Murder on the Campus

Poor casting sinks this vintage murder mystery that generates a modicum of suspense but generally lacks anything worth one's attention.

Charles Starrett makes for a bland leading man, playing a reporter who just happens to be located at the right place to nearly witness a murder of a student up atop a bell tower. He and the cops find the corpse but can't figure out how the unknown killer escaped with no one seeing him. Starrett is so bland I figured he must be the killer himself, but that was wishful thinking on my part.

Talky and dull, the whodunit plods along with wooden performances by the no-name cast. As a coed who moonlights at night singing in a nightclub, Shirley Grey is too old for the role and makes zero impression. Dialogue patter between Starrett and the dogged cop on the case (J. Farrell MacDonald) is uncreative on the order of saying things like "Go jump in the lake".

Movie doesn't pick up steam until the finale, when the murderer explains exactly how and why he did it and there's a bit of excitement, way too late to make up for the sleep-inducing earlier footage.

Shirley Grey is a very popular girl on campus, despite having to work. For that, she's a singer down at a local night club. When a series of murders occur, she winds up as a suspect. But her boy friend, reporter Charles Starrett, doesn't believe she did it. This cuts no ice with chief of police J. Farrell MacDonald, nor his sergeant, Dewey Robinson.

It's a Chesterfield picture, directed by Richard Thorpe. He was slowly climbing his way out of Poverty Row. This means he gets good performances out of a cast that includes Edward Van Sloan, Maurice Black, and Al Bridge.

The problems arise with the issue of uncovering who committed the murders, and why. Miss Grey is an early suspect. She clearly knows things that's she's not telling, which makes her a prime suspect in the eyes of the police, if not of anyone who knows how mysteries like this are plotted. Just once, I'd like to see the girl friend turn out to be the murderer, despite the insistence of her adoring lover. The information is revealed in clumps as they are told to Starrett, with a log monologue to explain method and motives Still, despite problems with the script, it's a good mystery, and the performances are nothing to sneer at.

I love these Thirties movies. Everyone reviewed the mystery but what interested me was the college life. Clearly, this was an expensive eastern private school, home of the Gentleman's C. In the Depression there were basically two types of college students--the rich and those on scholarships and/or just getting by on various part time jobs, often having to stop for a semester or year when the money ran out. As Johnny Carson used to say, you buy the premise, you buy the bit. So I think these rich kids were kept here by their parents because they were totally useless in the real world and there weren't any jobs in the Depression for people who couldn't do anything but hang out with their friends. It was cheaper to keep them in school than let them ruin the slim profit margin of their parents' businesses. They were perpetual students and perpetual slackers. I imagine they were in this college until they all had PhDs or they got sent abroad, whichever cost their parents less. The men would be old enough when WWII came along to get cushy war jobs via the old boys' network, and the women would marry, divorce, and remarry within the same network.

Now, our heroine was obviously the other type of student. She was taking forever to get through school because it was taking her forever to earn the money. And since nobody was shown in a class, one has to assume that slowed down her progress, too. She won't "marry well" because the reporter got in the way and reporters were notoriously poorly paid. I hope she dropped out and married him right away because if she wasn't going to marry a rich student, she was wasting her money at this institution of learning nothing.

The dead fellow in the bell tower seemed to have been someone's project. I didn't understand why he was at the school but if he only had two years of high school he would have fit right in, academically. He seemed to have been enough of a slacker to concentrate on athletics instead of his bell tower job or school so if he had lived he might have done well in the culture of the place but alas, his quest for the old school tie was cut short. Another five or six years of frat life and he probably would have been indistinguishable from his wealthy brothers.

The professors at this college seemed to have as little interest in education as the students, to judge by the small sample we are shown. Apparently the perks of being employed by the college of "couldn't care less" included having time for extracurricular activities.

Because much of the wealth in the Depression era came through illegal or marginally legal activity, there was plenty of that going on with the students and their associates. Because superficiality and wealth were valued, snobbery, pettiness, and revenge were rife.

Prohibition was just ending, so no more bootleg booze, but there was the excitement of dead bodies littering up the campus so that was diverting. These people were such dullards it didn't even cross their minds to be afraid in the middle of a crime wave! The leaders of tomorrow--which accounts for a lot of things....

I'm convinced that serious moviewatchers need to perform regular, frequent cinematic calisthenics. And that these must include some wading through old, forgotten 30's era mysteries. These unsung projects collectively are the foundation of many of the storytelling conventions we use today.

Mysteries from this era are true detective stories that "play fair" in allowing you to outguess the writer. It is participative viewing of the kind that persists in other forms in movie stories. Here it is pure. This example is a good one for your daily toneup.

It features a narrator which is literally a reporter, a typical trick. It also has an impossible murder, impossible as it turns out in several ways. There are the comedic cops as well as a co-detective doctor. (Doctors in that era were considered men of science.)

You'll have a hard time not guessing the murderer, but how early do you think you can?

Incidentally, this is set on a college campus. You'll not find it easy to relate to these students.

Ted's Evaluation -- 2 of 3: Has some interesting elements.

This film essentially begins with a gunshot being heard by a number of people that appears to be coming from the top of the local college bell tower. Sure enough, when the police get there, they find the body of a college student who died from a bullet wound to the head. Interestingly enough, they not only fail to find a gun, but they also soon discover that nobody was seen leaving the tower after the gunshot was heard. So, with very little else to go on, the police then begin to question everyone who either knew the college student or had any relationship with him. And it's during this time that they find what appears to be the murder weapon in the bedroom of a young college student named "Lillian Voyne" (Shirley Grey) who has no solid alibi on where she was when the murder occurred. What she does have, fortunately, is a boyfriend by the name of "Bill Bartlett" (Charles Starrett) who just happens to be an investigative reporter for the local newspaper and is very skilled in his job. Now, rather than reveal any more, I will just say that I honestly wasn't expecting too much from this film due in large part to the time period in which it was made and the rather mediocre rating on IMDb. That being said, while I will admit that this movie is rather dated and it suffers in that regard, I still found it to be rather entertaining--with the numerous twists and turns along with the dogged persistence of Bill Bartlett being particularly enjoyable. On the other hand, considering the date this film was produced, there are a couple of inherent flaws here and there with the rather abrupt ending being particularly noticeable. But even so, all things being considered, I enjoyed this film, for the most part, and I have rated it accordingly. Slightly above average.