Donald Cook, the scion of an old New York family, receives a letter that threatens him should he go to his uncle's casino. He does so anyway, and is poisoned, but recovers. His wife, Louise Henry, is not so lucky. Enter Paul Lukas as Philo Vance.
It's a piece of miscasting, but Lukas does what he can with it, putting more energy and emotion into the movie than other Vances, particularly when Rosalind Russell enters the scene. There are lots of red herrings, lots of great character actors, including Eric Blore as Lukas' valet, Alison Skipworth as the tasteless matron of the family, Isabel Jewell in a non-comedic part, Louise Fazenda and Leo G. Carroll as servants, and William Demarest as an auctioneer.
I have, in many of my reviews of mystery movies, commented that a movie is a fair or unfair mystery. I should, at least once, explain what I mean by that. A mystery is a competitive game: is it possible for the audience to figure out whodunnit before the revelation is made? Can they winkle out the relevant clues and discard the false ones before they are given the answer? To do so fairly, they must have the same knowledge as the investigator, and the answer must be unique.
Too often the competition is ruined by having the investigator having a clue the audience does not. Sometimes there are two valid solutions, and Maigret will win the laurels by choosing the complicated one in contravention of Occam's Razor. True, a really skilled composer of mysteries may give both, as Agatha Christie did in MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS, but that's an odd lemma in the logical game of mystery writing, like the occasional example in which the audience is given more relevant information than the investigator, or the subgenre of howcatchem in which the investigator must find the flaw in a seemingly perfect murder; the Columbo TV series is the best known example of this, and the audience is told whodunnit up front. Can they see the flaw before one-eyed Peter Falk does?
There's also the problem in a lot of mysteries in which the actual murderer is obvious from the start, just by the way the performer behaves, or the structure of relationships. Spot the murderer early on. Does the evidence mount against them? All too often, alas, it does not. Bad mystery.
For most mysteries, the question is who did it, and properly the investigator must know no more than the audience. Few of the Philo Vance mystery movies of the 1920s and 1930s play fair, and the one book in the series written by Willard Huntington Wright as S. S. Van Dyne which I read suffered this flaw, and was also exceedingly dull. Wright may have been an acclaimed aesthete, but it didn't show in his mystery writing.
In this movie, the solution is offered without eliminating two other possibilities. The murderer confesses. Too bad. Without that confession, the murderer's lawyer would make that apparent to the jury, permitting the reasonable doubt that will acquit him. Good thing the cops shoot him; he deserves it and saves the court system money.
It's a well made movie. The MGM gloss is evident, in the music by Dmitri Tiomkin, the photography by Charles Clarke, and the performers' willingness to do their best for director Edward L. Marin, a competent journeyman. You'll have a good time watching it until the solution is presented. Too bad the mystery angle is a cheat.
It's a piece of miscasting, but Lukas does what he can with it, putting more energy and emotion into the movie than other Vances, particularly when Rosalind Russell enters the scene. There are lots of red herrings, lots of great character actors, including Eric Blore as Lukas' valet, Alison Skipworth as the tasteless matron of the family, Isabel Jewell in a non-comedic part, Louise Fazenda and Leo G. Carroll as servants, and William Demarest as an auctioneer.
I have, in many of my reviews of mystery movies, commented that a movie is a fair or unfair mystery. I should, at least once, explain what I mean by that. A mystery is a competitive game: is it possible for the audience to figure out whodunnit before the revelation is made? Can they winkle out the relevant clues and discard the false ones before they are given the answer? To do so fairly, they must have the same knowledge as the investigator, and the answer must be unique.
Too often the competition is ruined by having the investigator having a clue the audience does not. Sometimes there are two valid solutions, and Maigret will win the laurels by choosing the complicated one in contravention of Occam's Razor. True, a really skilled composer of mysteries may give both, as Agatha Christie did in MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS, but that's an odd lemma in the logical game of mystery writing, like the occasional example in which the audience is given more relevant information than the investigator, or the subgenre of howcatchem in which the investigator must find the flaw in a seemingly perfect murder; the Columbo TV series is the best known example of this, and the audience is told whodunnit up front. Can they see the flaw before one-eyed Peter Falk does?
There's also the problem in a lot of mysteries in which the actual murderer is obvious from the start, just by the way the performer behaves, or the structure of relationships. Spot the murderer early on. Does the evidence mount against them? All too often, alas, it does not. Bad mystery.
For most mysteries, the question is who did it, and properly the investigator must know no more than the audience. Few of the Philo Vance mystery movies of the 1920s and 1930s play fair, and the one book in the series written by Willard Huntington Wright as S. S. Van Dyne which I read suffered this flaw, and was also exceedingly dull. Wright may have been an acclaimed aesthete, but it didn't show in his mystery writing.
In this movie, the solution is offered without eliminating two other possibilities. The murderer confesses. Too bad. Without that confession, the murderer's lawyer would make that apparent to the jury, permitting the reasonable doubt that will acquit him. Good thing the cops shoot him; he deserves it and saves the court system money.
It's a well made movie. The MGM gloss is evident, in the music by Dmitri Tiomkin, the photography by Charles Clarke, and the performers' willingness to do their best for director Edward L. Marin, a competent journeyman. You'll have a good time watching it until the solution is presented. Too bad the mystery angle is a cheat.