dragon Murder Case, would definitely be a candidate for a plot scenario. Unfortunately the whole thing unfolds with a rather Scooby Doo obviousness where as The Kennel Murder case was so busy and confusing you were guessing till the last minute because the plot was so byzantine. Maybe I’m being unfair here. Perhaps if I was watching it in 1933, and had not spent my childhood watching Scooby Doo, I would have been delightfully surpised by the denouement of The Dragon Murder Case.

Basil Rathbone’s lone Philo Vance picture was The Bishop Murder Case (1930). This series was a detective training ground because like the other two actors mentioned here, Rathbone was about to become a lot more famous by playing another well-known detective, Sherlock Holmes. In between playing Vance and Holmes he was best known for playing the stereotypical English bad guy in Errol Flynn movies. I’ve always enjoyed Rathbone as an actor, but something about him in The Bishop Murder Case just didn’t click for me. The stand-outs in the supporting cast, Roland Young and George F. Marion, perhaps took something away from my enjoyment of the detective. Marion in particular plays an eccentric chess master who lives with his ancient sister and spends his evenings skulking around in dark corners. Rathbone can't compete with this kind of a show-stopping villain. He doesn't have the eccentric flair needed to play a great detective, or even Doctor Who. He moved workmanlike through the plot like perhaps the Second Doctor or the Eighth might have, but without the droll, self-aggrandizing panache of a Fourth or a Tenth Doctor. I apologize for getting off course here and contaminating my post with obscure references to an obscure English television show. I’ve just spent the last week deeply immersed at a science fiction and fantasy convention, which is why I haven’t posted much lately.

I look forward to watching the rest of Philo Vance movies waiting in my tivo queue. It's likely that I will shove the posts into the media room though, unless I'm blown away by one of the remaining pictures.

One Way Passage (1932)

One Way Passage is an implausible pre-code melodrama about a couple who fall in love on a cruise ship. The implausibility comes in because he just happens to be on his way to death row and she is dying of a fatal disease. I guess prisoner transport ain't what it used to be, eh?

Even with the contrived premise, it's a genuinely moving scenario, and really ups the ante on the holiday romance genre. It's not enough that they fall in love on vacation and can never be together. They have to die as well. The movie manages, due to a short 70 minute run time to keep a brisk pace as well as providing adequate character development. Powell's character plans to escape from his captors when the boat lands in Hawaii with the help of two con-artist accomplices, Skippy and Barrel House Betty, (Aline MacMahon and Frank McHugh), but decides to return to the ship when Francis collapses.

Francis and Powell had great chemistry together and their scenes are light and breezy with an undertow of angst. Francis doesn't seem particularly sick. She faints twice, but that isn't an inordinate amount of swooning even for a healthy ingenue in old movies. I think it's rare when an actor who is supposedly dying in a movie actually looks sick so I'm willing to forgive it. MacMahon McHugh provide some necessary comic relief as the scheme behind the scenes to get the couple together. Warren Hymer as the cop who is Powell's guardian manages a layered performance as he gradually comes to like Powell's character, but still has to do his duty.

An interesting historical footnote about One-Way Passage is that it takes place on a cruise ship during prohibition. All the characters drink non-stop including our lovers who literally bump into one another and spill their drinks. Cocktails actually become an obvious metaphor for their love affair, which is interesting, I think given that drinking was still technically illegal in the United States. I guess there must have a booze cruise mentality and that one of pleasures of boat travel was being able to drink legally in international waters.

The business of marriage: Double Harness

Ann Harding plays a clever independent woman, Joan Colby, whose family has fallen on hard times in the Depression and who feels her age rapidly approaching the "Old Maid" barrier. She concocts a plan to marry a charming playboy, John Fletcher, (William Powell) who has so far avoided the minister like a matrimonial plague. Contrary to her plan to keep emotion out of the business of marriage she inevitably falls in love with her playboy. Were we not introduced to Harding's character first and like her so much we might not be entirely sympathetic to her scheme to force Powell to the alter by purposefully arranging to have her father catch her in his apartment wearing a nightgown. Harding states a plain truth that she doesn't really have any options. She doesn't have the sorts of talent that a respectable lady could use to support herself with and so her business has to be marriage to a man with a future.

Though the Double Harness of the title refers to a pair of horses yoked side by side as a metaphor for matrimony, it could as easily refer to the predicament that Harding finds herself in. As an attractive young woman of her class, she has had plenty of opportunities to dine with men alone in their apartments and in doing so, to audition for the role of wife. As a respectable young lady, she hasn't taken any of those opportunities, because she hasn't liked any of those men well enough to risk her reputation on them. Her double harness is the damned if she does, damned if she doesn't situation of single women through the ages. In code era films, such a dilemma could not be as honestly stated nor treated as realistically. Joan certainly enjoys going to Flethcher's apartment for weeks before she springs her trap. For a few days she convinces herself that she likes John Fletcher just enough to trick him into that harness. After she falls in love with him, she changes her plan. Now she simply must marry him in order to save him from his lazy, decadent lifestyle. Colby's certain she can do something for him and so manages to rationalize the whole misadventure. Had she married anyone less affable and pliable than a William Powell character, the whole thing would have ended in disaster. She would have nagged him to work and he would have ignored her and eventually come to resent her.

Ann Harding is a very obviously smart woman which comes through in her acting. Sadly, she had almost no post-code career. Like Kay Francis, she took smaller and smaller roles until she retired. It's sad that audiences just didn't want what she offered. Some found her too mannered, and others probably didn't think her quite pretty enough. Certainly comparing her to the other smart, younger actresses of that era,your Myrna Loys, your Jean Arthurs, Ann had a softer more old-fashioned kind of look. (It didn't help that she always wore her hair in a librarian bun). It's too bad because I think she could have been really good in a fast-talking comedy.

Beyond the Thin Man: Powell and Loy

How is that I've had this blog for a month and I haven't talked about Powell and Loy? They are my favorite screen couple of all-time. He was so dashing yet wacky. She was so funny in a cool way. Together they were dynamite and crazy sexy to boot. Best known as Nick and Nora Charles from The Thin Man movies, Powell and Loy were such a popular pairing that appeared in eight other films outside that series.

Manhattan Melodrama and Evelyn Prentice were released in 1934, the same year as The Thin Man. This accounts in part, I think for their ease of portraying a married couple in The Thin Man. They'd already spent a fair time together on screen. I was so excited the first time I watched Manhattan Melodrama. Here was a Powell and Loy movie with Clark Gable in it as well. I should have known what with the word "melodrama" actually in the title that it wasn't going to be funny. I guess I was hoping it was ironic. Well the only irony I could find in Manhattan Melodrama was that it was the movie that bank robber John Dillinger went to go see on the night he was killed, though it is debatable whether he was there for the instructive anti-crime story or the air-conditioning. (Dillinger was shot in Chicago in mid-July.) It's not a bad movie and on second viewing I liked it better because I wasn't disappointed with the lack of comedy. Powell plays a lawyer and politician who defends his childhood friend from his orphan days (Clark Gable) on a murder charge and falls in love with his girlfriend (Myrna Loy). Of course, that's a gross over-simplification of the plot. A lot is packed into this movie including a ferry boat accident and a riot started by Bolsheviks.

In Evelyn Prentice, Powell plays a defense attorney again, and this movie isn't funny either. It is a decent romantic drama with Rosalind Russell, in her first screen performance as John Prentice's seductive client who causes a rift between he and his wife, Evelyn (Loy). Evelyn goes out and gets even. Since this movie was made just after the enforcement of the code it is very careful to show that both John Prentice and his wife's cheating were mere flirtations that were unwise and indiscreet but nothing more. Evelyn's mild flirtation really comes back to bite her. I guess taking tea with someone other than your husband is really a gateway to murder. The other man, Kennard, sets her up for blackmail as he's well aware she's the wife of a prominent attorney. After trying numerous times to give him the brush off, Evelyn naively goes to his apartment to try to convince him to leave her alone and witnesses his murder by his long-suffering and abused girlfriend, Judith (Isabell Jewell). Evelyn's bad luck keeps getting worse as her husband takes on the Judith's case. Loy is excellent as a woman in a difficult moral position and Isabell Jewell is very compelling in her part.

Powell and Loy's next non-Thin Man outing was the Great Ziefeld (1936). This is not at all what I expected from one of their movies. It is a huge production musical with long, intricate musical numbers interrupted by anecdotal vignettes about Ziegfeld's (Powell) life. Myrna Loy doesn't come in until the very end as Ziegfeld's second wife, actress Billie Burke. The musical numbers are entertaining in the same way as watching large set-ups of dominoes. It looks cool and you appreciate that a lot of work went into it.

Libeled Lady came next with it's star packed cast that also includes Jean Harlow and Spencer Tracy. Harlow and Powell were an off-screen couple and they wanted the story fitted so that might end up together on screen. MGM wasn't about to let that happen and they insisted that it remain a Powell and Loy vehicle. Libeled Lady has some of Powell and Loy's most romantic scenes as he plays playboy sent to seduce her out out of a lawsuit. This is a not to be missed outing from the couple, and one that stands with the best of the Thin Man films.

The next thee films, Double Wedding, I love You Again and Love Crazy are among the best the pair ever made. The Thin Man formula was starting to wear a bit thin, at this point and it seems that the duo could get by at the box-office without the Nick and Nora moniker. Double Wedding( 1940) is about a bohemian artist (Powell) who falls in love with a controlled society lady (Loy) and goes to crazy lengths to win her hand. Double Wedding is a heady cocktail of romance and screwball comedy. Some of their best love scenes and funniest antics are in this film. I Love You Again (1940) is about a failing marriage saved by amnesia. The improbable plot is buoyed along by an improbable series of complications that end with Powell dressed in a boy scout uniform leading troops of kids through a swamp. That sequence alone makes it worth a rental. Love Crazy (1941)is my personal favorite Powell and Loy movie. It pushes the boundaries of what they had done in a comedy, especially Powell who is in drag for a good deal of the movie. The plot involves a nosy mother-in-law, an anniversary misunderstanding and a husband who tries to prevent a divorce by getting himself declared legally insane. There's nothing William Powell won't do for love including throwing all the top hats at a swanky party into the pool and declaring them emancipated.

Powell and Loy reunited for one final film after the The Thin Man series ended in 1947, The Senator was Indiscreet (1947). Though it wasn't a true Powell and Loy film, in that Loy only appears in a surprise cameo at the end, I include it here for the sake of completion. By the mid forties, times had changed and the emphasis on family comedy and film noir. The Thin Man movies adapted by giving the Charles' a kid as well as a dog, but part of the escapist fun of a wealthy gentleman who solves crime in spare time was lost when added domestic comedy. Myrna Loy and William Powell continued to make films without one another for the next two decades, Loy continuing to act on television until the early 1980s.

Eye Candy of the Day: Nevada

Thelma Todd, Gary Cooper and Ernie Adams in Nevada (1927). The film also co-stars William Powell who plays a villainous ranch foreman who sells out his boss to cattle rustlers.

Young Gary Cooper in one of his first lead roles plays, Jim Lacey, A.K.A. Nevada, a gunfighter who goes straight and takes on an army of cattle rustlers. This is slight fare but it is well made and entertaining from start to finish. The pace is quick with few inter-titles, and is easy to follow. Cooper looks gorgeous and is quite effective especially in a few dramatic moments later in the movie. Thelma Todd plays an English woman who starts out as the typical damsel in distress but surprises as she dons gauchos and a cowboy hat and rides out to help save her brother's ranch. In one memorable scene, Nevada ties her to a tree to prevent her from joining the battle. Shortly after that she decides he's the love of her life and picks him over his rival, William Powell. Powell's part is small but memorable. In a few scenes he exhibits a mix of dastardly and charming that is hard to forget. He has that Powell panache at the end when he's arrested and he reaches for a cigar instead of his gun. There is a touch of the cool style that would be his meal ticket in decades to come.