“Forward: The producers of this picture feel that the attorney depicted herein should be disbarred and strongly suggest that the American Bar Association do something about it.”
Recently, my friend Scott K. Ratner made the claim that the wild success of the film version of Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man (1934) did much to waylay the popularity of the puzzle mystery. I’m not going to argue that point here (Scott’s wrong!), but The Thin Man came up as I was researching today’s film. As I pointed out to Ratner, what the pairing of William Powell and Myrna Loy to solve a murder did for/to films was to popularize the sleuthing team – a man and woman brought together by circumstances to piece together a crime and, in the course of their investigations, grow closer in a way that was romantic or as friendly adversaries – or a little bit of both.
We can’t give all the credit for this trend to Hammett’s creations or even to Powell and Loy, as wonderful as they were together. The creation and popularity of these sorts of teams in crime literature from the mid-30’s through the 40’s also inspired studios repeatedly to pair up the popular conventions of genre mysteries with the equally successful tropes of screwball comedy.
Stuart Palmer had introduced Hildegarde Withers, his schoolteacher detective, in 1931, and Hollywood accepted the character as a gift the following year with The Penguin Pool Mystery, starring Edna Mae Oliver. Five more films followed (one with Helen Broderick and the sleuth and the final two with Zasu Pitts); so did a pilot for a sitcom starring Agnes Moorehead that is sadly lost, and a 1972 TV-movie with Eve Arden as Withers. In all of these, the greatest source of entertainment wasn’t the mystery but the fractious relationship between Hildegarde and Homicide Inspector Oscar Piper. (James Gleason may not be William Powell, but he shone in all six films.)
In 1936, married authors Frances and Richard Lockridge introduced the Norths, a witty New York couple who, when it came to crime-solving, beat the police to the game every time. Their twenty-six novels inspired a Broadway play, a 1942 film (starring Gracie Allen as Pam North!), a radio series that ran for twelve years (tying with The Adventures of Ellery Queen in 1946 to win an Edgar for best radio mystery series), and several TV productions. Some even more engaging sleuthing couples, like Kelley Roos’ Jeff and Haila Troy series and Delano Ames’ Jane and Dagobert Brown, never were filmed, at least as far as I could determine. And lots of original couples like these appeared in one-off films, like 1935’s Star of Midnight (with Ginger Rogers teamed with Powell) and TV series, like McMillan and Wife, which sought to duplicate the vibe set by couples like the Charleses and the Norths for a modern generation.
If anyone wrote crime novels totally well-suited to adaptation to screwball mysteries, it was Craig Rice. Rice was a fascinating character, sometimes called “the Dorothy Parker of detective fiction. She led a madcap life, with four marriages and three children (whom she seems to have left behind to travel with her husband). Like Parker, she liked her men and her booze, but while Parker flirted with the “appeal” of suicide in her work, Rice actually made several attempts to end her life. And while Parker, despite her self-destructive habits, survived until age 73, Rice died of a combination of barbiturates and alcohol at 49.
Despite the bumpy road of her life, Rice’s artistry flourished, and her popularity soared to the point where she was featured on the cover of Time Magazine in 1946. She debuted as a mystery novelist in 1939 with Eight Faces at Three, which introduced the sleuthing trio of John J. Malone, a hard-living, wisecracking attorney, Helene Brand, an eccentric heiress and press agent Jake Justis (who would eventually marry Helene.) Rice’s ability to infuse humor on every page made her a natural fit for the type of screwball mystery film that gained such popularity from The Thin Man through the 1950’s and into television. Rice herself adapted a couple of these for film, as well as her widely considered best novel, the standalone Home Sweet Homicide (see JJ’s rave review here) and several films not based on her own work. And so MGM came up with a great idea to (hopefully) repeat its success with the Thin Man series: team up Craig Rice with Stuart Palmer and create a film that paired Rice’s J.J. Malone with Palmer’s Hildegarde Withers. What could go wrong?
Unfortunately, the publisher of the Withers books would not agree to the idea. Undaunted, Palmer and Rice co-wrote a short story, “Once Upon a Train (The Loco Motive),” and published it in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in 1950. (The authors would eventually pair up Withers and Malone in some short stories that were published in 1963 as The People vs. Withers and Malone.) In the story, J.J. Malone is teamed with an original character named Mrs. O’Malley, a Montana-born widow who wins a radio contest and boards a train bound for New York to accept her prize. While stopping in Chicago to visit her niece, Mrs. O’Malley, a crime story fan, meets Malone, whose sleuthing abilities have been advertised (and exaggerated) in one of her favorite detective story magazines.
Malone is trying to collect a delinquent $10,000 fee from a client of his who he helped get paroled from a long sentence at Joliet. Instead, the client skips town aboard the same train on which Mrs. Malone is riding. Also at hand are several other people with an axe to grind against the ex-con, as well as Chicago detective Marino, who wants to arrest the guy for skipping bail . . . and who has a very antagonistic relationship with Malone.
The set-up is perfect for a screwball mystery, and it would have made perfect sense for Rice and/or Palmer to write the screenplay. Unfortunately, MGM never thought that logically, although their screenwriter of choice, William Bower, did have some experience writing screwball; he also wisely hewed to the plot points and dialogue from the original story. And veteran director Norman Taurog, who made 180 films over four decades, including most of the Elvis Presley films, knew exactly what to do with the farcical material.
Then the studio began dipping into its stable of character actors and came up with a wonderful cast – no A-List actors perhaps, but a perfect blend of faces and personalities from top to bottom. Fred Clark, the perfect dour-faced foil, plays Detective Marino, and Ann Dvorak shows her lighter side as the murder victim’s beleaguered wife. Willard Waterman, who would go on to star as The Great Gildersleeve on TV in 1954 and then play comical antagonists in virtually every TV sitcom and Western in the 1960’s, has an early role here as a train passenger who keeps getting in the way of Malone and O’Malley’s attempts at sleuthing. Waterman essentially plays it straight here, but he has too funny a persona not to elicit laughs. And if you don’t blink, you can catch Herb Vigran and Regis Toomey as reporters; even Toomey is funny here.
As Malone, MGM cast James Whitmore, who is a comic revelation here as his lengthy resume doesn’t include much in the way of comedy. This was the fifth film he had made that year (they really worked ‘em in the old studio days!), and he brings a breezy energy to the role, juggling clue finding and body switching with a boyish horniness for every female on the train – except Mrs. O’Malley, who he treats with an easy-going friendliness.
Mrs. O’Malley is played by Marjorie Main. There was a time when I ate up rural humor! The sitcoms of the 1960’s – The Andy Griffith Show, The Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction and its spin-off Green Acres – all of these were “must-watch TV for this pre-teen representative of a nation hungry for cornpone. And on Saturday mornings, the local station would play the old Ma and Pa Kettle movies, starring Main and Percy Kilbride. I can’t watch them now, but I couldn’t get enough of them as a kid.
In 1950, Main was most closely associated with the Ma Kettle character, which had spun off from the 1947 screwball comedy The Egg and I. Before that, Marjorie Main had had a long career playing supporting roles. She could be dramatic, as in Dead End (1937), but her go-to role was the bucolic housekeeper or farmer’s wife. In The Women (1939), she is a welcome straightforward contrast from all the sophisticated bitchery of the rest of the characters; that same year, she even appeared in the third film featuring Nick and Nora Charles, Another Thin Man.
Tastes change as we grow, and I don’t go in so much for bucolic humor anymore. But Main is wonderful here, a perfect companion to the “always playing the con” antics of Malone. She gets all the best lines, too, often spoken with more subtlety than most of her film characters possess.
For those of you reading this to find your next great puzzle mystery film, move along, please. There’s nary a clue here; in fact, no real mystery exists despite the fact that multiple murders are committed and the killer is revealed at the end. More than anything, this is an out-and-out farce set mostly on a train, with that screwball pace that leaves you breathless. A passenger train has many doors, and I think all of them are used here in perfect farcical fashion; it’s just that, instead of sneaking lovers, we have the passing around of dead bodies. So if you go in with that knowledge – and if you are not put off by the absolutely terrible theme song (written by Adolph Deutsch, who composed the background music for some of MGM’s best musicals) that plays over the opening credits – you will be happily entertained throughout.
I watched this on Turner Classic Movies, so it should come around occasionally. It’s a quick 75-minute romp you won’t regret watching. Also, I have to say as someone who has never read Craig Rice that this really spurs me to seek her novels out – recognizing that the humor might trump the mystery in a lot of these. I’m open to suggestions. (I have Home Sweet Homicide and plan to read that before the next millennium . . . )
Ah Sweet Mystery! 
“There’s nary a clue here; in fact, no real mystery exists.” Yes, but WHY are there no clues or mystery? That is, why did filmmakers not consider them necessary? Because there was already an established tradition of these elements being considered unnecessary in cinema “whodunits.” And what could bring about such a tradition…? A boxoffice phenomenon that treated those elements as of no importance. The Almighty dollar speaks.
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On a totally different note, Dorothy Parker more than just “flirted with the ‘appeal’ of suicide in her work”—and she had the slit wrists to prove it.
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I’ll cede you Parker (I used to know more about her, and the information I read recently seemed iffy), but I won’t give The Thin Man the power you accord it. Puzzle mysteries continued to be made, but the public was happy to settle for the appearance of complexity when what they wanted was sex and violence. It’s worse in live theatre, where you can almost count the puzzle plays on the fingers (and toes) of one person (and I consider Oedipus Rex to be a puzzle play with clues and a terrific shocker of a solution, so I’m going pretty far back). Audiences couldn’t follow along with the clues all jammed into two hours. Like you, I wrote a bunch of whodunnit plays. Mine were dinner theatre fundraisers for a Northern California theatre company, full of clues and challenges to the viewers. People paid no attention to the puzzle: they liked the characters and the costumes and the milieu of the year . . . and the food and the wine they were imbibing plentifully. I think it all just went too fast for them.
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But Brad, you’re overlooking over the fundamental distinctions between the nature of participants in the different mediums:
Book – a reader is by necessity an active participant for, not having visual images and sounds provided for him, he must create them in his mind from the blueprint provided by the text. This makes reading a generally more arduous process than watching a movie or play, but the advantage here is that a reader can generally instantly and vividly recall a referenced past incident, because he himself provided the effort to mentally construct it. The reader also has the oft-cited opportunity of being able to flip back thru the pages to the earlier incident, but this advantage is actually minor in comparison with having been the actual initial mental architect.
Movie – the movie audience is passive, having images and sounds spoon fed to him. Thus, an earlier incident is less likely to be recalled by mere verbal reference. However, the motion picture has the advantage of the flash back technique, which is able to compensate for the passivity of the viewer. This explains why most of the most highly regarded puzzle plot films (The Kennel Murder Case, And Then There Were None , The Verdict, Murder on the Orient Express, The Last of Sheila, Death on the Nile, Evil Under the Sun, Zero Effect, Knives Out) as well as puzzle plot TV series (Ellery Queen, Monk, Jonathan Creek, Sherlock, Death in Paradise, etc…) have all employed denouement flashbacks, at the risk of accusations of being formulaic or cliché (and it indeed IS a cliche, but one whose benefits outweighs its liabilities).
Play – the theatre audience is— like the movie audience— passive. However, unlike the filmmaker, the stage director and playwright generally do not have the device of denouement flashback available to them. Sure, there have been occasional efforts to replicate the flashback technique onstage (Christie’s “Go Back for Murder” is an example), but it has generally led to cumbersome and awkward results (the Ken Ludwig adaptation of “Murder on the Orient Express” has been the most effective attempt I’ve seen). For this reason, it is difficult to produce onstage the desired “sudden retrospective illumination” facilitated by the active mind of the reader and the flashbacks of cinema. And I believe that this is the reason that most of the greatest stage thriller successes have been suspense plays or inverted crime tales (Angel Street, Dial M for Murder) or “twist dramas” dependent upon little to no clueing ( Witness for the Prosecution, Sleuth, Deathtrap, etc…) rather than actual puzzle plot whodunits. Of course, there is one major exception to this— an enormously successful play that is nothing but a pure whodunit— but it also is devoid of clueing, and its success provides its great mystery.
However, I can honestly say that I succeeded in theatrically inducing gasps of not only surprise, but genuine SRI, and from drunken dinner theatre audiences at that. But it took the cleverest of staging, and years to figure out how to do it. And frankly, it wasn’t worth all the effort.
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If you already have a copy of HOME SWEET HOMICIDE, go ahead and read it. I think it’s one of her better ones, and I love the movie, too.
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BREAKING: La Maison Interdite, by Michel Herbert & Eugen Wyl (1932) is a classic French locked room novel. Roland Lacourbe rated it as 5 stars.
The good news is that the English translation The Forbidden House of this book is the next release of LRI owned by John Pugmire.
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Your history here is a tad scrambled:
According to Stuart Palmer (Withers’s creator) in his introduction to the collection of the Withers/Malone stories, the idea to combine John J. and Hildy was a literary conceit, for magazine use; Palmer gives equal credit to Craig Rice, Fred Dannay, and himself for coming up with it.
Movies came later: MGM wanted a Withers/Malone team-up, but RKO, which had the rights to Hildy, scotched that (even though they’d done nothing with the character in more than a decade).
MGM pressed on: having engaged Whitmore for Malone, they made the decision to simply convert Withers into Ma Kettle, enabling them to keep contractee Marjorie Main in the project (the original plan was to sue Main as Hildy – and Main was in fact a New Englander, as prim in her real life as Ma Kettle was rowdy – but RKO put paid to that).
Mrs. O’Malley was the creation of Bill Bowers (sp), and Stuart Palmer (who basically controlled the prose characters) took the paycheck and pulled back (Craig Rice had little to do with any of this).
Anyway, that’s the whole story, documented in detail elsewhere, for whatever it’s worth ,,,
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Thank you for the corrections, Mike. I’m having this trouble right now with my research into the Ellery Queen TV show, where different sources tell me different things. William Link himself offers contradictory info in writing and a taped interview. Which Link do I follow??
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Much of the history of EQ-TV gets swallowed up in the unsettled circumstances of Jim Hutton’s life at the time of its making – in particular a long-standing romantic relationship that exemplifies the term “off-and-on”, and the sudden onset of the cancer that did Hutton in (in what would have been Season 3 of the series).
Hutton himself was well-liked by his peers on the set, who never said anything (much) negative about the man; much depends on when the statements were made, in relation to their proximity to Hutton’s passing.
It’s all rather complicated, and until (or unless) someone writes full-scale biographies of Hutton and the others, we’ll never really know, one way or the other – So There Too.
As long as I’m here:
There was a Jeff and Haila Troy movie: “A Night To Remember”, from Columbia in 1943, with Brian Aherne and Loretta Young as the Troys.
These days, it’s very well thought of (the supporting cast includes Sidney Toler, in his gap year from Charlie Chan, as a crusty cop), but Columbia decided against going for a series.
Literally – Columbia bought another Troy novel, but changed the character names to Barry and Jane Craig, casting Allyn Joslyn and Evelyn Keyes, and calling the new mixup “Dangerous Blondes” (?).
Why Columbia went through this rigmarole is lost to history; as it turned out, the was no “Barry & Jane” series either.
Not much of a story here, but what are you gonna do?
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I’ve seen A Night to Remember several times. It baffles me that there were so many successful fictional couples in GAD mystery – and there were dozens of these charming couple solve forgettable mystery films – and never the twain really met. I may be wrong, but I think the six Thin Man movies might be as lengthy a series as you get here, and as soon as Hammett quit being involved (or, rather, was pushed), they got even more formulaic. The couples-solving-mysteries thing seemed to work on radio, but couldn’t translate into a real series on film. Why, oh why, don’t we have novels based on books by Delano Ames, the Lockridges, Craig Rice, and Kelley Roos?
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It’s as I said Brad. The success of The Thin Man convinced Hollywood. moguls that all you needed was a charming couple and a forgettable mystery. They didn’t realize that The Thin Man’s initial mystery was INTENTIONALLY forgettable (or, at least intentionally sloppy), and if your mystery was forgettable, your couple must be VERY charming or have already accumulated a great deal of good will (Nick and Nora had both). If plot is less important, there’s no need to base the films on novels; “based on characters by’ is then deemed just as good. Which is why we had so many “based on characters by” series (Bulldog Drummond, Torchy Blane, Boston Blackie, The Lone Wolf, The Falcon), some of them even couples (Joel and Garda Sloane, Bill and Sally Reardon), and the steep decrease of standalone puzzle plot mysteries (which had been prevalent until 1934), at the same time the Golden Age puzzle plot was reaching its fullest flowering (Death on the Nile, The Judas Window, The Beast Must Die, The ABC Murders, The Problem of the Green Capsule, And Then There Were None, The Hollow Man, Five Little Pigs, Till Death Do Us Part, Evil Under the Sun, etc…).
The key to success in detective series post 1934 seemed to be the ability to retain the same actors (for long stretches) in their title roles. William K. Everson was right when he described detective movie fans as those “who care little for fidelity to a literary school as long as Basil Rathbone is Sherlock Holmes and William Powell is Philo Vance.” Admittedly, there were 14 Philo Vance films starring 10 different Vances, but that was not really a series, but rather a series of series, with no more than 3 films ever made consecutively at one studio (3 Paramounts, then an MGM, then 2 Warners, then 2 MGMs, then 3 Paramounts- one of them British- then one Warners, and finally 3 PRCs— Philo Vance was less a detective series franchise than a demonstration of successful literary agent deal-making).
On the other hand, the writing was on the wall for the Perry Mason series once they lost Warren William as Mason (he later made 9 films as The Lone Wolf, all nearly interchangeable) and the same for RKO with Edna May Oliver as Hildegarde Withers. Sure, you can try another actor in the role, but the identification is often too strong for successors to succeed. They pulled off the switch from Oland to Toler with Charlie Chan at Fox— but they knew very well where the appeal lay, and were careful to secure long contracts with their Chan actors.
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