The Murder Party

The film version pays its respects to the play... there's not much camera movement and no music at all. Despite that, the capable cast and brisk pace make this an enjoyable 60 minutes of movie theater. There are a few red herrings thrown in and the culprit could be anyone. There's a watchable copy on YouTube at the moment.

Immensely gifted British-born Director Michael Powell shows touches of upcoming genius in this 62-minute noir whodunnit which may well have given some ideas to René Clair as he helmed the much larger budget production AND THEN THERE WERE NONE of 1941.

In addition to unusually clear B&W cinematography for 1934, NIGHT OF THE PARTY aka MURDER PARTY benefits from superior acting, in particular Ernest Thesiger as Adrian Chiddiat (rhyming with idiot), a failed writer belittled by womanizer Lord Studholme (excellent short portrayal by Malcolm Keen), Muriel Aked as Princess Amelia of Corsova; and, inevitably, the great Leslie Banks makes the most of his short and efficient part as Sir John Holland, a police inspector invited to attend what turns out to be a MURDER PARTY.

Top notch dialogue by Roland Pertwee and John H Turner.

Definitely warrants watching as an early Michael Powell vehicle showing many of the touches that would lead to such masterpieces as COLONEL BLIMP, THE RED SHOES, BLACK NARCISSUS, among others, 8/10.

A film from the beginning of Michael Powell's career, still without Emeric Pressburger.

A serial product (Powell made no less than five films in 1934, and would make six more in 1935), with cinema gaining audiences due to the recent introduction of sound.

This is a typical detective film, in the style of Hercule Poirot's whodunit, almost entirely filmed indoors, without much rhythm and whose main virtue is to be able to keep in suspense, until the end, who the murderer is.

It would be hard to guess, from this film, the enormous qualities that the director would demonstrate in the following decade.

Obviously inspired by Agatha Christie and her stories of Poirot, Michael Powell's The Night of the Party takes what should have been a tightly focused murder mystery and just lets out all of the tension by actually trying to follow real police procedures. What should have been a pressure cooker of tension as everyone is trapped in an enclosed location with a murderer ends up just feeling wane as police pursue one lead and then another over the course of days and weeks afterwards. It just ends up feeling like a waste of a solid setup and concept.

Lord Studholme (Malcolm Keen) is having a party for the visiting Princess Amelia (Muriel Aked). To this party he invites a cast of characters from his daughter Peggy (Jane Baxter) to her friend Joan (Viola Keats), daughter of the police inspector Sir John (Leslie Banks), the writer Chiddiatt (Ernest Thesiger) whose work Lord Studholme's papers have regularly trashed, and Studholme's secretary, Guy (Ian Hunter) who is having a secret love affair with plans to marry Peggy. There are a handful more, but that's the real focus, everyone who could possibly have a motive for killing Lord Studholme. Though, there's extra business about John in that Lord Studholme wants to start an affair with her, but she doesn't want it while he forced her previous lover, Howard Vernon (Cecil Ramage), to sell him the love letters she had sent him.

The movie takes its time to establish everyone, a good half-hour (out of a film that's only an hour long), and it's probably the film's greatest strength. People feel individualized and specific. People get real motives for what they could do to Lord Studholme.

The plot turns at the party when the princess, deciding that she's bored and won't be told no, dictates that they should all play a game called Murder where, drawing cards out of a hat, one person is declared the murderer, a second the investigator, the lights should go off for ten minutes, and they should play act the murder and then the investigation. Chiddiatt jumps at the suggestion, getting behind it especially when he discovers that the princess has a gun with blanks in it, and everyone gets involved, Sir John's arrival negating the need to randomly choose someone to investigate. Of course, Lord Studholme gets murdered, and we have our suspects.

If Christie would have written this, it'd have happened in a remote country house, not an inner city, posh apartment. No one would have been able to leave as Sir John, or Poirot, would have kept everyone there to dig into their pasts and dramatically draw out the truth of who killed him for nefarious means. Well, that's not how Powell and his writers, Roland Pertwee and John Hastings Turner, decide to play things. Sir John gets immediately sidelined when he calls his fellow police officers at Scotland Yard to take over. They let everyone go, and the investigation becomes a series of interviews about information we already know, eventually zeroing in on one of suspects because his knowledge of certain aspects makes him the most obvious suspect.

And then we get to the courtroom scenes. I rolled my eyes instantly because courtroom scenes tacked on to the end of movies rarely work that well. They vacillate between boring and unbelievable, and at least this has the good sense to go into fully unbelievable and, one might even call it, exploitative. It's kind of amusing.

So, the actual murder mystery feels bungled, but the character work leading up to it is interesting in and of itself. It feeds into an abbreviated courtroom bit, but it ends with a kind of ridiculous bang, a ridiculous bang that I was pretty okay with, even if it was a small moment that did little to elevate what had come before. This isn't exactly some great failure, the character work is too decently well done for that, but it is something of a wet squib when it actually gets to the murder mystery part. In terms of this quota quickie period, it's very much on the low end, but that it's still sort of okay is a testament to Powell's abilities behind the camera, I think.

There's an inexplicable other-worldliness about this which makes a routine tale of a murder amongst a group of stilted upper-class English folk completely absorbing. It's so much enjoyable than it should be.

One reason this is such compulsive viewing is the presence of the wonderfully camp, wickedly witty, unapologetically over the top Ernest Thesiger. Most people who've actually heard of him will probably just know him as the weird one in BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN but this larger life living Roman candle can't help but adding an almost magical sparkle to anything he's in. His effervescence works perfectly here amongst the staid, stiff upper lipped ensemble.

You might at first think that watching a group of relics from a bygone age would be unrelatable to us now but as stiff as they first appear, they're all such well rounded, well directed and believable characters, you will easily engage with them. Leslie Banks, our version of Walter Huston: Mr integrity, plays his usual upstanding role anchoring the story firmly in reality but the biggest surprise is Malcolm Keen. His loathsome character really does engender absolute hatred in your heart. In an astonishing performance, especially from this era, you will feel like applauding when he eventually meets his well-deserved comeuppance.

Whilst it's obviously based on a stage play, Gaumont achieved something not too common in the 1930s - to make a real movie, not a filmed stage play. Fans of murder mysteries won't be too taxed in working out who did what and why but the journey along the way is presented so skilfully that you won't be able to look away.