The Crooked Circle

I tried to watch it because it is an early Bruce Humbertsone's film, a director whose filmography will become a little more known during the forties and fifties with the likes of I WAKE UP SCREAMING, TEN WANTED MEN, THE PURPLE MASK and some Tarzan adveture yarns. I am not fond of those all alike thirties mystery flicks, talkative, mostly comedies, and boring for me. So, maybe I am not the best reviewer for this kind of stuff. But if you are courageous enough, go, don't bother my review. It is rare, short and maybe you belong to those who can enjoy it. I don't know very much the actors except maybe Zasu Pitts.

The Crooked Circle is a film that has a lot more potential than it fully realizes. It starts with an intriguing scene with a group of black hooded individuals in an underground room. These shady characters are the Crooked Circle and they are planning revenge on a group of amateur sleuths called the Sphinx Club. Now this set-up makes it sound like the movie could go in an interesting direction with both these groups fighting against each other. Unfortunately, the focus is subsequently too often on comedy, rather than suspense.

The film takes the form of the old dark house format which was hugely popular in the 1930's. The house itself is full of the usual array of secret passageways, trap-doors and hidden rooms that was part and parcel in these movies. The mystery isn't ultimately too compelling, although there is a reasonable twist near the end. It's as creaky as you would expect but not without some charm.

The Crooked Circle is a crime organization that meets in a dark room. All the members wear hoods. The group has one female member. They do not like the Sphinx Club, which is a local amateur crime fighting organization that is adding one new member because of the retirement of another. --Okay, if that makes sense so far then the rest of the film will, too.

Over in the old dark house, Zasu Pitts is spooked from the first moment we see her, and that's before the real action of The Crooked Circle has even started. Soon police officer James Gleason arrives, and Zasu spends the remainder of the picture clinging to various pieces of his uniform, much to his annoyance. They make a cute couple.

Other club members—who all end up assembled at the house, of course—include Berton Churchill as a jovial host who thinks it's amusing that the Circle has vowed to kill him; Rosco Karns, who manages a few wisecracks; and C. Henry Gordon as "Yoganda," a mystic of sorts who has just joined the group, claims to have insight to future events, and may or may not be an infiltrator from the other side. Ben Lyon and Irene Purcell are the obligatory handsome young couple who are both—in different ways—deeply involved in the case.

It's totally silly, but plenty of fun.

If you've never experienced the thing that is Zasu Pitts, here is a Zasu zinger! In 1933 Mae Questel caricatured Pitt's voice for the character Olive Oyl for the Fleischer Studios animated cartoon version of the comic strip Popeye. Zasu (pronounced Zay-Sue) does her best "Olive Oyl" impersonation walking around whining and ringing her hands or attaching herself to the policeman's laynard. I kept waiting for her to say "ohhh myyyy", but instead it's "something always happens to somebody." The first time I saw this film I loved Zasu and found her character really funny. I've since seen her in other films where she does this same whining, uptight, fragile-flower routine. So, upon watching this film again I started getting a little annoyed with the constant whining and near hysteria over a piece of dust. But, there are some funny comedy bits here, and it's also a mystery movie as well. It's an interesting mix of mystery and comedy that actually works. The mystery plot holds together well through the camp of Zasu Pitts and James Gleason who plays Arthur Crimmer the policeman. The haunted House is fun with many a secret passage and even a skeleton in the attic! Well worth the watch. Read more public domain movie reviews at: http://pdmoviereview.blogspot.com/

By 1930, film was already a living, breathing organism that was manipulating artists and audiences in its quest to survive and grow. From 1932 to 1938, that organism tried a number of potential branches of evolution before settling on one main one. But during that period, many experiments can be viewed, experiments that did not blossom and quickly became extinct.

Sadly, this exemplifies one of them and it is such a perfect example, such a pure specimen, it really must be seen if only for history. I'm increasingly convinced that we cannot be fully in the film experience until we have shared in some of its failed attempts.

What characterizes this is extreme abstraction. The basis is the detective story, a basis that is so strong in narrative appeal it survives today as the root of most film. But this experiment abstracts it extremely.

The bad guys are not just bad, but have a club. The good guys are not just good and smart, but they have a club too. The two clubs are at war, mostly it seems because that's what two groups do: define the other as the enemy and adopt roles accordingly.

The setting is abstract too: a "haunted" mansion with trap doors, secret passages, resident hunchback, disembodied music, skeletons (that predictably catch on the girl's dress) and blackouts. There's a very, very clever twist in the story too, one you know is there but you just can't pin down until it happens.

Zazu Pitts does a spooked housekeeper whose voice would be appropriated for Olive Oyl who would make her first appearance the following year.

Ted's Evaluation -- 3 of 3: Worth watching.