Un drame à Hollywood

If you want to kill an actor on set, just sneak in real bullets for a shooting scene. It's not foolproof, but it will get the job done.

In "The Crime of Helen Stanley" that's exactly what was done. Helen Stanley (Gail Patrick) was killed during a shooting scene while filming a movie. The initial suspect was her ex-husband, but once he committed suicide he was out of the picture. There were no shortage of suspects as Helen wasn't a very well liked woman. No suspect was guiltier seeming than Lee Davis (Kane Richmond), a cameraman whom she used to date but who was now engaged to her sister. You had to think that he couldn't be guilty because he was in love, and Hollywood never made cold-blooded killers out of people in love.

Trying to solve the case was Inspector Steve Trent (Ralph Bellamy). He followed every clue and, like all movie detectives, he had a nose for who was telling the truth and who was lying.

"The Crime of Helen Stanley" would've been better had I not already seen a murder on a movie set in "The Death Kiss." It was different, but not different enough to distinguish itself.

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Movie star Helen Stanley is jumpy, nervous. She checks the gun in her dressing room desk drawer. She calls up her friend Inspector Trent and urges him to come to the studio. By the time Trent arrives, Helen Stanley has been murdered while filming a dance scene. Inspector Trent investigates.

Gail Patrick is only on screen for about 15 minutes as the temperamental Helen Stanley, but that's plenty of time for Patrick to establish her character as one of those mercurial celebrities who race through life making enemies.

It's up to Ralph Bellamy, as Inspector Trent, to sort through those enemies and identify which of them is the murderer. His long list of suspects includes everyone on the set--cameraman, director, bodyguard, crew members. Shirley Grey has a nice role as a script girl who is engaged to cameraman Kane Richmond. Lucien Prival is the veteran movie director, Phillip Trent an assistant, Bradley Page an agent, Ward Bond a crew member--and all seemingly had reasons to do away with the much-hated actress.

Bellamy is fairly low-key as the pipe-chewing Inspector Trent. He offers a few nuggets of detective wisdom ("Those open and shut cases sometimes are the toughest ones to crack") but mainly hangs around the studio asking the obvious questions. That leaves the focus on plot, which along with all of those suspects involves a lost diary and a missing murder weapon. It all moves fairly quickly from one short scene to the next. Overall it's pretty standard, a reliably entertaining B mystery.

It's the third of four movies that Ralph Bellamy starred in for Columbia as Inspector Steve Trent. In this one, flighty movie star Gail Patrick is shot while performing a dance number in which her character, Helen Stanley is shot.

It's a nicely set-up mystery, with a lot of suspects which Bellamy muscularly eliminates one by one -- Ward Bond, in an early substantial part is eliminated when he's shot while phoning Bellamy with a vital clue. It's not really a fair mystery, since the clue which lets Bellamy crack the case is withheld from the audience. Instead we get the usual tropes of mysteries of the era, directed unenthusiastically by Ross Lederman, especially gloved hands emerging from from drapes. The cast includes Shirley Grey and Vincent Sherman.

Blue-eyed Betty Lane runs away from home after she learns the shocking truth about her father's womanizing. A chance meeting with her old finishing school classmate, dark-eyed and seductive Helen Stanley, leads Betty to the tangled mysteries of the Gothic Stanley mansion in the deep south.

This crime thriller handles themes of race prejudice, drug addiction, insanity, family secrets, and even lesbian sex. Betty stumbles across letters from Helen's father confessing that beautiful pale-skinned Helen is really the daughter of a light skinned black woman. Sweet, trusting Betty would never do anyone any harm, but strong-willed Helen has been raised in the brutal world of Jim Crow. She will do anything to protect her identity as a "white" woman.

Shirley Gray does a great job showing Betty's sweet, trusting nature, her fear melting into relief as Helen laughs and offers to "spin the bottle" with her. But this kissing game is not about innocent romance. Helen "spins" a long ivory opium pipe, laughing and teasing until shy Betty reluctantly takes her first puff. Gail Patrick, dark eyed and very beautiful, shows the wolfish side to Helen Stanley's deeds. Her eyes light up as Betty sucks on the long ivory pipe, plainly seeing that the blue-eyed blonde is heading for helpless addiction.

Once Betty is on the pipe, Helen converts her into a pet, or slave. The two of them host parties where Southern gentlemen paw the increasingly oblivious Betty, who clings to Helen like a lost child, begging for "another puff, Helen. Please! Just a quick one." Soon Betty is weeping, begging for more of the drug, and a laughing Helen kicks her out into the rain.

At this point, well into the film, we cut to Inspector Trent, the "hero" of the film, who has been building a file on Helen for months. He rescues Betty, exposes the drug ring, and watches as a doomed Helen dies in the flames of her father's plantation house. But the final line of the film, "this is the way it has to be," has a dark, ambiguous meaning. Is Trent upholding justice or the racial code of the Deep South? For all her cruelty and evil, Helen is far more attractive than Betty, whose sweet, submissive nature is spineless and fundamentally passive. She ends the movie clinging to Inspector Trent just as helplessly as she clung to Helen! The Inspector's line to her -- "a baby like you needs a lot of looking after," is also hard to fathom. Does he love her, or did he secretly love evil Helen?

Altogether, a fascinating lost film of the Thirties crime genre!

This movie was remade in 1938 tilt who killed Gail Preston. Rita Hayworth had the lead. Only differences are this is set on a movie set. Rita's was in a night club.

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