Strangers of the Evening

WHO KILLED FRANK DANIELS? is an odd, stagy little film from the early days of talkie cinema. It plays out as a murder mystery with the emphasis on some very tame, almost unrecognisable comedy which no doubt delighted contemporary audiences, although modern viewers will be baffled rather than amused by the jokes and pratfalls evinced here. It's certainly not a timeless comedy like the works of Laurel and Hardy or Harold Lloyd.

The film is very short but manages to fit quite a lot of plotting into its running time, half of which turns out to be rather irrelevant. The body of a man is discovered on a street and two suspects are sought by the exasperated cops; most of the action centres around a morgue allowing for plenty of ghoulish jokes surrounding corpses and the like. Lucien Littlefield's bizarro goof 'Snookie' is probably the best reason to watch this, although comedienne Zasu Pitts shows up late on in the proceedings to add some more humour to the thing.

This is very watchable. A good mix of intrigue and humour.

I'm a fan of Zasu Pitts, so then this came up on YouTube, I jumped. Zasu doesn't show up until the second half of the film - I call that false advertising. Today's audience should not expect comedy. There are scenes that hint at mild amusement, but don't expect more. It seems as if the writers came up with scenes with comic potential, but didn't know how to pay it off. 1932 was early in the talkie era, and they just hadn't worked out timing yet. There's a lot of the talk-pause acting that made the earliest talkies stiff to later audiences. I just didn't find this movie worth finishing - even when Zasu finally made her entrance.

This murder mystery cum comedy is seriously hard work to enjoy. Talky and slow moving mystery concerns a couple of bodies turning up at the local morgue, then disappearing, with detectives seemingly bombarded by unusual suspects but no motives. Framed for the murder of one of the corpses, local Doctor (von Eltz) decides to solve the crime himself before he's wrongly arraigned.

Zasy Pitts offers comic timing and a familiar hound-dog expression and urban drawl, but even her professional touch can't muster enough spark to light this drab affair. Miriam Seegar is an attractive souther belle with little more to do here than hang like the handbag that adorns her arm and deliver inane dialogue. Warner Richmond also features in a trademark role as the conniving villain.

Frequent newspaper inserts substitute for the narrative, while there's the usual silhouettes and shady conspiracies to thicken the plot, alluding to much more than is eventually delivered. There's an amusing punch-up near the end, and the parallel story lines successfully connect at the film's 'all is explained' conclusion, but even at only 65 minutes, it's still a bit of a yawn.

Strangers of the Evening features switched corpses, an amnesia victim, estranged family members, and strange doings in the funeral parlor back room. It also contains a hard-to-follow plot involving too many characters, none of whom we get to know well. Even top-billed Zasu Pitts doesn't appear until about the halfway mark, and then in a role that is as minor—yet as important—as everyone else's. Overall, it's an uneven mix of oddities and clichés that leaves one off balance yet with a vague impression of having enjoyed it quite a lot.

The dialog is certainly not the star of this picture. Whew! there is some silly stuff here. Take this exchange between Theodore von Eltz as young Dr. Everett and Miriam Seegar as Ruth, the daughter of a murder victim: Dr. Everette: "Please, dear." Ruth: "Oh, don't!" Everette: "Why, Ruth…you believe that I killed him?" Ruth: "Oh, I don't know what to believe." Everette: "Oh, Ruth, dear, you've got to have faith in me." Ruth: "Well, you quarreled." Everette: "But you can't believe that I did it! I don't know what happened, but you must trust me…." And so on.

However, that blend of the predictable and the weird is somehow difficult to turn off. Von Eltz is actually quite good in his limited role. Lucien Littlefield is appropriately bizarre as "Snooky," as he's called by Zasu Pitts' Sybil, a sweet loony herself who found Snooky wandering in the street wearing only a raincoat and so took him home and fell in love with him.

Zasu sums it up at the end about as well as anyone could: "Oh, Snooky!"