Silver Screen (Nov 1936-Apr 1937)

Silver Screen for January 1937 67 "Whodunit" [Continued from page 24] lette, who used to play Sergeant Heath to William Powell's Philo Vance, has been replaced by the thick-necked, thick-wilted Nat Pendleton, who annoys today's ace detective, Nick Charles. Charles Butterworth gave Ronald Colman bewildered assistance in "Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back," and the frogvoiced Lionel Stander was an unfailing pleasure as Nero Wolfe's indefatigable aide. One of the greatest assets of the whodunit is the lengthy cast that invariably crowds the screen, giving opportunity to so many capable players. There are all the red herrings who must slink about looking just too suspicious for words, in order to distract the moviegoer's attention from the real culprit. Usually, of course, the guilty party is the most irreproachably innocentappearing character in the cast; but he may sometimes be an obvious villain, with an "air-tight" alibi that the detective breaks down at the last minute. What, no women? Well, very few. The thrillers are neglectful of our sex, when they are not downright insulting. All the heroine has to do is scream at regular intervals and get herself into incriminating positions or dangerous spots from which the hard-working hero must rescue her. Or she may even make an infernal nuisance of herself, like the charming but exasperating young lady that Rosalind Russell played in "Rendezvous." Edna Mae Oliver alone has upheld the honor of her sex, as the screen's sole lady detective, the snooping school-teacher who made her first appearance in "Penguin Pool Murder," with the tough, querulous Jimmy Gleason playing stooge. International Mary Brian and Gary Grant emerge from a picture show all smiles and still single. But why stop there? Claudette Colbert would certainly make a clever, as well as decorative sleuth. Joan Blondell's long acquaintance with the ways of movie crooks qualifies her also. Maybe a feminine Sherlock wouldn't be realistic. So what? One of the most engaging features of the thriller is its bland disregard for realism. The step from the whodunit to the horror picture takes you even farther from realism— perhaps into the realm of fantasy. But the fantastic thriller has a great deal to learn from the prosaic detective yarnchiefly, the value of comedy. The relief from tension that laughter gives makes the grimmest moments more effective by contrast. The best of these pictures— "The Invisible Man"— was also the most comic. The actor who does the scaring in the thrillers is much less important than the actor who is being scared. Audiences watching "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" shivered more at Miriam Hopkins' portrayal of naked fear than at Fredric March's trick make-up. Much of the kick beneath the light-hearted foolery of "The Thin Man" was supplied by Harold Huber, as the terrified stool-pigeon. Logically, the next step in Hollywood's dogged attempts at the mass production of mild hysterics should be the more subtly chilling psychological horror story. We've had a taste of this sort already in Peter Lorre's "M" and in "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," that bright little essay on schizophrenia, which might have been written in collaboration by Dr. Sigmund Freud and the Grimm Brothers. There is room in the moviegoer's affections for every type of thriller. We can listen with an equally pleasant shudder to Boris Karloff's hollow tones echoing in the cobwebby laboratory and the ruined castle, to William Powell flippantly defying some belligerent gunman, or to the hushed, eerie sound of Leslie Howard's voice as he takes us on another of his excursions into the hereafter or the fourth dimension. IB rAPPENED TO THE BOY FRIEND UTELY okr-THEpe's Dicvc: now.' 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