Another reviewer mentioned that this was ahead of its time and they were right. Most of these fuzzy black-and-white 1930s movies about detective, reporters, and one or another particeps criminis seem hastily flung together. They're pretty crummy. You await the outcome only because you're barely curious. It's like waiting for a particularly dull jigsaw puzzle to be completed, just because you've already invested so much time in it.
Except for an unnecessary and hysterical ending, this one is exceptional. Robinson is the editor of a New York tabloid. The owners are all over him for the paper's low circulation, so Robinson orders his reporters to dig up the story of a twenty-year-old murder, a love tragedy, and find the woman who shot her philandering paramour. Dig into it. Find out where she lives, what happened to her, and we'll run a daily special on her crime and her current life.
It's not such a hot idea from a moral point of view, a little like "Absence of Malice." The murderer, Nancy Voorhees, now Nancy Townsend (Frances Starr), has established a new life with a good man (H. B. Warner). Nancy's daughter, Marian Marsh, is a student at Hunter College and is supposed to marry a devoted young man from a family of social standing. The story wrecks their happy lives and leads to two suicides. Robinson, at the urging of his secretary, Aline MacMahon, tells off his bosses, throws a telephone through a glass door, and quits.
A few observations. Almost everyone overacts, but that's to be expected in a year when sound was hardly established and silent-movie conventions prevailed. Frances Starr is especially egregious in this regard. There are moments when her performance looks like a parody.
Robinson is introduced washing his hands, and MacMahon remarks that he does it compulsively, several times a day. (Cf., Lady MacBeth.) Prohibition was still the law in 1931, yet everybody saunters in and out of Corcoran's to have a drink. Robinson keeps a pint stashed in his desk drawer.
There are some nice pre-code tickles in the dialog. Ziggie Feinstein is arranging a taxi race from the Bronx to mid-town and he's already fixed it. "I'm going to let an Irishman, a Jew, and a Wop win." When a low-life employee threatens to quit, Robinson gets to quote the Bible: "O, Death, where is thy sting?" Of his secretary, who sits and glares at him disapprovingly, "Don't just sit there like a visible conscience." And: "God gives us heartaches; the devil gives us whiskey." I don't claim these are flights of poetry, just that you're unlikely to find lines even of this level of originality as Philo Vance goes about solving a mystery.
One of the lower forms of reporter is the silkily sinister Boris Karloff, who poses as a priest in order to get the dish -- when he's sober. The character's name is "Mr. Isopod." It's hard to believe that was an accident. In Greek it means "even footed" or even, by extension, "even handed," whereas in fact he's a scurrilous skank.
Except for an unnecessary and hysterical ending, this one is exceptional. Robinson is the editor of a New York tabloid. The owners are all over him for the paper's low circulation, so Robinson orders his reporters to dig up the story of a twenty-year-old murder, a love tragedy, and find the woman who shot her philandering paramour. Dig into it. Find out where she lives, what happened to her, and we'll run a daily special on her crime and her current life.
It's not such a hot idea from a moral point of view, a little like "Absence of Malice." The murderer, Nancy Voorhees, now Nancy Townsend (Frances Starr), has established a new life with a good man (H. B. Warner). Nancy's daughter, Marian Marsh, is a student at Hunter College and is supposed to marry a devoted young man from a family of social standing. The story wrecks their happy lives and leads to two suicides. Robinson, at the urging of his secretary, Aline MacMahon, tells off his bosses, throws a telephone through a glass door, and quits.
A few observations. Almost everyone overacts, but that's to be expected in a year when sound was hardly established and silent-movie conventions prevailed. Frances Starr is especially egregious in this regard. There are moments when her performance looks like a parody.
Robinson is introduced washing his hands, and MacMahon remarks that he does it compulsively, several times a day. (Cf., Lady MacBeth.) Prohibition was still the law in 1931, yet everybody saunters in and out of Corcoran's to have a drink. Robinson keeps a pint stashed in his desk drawer.
There are some nice pre-code tickles in the dialog. Ziggie Feinstein is arranging a taxi race from the Bronx to mid-town and he's already fixed it. "I'm going to let an Irishman, a Jew, and a Wop win." When a low-life employee threatens to quit, Robinson gets to quote the Bible: "O, Death, where is thy sting?" Of his secretary, who sits and glares at him disapprovingly, "Don't just sit there like a visible conscience." And: "God gives us heartaches; the devil gives us whiskey." I don't claim these are flights of poetry, just that you're unlikely to find lines even of this level of originality as Philo Vance goes about solving a mystery.
One of the lower forms of reporter is the silkily sinister Boris Karloff, who poses as a priest in order to get the dish -- when he's sober. The character's name is "Mr. Isopod." It's hard to believe that was an accident. In Greek it means "even footed" or even, by extension, "even handed," whereas in fact he's a scurrilous skank.