The Murder in the Museum

I've always loved this curio, a z-grade murder mystery from producer Willis Kent (Cocaine Fiends; Reb Russell westerns) set in a seedy sideshow arcade with a cavalcade of odd and interesting carny performers worked into the plot. As a murder mystery, it supplies a number of good red herrings, and the cheap sets and downbeat atmosphere and hard-boiled dialogue give the film a raw, exciting feel... The cast is full of reliable veterans, many from the silent era (former silent actors filled the z-grade independent films of the early 30s), so that even the smallest role is colorfully played. And star Henry B. Walthall, of Birth of A Nation fame and a major star in the mid-to-late teens and early twenties (superb in Ibsen's Ghosts and also The Scarlet Letter), gives a

moving performance as a one-time college professor who has been reduced by tragedy to performing magic tricks in a sideshow. He gets a number of featured scenes and, as always, has an understated grace and elegance as an actor (see also the serial The Whispering Shadow and the feature The Flaming Signal for other films of his from this period). This was, I believe, his last film, and his name isn't even spelled correctly in the credits (his name is above the title!). By the way, trainspotters should note that there are three versions of this in circulation--a mail order outlet from Oregon recently released a crisp looking copy,but it is missing a scene at the beginning and has different canned music over the opening credits from an old copy I have from a worn 16mm--and the AFI catalog lists another version with later-filmed exotic dancing footage spliced into the dancing girl scenes. Today's "bad boys" of the post-Pulp Fiction cinema world could take a lesson in understatement and atmosphere from this film. Hats off to director Melville Shyer for another solid piece of work!

Social reformers and political enemies Joseph Girard and Sam Flint are at a dime museum, as are reporter John Harron, and Girard's niece, Phyllis Barrington. It's a thoroughly sleazy affair, promising all sorts of thrills for an additional dime, and delivering very little. Besides the girls in gauzy costumes, there's an armless man, fortune-teller Symona Boniface, stage magician Henry B. Walthall, knife thrower Steve Clemente, and similar acts. Suddenly a shot rings out and Flint is dead. Eventually the police show up and arrest Flint for havinga .45 revolver. When he says he lent the gun to the armless man for an act he was working on, they discovering a toe print on it and arrest the second man. But then it turns out the bullet was a .32 smoothbore. Meanwhile, Harron and Miss Barrington investigate.

It's a Poverty Row movie produced by Willis Kent. The director is Melville Shyer, who spend most of his career as an AD and production manager. I don't think he held any rehearsals, because the lines don't sound very convincing. Still, it's always good to see top-billed Walthall, and Bobby Harron's younger brother.

Regarding the variant versions of this film, it should be noted that one IMDb comment-maker thinks the version with exotic dancing features a section filmed later and spliced in. I do know that the version from Alpha Video as of this year (2006) does NOT contain the entire sequence -- but the sequence CAN be found in another Willis Kent movie available from Alpha Video, namely "Confessions of a Vice Baron" (1943), which is a Willis Kent Productions pastiche of scenes taken mostly from films that starred Willy Castello, but also includes a number of non-Castello movie clips as well. I have checked out the question of the missing footage from the Alpha Video DVD version of "Murder in the Museum" and located it. I would like to describe it, for the benefit of my fellow "trainspotters."

In the Alpha Video version of "Murder in the Museum", the cootch dancers are shown doing a come-on for their dance, then doing a "gyp" version of the dance for 10 cents (to appease snoopy vice-busters), and then a 25 cent "real" version of the dance is promised to male viewers who file into a room. We see only the first portion of the 25 cent dance by Caremelita, a traditional belly dancer in a bangled costume. No music is playing as she dances, and her body is partially obscured by various onlookers until the end of the scene. The movie then picks up with the gunshot that signals the promised "Murder in the Museum."

The deleted footage from this sequence can be found in Alpha Video's DVD of the Willis Kent / Willy Castello pastiche movie "Confessions of a Vice Baron." To get to it, jump to Chapter Index 5 and fast forward through the school girl scene and the Willy Castello close-up; it is the next scene. A jump-cut is made from the barker's intro of the dancers, deleting the 10 cent "gyp" dance, and going directly to the 25 cent dance scene opening. We see the same footage of Carmelita dancing in front of the obscuring onlookers, but this time we get to hear the Turkish music. Then the scene opens up and we see Carmelita full view, on the same stage, but with no bystanders to block our sight of her as she continues to dance to the same music. When she finishes, there appears to be a soundtrack splice (the music jumps) and the off-camera barker says "And over here is Fateema!" and we see another young woman doing some traditional belly-dance moves. She is not shown on the same set as the sideshow midway (she is against a dark floral drapery curtain) and she is not wearing traditional Middle Eastern bangles -- rather, she has on silk or rayon "stripper" type clothes, unlike those seen on any of the earlier-shown dancers. The same music continues over her dance, followed by another musical splice-jump, and then the scene closes out with some more footage that was obviously part of the original "Murder in the Museum": One young woman asks the other to leave as they are "the only girls" in the audience, and her friend declines, with a slight hint of lesbian interest in the dancers; they both then leave, along with the boyfriend of one of the girls. "Confessions of a Vice Baron" then switches to clips from another movie.

It is very clear from comparing the two DVDs that the entire Carmelita dance, with accompanying music, plus the gag with the girls in the audience, came from the original, uncut version of "Murder in the Museum," but i have my doubts that the Fateema dance sequence was originally part of this movie. Given the ease with which digital film can be edited, i hope that Steve Caplan at Alpha Video can be persuaded to restore the lost footage (with or without the possibly extraneous Fateema dance), making Alpha's version of "Murder in the Museum" even better than it already is.

This reminded me of Lon Chaney movie where we are brought into a kind of freak show atmosphere with unconventional characters. The neat thing is that they are like all of us, and that's the tragic element. Because the world they live in has so much of an impact on them, it is hard for them to reach above and beyond to happiness. This is actually a pretty decent movie with fair cinematography and decent performances. Another reviewer mentioned Todd Browning. I'd love to hear more about him and his life. His movies are really quite engaging. So this could typify the genre he worked in, even though it wasn't his.

I was pleased that the conclusion wasn't some offhanded, anything to get a finish to this thing kind of work but dealt with the pain and reality of the characters.

When reform-minded city councilman Newgate is gunned down while investigating dope peddling charges lodged against a seedy metropolitan side show, a key suspect's debutante daughter joins forces with a slick newspaper reporter to find the real killer.

This 1933 Poverty Row whodunit was most likely inspired by Tod Browning's FREAKS (1932), and cleverly co-opts the whodunit format to provide a mediation on urban cynicism in Depression-era America. Instead of the expected lineup of affluent ne'r-do-wells peculiar to mystery thrillers, the unusual suspects here comprise a sobering cross section of disappointed and bankrupt men, from Steve Clemente's Mexican revolutionary turned knife-thrower to Henry B. Walthall's "Professor Mysto," a sad-eyed bibliophile reduced to performing sleight-of-hand in the disreputable Sphere Museum. Several of the characters refer to grudges borne and threats perceived (whether real or imagined), and with the dead "blue-nose city councilman" etched as more of an opportunist than a philanthropist, THE MURDER IN THE MUSEUM inclines intriguingly toward social criticism - but also offers entertaining flashes of pre-Production Code pulchritude and plenty of ripe, dime novel dialogue.

Sadly, both Walthall (formerly a star of silent films) and lead John Harron (WHITE ZOMBIE) would die before the end of the decade - lending additional poignancy to this tale of financial and spiritual ruination. Three Stooges fans will get a kick out of seeing Symona Boniface cast here as "Katura the Seeress."