The Crime of Helen Stanley

It's the third of four movies that Ralph Bellamy starred in for Columbia as Inspector Steve Trent. In this one, flighty movie star Gail Patrick is shot while performing a dance number in which her character, Helen Stanley is shot.

It's a nicely set-up mystery, with a lot of suspects which Bellamy muscularly eliminates one by one -- Ward Bond, in an early substantial part is eliminated when he's shot while phoning Bellamy with a vital clue. It's not really a fair mystery, since the clue which lets Bellamy crack the case is withheld from the audience. Instead we get the usual tropes of mysteries of the era, directed unenthusiastically by Ross Lederman, especially gloved hands emerging from from drapes. The cast includes Shirley Grey and Vincent Sherman.

Blue-eyed Betty Lane runs away from home after she learns the shocking truth about her father's womanizing. A chance meeting with her old finishing school classmate, dark-eyed and seductive Helen Stanley, leads Betty to the tangled mysteries of the Gothic Stanley mansion in the deep south.

This crime thriller handles themes of race prejudice, drug addiction, insanity, family secrets, and even lesbian sex. Betty stumbles across letters from Helen's father confessing that beautiful pale-skinned Helen is really the daughter of a light skinned black woman. Sweet, trusting Betty would never do anyone any harm, but strong-willed Helen has been raised in the brutal world of Jim Crow. She will do anything to protect her identity as a "white" woman.

Shirley Gray does a great job showing Betty's sweet, trusting nature, her fear melting into relief as Helen laughs and offers to "spin the bottle" with her. But this kissing game is not about innocent romance. Helen "spins" a long ivory opium pipe, laughing and teasing until shy Betty reluctantly takes her first puff. Gail Patrick, dark eyed and very beautiful, shows the wolfish side to Helen Stanley's deeds. Her eyes light up as Betty sucks on the long ivory pipe, plainly seeing that the blue-eyed blonde is heading for helpless addiction.

Once Betty is on the pipe, Helen converts her into a pet, or slave. The two of them host parties where Southern gentlemen paw the increasingly oblivious Betty, who clings to Helen like a lost child, begging for "another puff, Helen. Please! Just a quick one." Soon Betty is weeping, begging for more of the drug, and a laughing Helen kicks her out into the rain.

At this point, well into the film, we cut to Inspector Trent, the "hero" of the film, who has been building a file on Helen for months. He rescues Betty, exposes the drug ring, and watches as a doomed Helen dies in the flames of her father's plantation house. But the final line of the film, "this is the way it has to be," has a dark, ambiguous meaning. Is Trent upholding justice or the racial code of the Deep South? For all her cruelty and evil, Helen is far more attractive than Betty, whose sweet, submissive nature is spineless and fundamentally passive. She ends the movie clinging to Inspector Trent just as helplessly as she clung to Helen! The Inspector's line to her -- "a baby like you needs a lot of looking after," is also hard to fathom. Does he love her, or did he secretly love evil Helen?

Altogether, a fascinating lost film of the Thirties crime genre!

This movie was remade in 1938 tilt who killed Gail Preston. Rita Hayworth had the lead. Only differences are this is set on a movie set. Rita's was in a night club.

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Movie star Helen Stanley is jumpy, nervous. She checks the gun in her dressing room desk drawer. She calls up her friend Inspector Trent and urges him to come to the studio. By the time Trent arrives, Helen Stanley has been murdered while filming a dance scene. Inspector Trent investigates.

Gail Patrick is only on screen for about 15 minutes as the temperamental Helen Stanley, but that's plenty of time for Patrick to establish her character as one of those mercurial celebrities who race through life making enemies.

It's up to Ralph Bellamy, as Inspector Trent, to sort through those enemies and identify which of them is the murderer. His long list of suspects includes everyone on the set--cameraman, director, bodyguard, crew members. Shirley Grey has a nice role as a script girl who is engaged to cameraman Kane Richmond. Lucien Prival is the veteran movie director, Phillip Trent an assistant, Bradley Page an agent, Ward Bond a crew member--and all seemingly had reasons to do away with the much-hated actress.

Bellamy is fairly low-key as the pipe-chewing Inspector Trent. He offers a few nuggets of detective wisdom ("Those open and shut cases sometimes are the toughest ones to crack") but mainly hangs around the studio asking the obvious questions. That leaves the focus on plot, which along with all of those suspects involves a lost diary and a missing murder weapon. It all moves fairly quickly from one short scene to the next. Overall it's pretty standard, a reliably entertaining B mystery.

I don't know why the 2006 reviewer from New York has never examined his analysis of "The Crime of Helen Stanley," as his depiction is for an entirely different movie (all other reviewers are right on the money). This was the third of four Columbia whodunits starring Ralph Bellamy as Inspector Steve Trent, investigating homicide in a no nonsense fashion that doesn't involve comic relief, a rare approach for the 1930s (again for Columbia, he went on to emphasize the humor playing the cinema's first Ellery Queen in 1940). Gail Patrick plays the title character, a bitchy Hollywood actress who mysteriously fears for her life, protesting when her former lover takes up with her sister (Shirley Grey). Shot dead in front of the camera while twirling the dance floor, the prime suspect turns out to be her former husband, confessing his guilt before committing suicide. Inspector Trent continues his investigation, learning that the answers can all be found in the late actress' diary, which everyone would like to find. This was a Hollywood mystery along the lines of 1932's "The Death Kiss," always enjoyable to see the behind-the-scenes action in a real studio, in this case Columbia. The cast is made up of little known contract players, but there is Ward Bond, another prime suspect, and Bradley Page, always a red herring. Shirley Grey previously played opposite Boris Karloff in 1931's "The Public Defender," and a year later co-starred with Bela Lugosi in "Mystery of the Mary Celeste." Vincent Sherman, as Helen Stanley's bodyguard, later became better known as a director (1939's "The Return of Doctor X"), while Steven Chase, as the suicidal ex, played the doomed doctor devoured by "The Blob" in 1958. The first Trent feature was "Before Midnight" (1933), also just as good, the second, "One is Guilty," rather elusive, the last, "Girl in Danger," a weak finale. Ralph Bellamy's sterling career continued right up until his death in 1991.