Penguin Pool Murder

In the 1930s, RKO produced a series of mysteries concerning the detective activities of schoolteacher Hildegarde Withers. Viewing the first film, THE PENGUIN POOL MURDER, one can understand why the series immediately took off. The mystery itself is well constructed and engrossing. Director George Archainbaud's presentation of the murder victim's discovery is imaginative. In an aquarium, a boy discovers a penguin acting strangely, as if encountering an intruder. The penguin's behavior is immediately explained when a corpse suddenly plunges into the tank! The scenario, based on a Stuart Palmer novel, features some intriguing red herrings with plausible motives for the murder. By the time the killer is revealed, it is fairly obvious who the culprit is, but the mystery is resolved in a clever and credible manner.

THE PENGUIN POOL MURDER is especially worthwhile due to its spirited lead performances. As Withers, Edna May Oliver is drolly acerbic, tartly disdaining the police's ineffectual work as she proceeds to solve the case. As Police Inspector Oscar Piper, James Gleason blusters amusingly, determined to find the killer without Withers' help. Oliver and Gleason truly sparkle in their relationship. Initially, they're cagey of each other but an underlying mutual affection quickly develops. Piper and Withers continue to argue about the case throughout the picture but in an amiable manner that precludes the possibility of mutual ill will. Even if the mystery becomes too familiar to be suspenseful upon repeated viewings, THE PENGUIN POOL MURDER can still be savored due to Oliver and Gleason's marvelous chemistry.

PENGUIN POOL MURDER (RKO Radio, 1932), directed by George Archainbaud, the first (and best) of six film mystery series featuring Stuart Palmer's fictional character of Hildegarde Withers, a spinster schoolteacher, who matches wits with Oscar Piper, a New York City police inspector, is a rare find these days, considering how it predates Agatha Christie's better known female sleuth of Miss Marple. In retrospect, Hildegarde becomes a detective on her own only when the police cannot solve or deduct any clues she encounters, and yet, not being on a professional level when crime solving is concerned, proves that experience is not the issue, but the powers of deduction are.

The story opens with an air view of New York City's Battery Park where various characters are introduced: Gwen (Mae Clarke), a young woman married to Gerald Parker (Guy Usher), a middle-aged businessman, having secret rendezvous with her lover, Philip Seymour (Donald Cook) at an aquarium. Obviously, she wants a divorce but Parker won't grant her one. After receiving an anonymous telephone tip about his wife, Parker heads over to the aquarium where he catches Gwen and Phil together. At the same time, Hildegarde Withers (Edna May Oliver), a spinster schoolteacher, enters the scene with her students on a field trip. Aside from her encounter with a purse snatcher who happens to be the deaf and dumb Chicago Lew (Joe Hernando), a body of a dead man is discovered floating in one of the penguin pool tanks. The man in question happens to be Gerald Parker. Police Inspector Oscar Piper (James Gleason) is called into the case. He suspects Parker's wife to be the killer, however, her lover, Seymour, confesses to the crime and is arrested. Hildegarde, however, has her suspicions, and as she takes notes, comes to the conclusion that Seymour couldn't have possibly killed him. Regardless, Seymour is placed under arrest and put under suspicion. After learning that Parker was murdered with the use of her own hat pin found plunged into his right ear drum to the brain, Hildegarde decides to take matters into her own hands by becoming a crime solver herself, much to the dismay of Inspector Oscar Piper.

The success to the initial pairing of Edna May Oliver and James Gleason lead to several sequels, all featuring Gleason, two more starring Oliver, including MURDER ON THE BLACKBOARD (1934) and MURDER ON A HONEYMOON (1935), one with Helen Broderick in MURDER ON THE BRIDLE PATH (1936), and two featuring ZaSu Pitts in THE PLOT THICKENS (1936) and FORTY NAUGHTY GIRLS (1937). While Broderick physically was a satisfactory substitute for Oliver, though no where as good as Oliver, the series actually fell apart once it acquired Pitts services, which brought an end to what might have become a long running film series.

Supporting cast consists of Edgar Kennedy as Donovan; Robert Armstrong as Barry Costello, the attorney; Gustav Von Seyffertitz as Max Von Donnen, the lab expert; Clarence Wilson as the aquarium director; Sidney Miller as the typical know-it-all student; and Rochelle Hudson as the Switchboard Girl. Edgar Kennedy, famous for his "slow-burn" characterizations in numerous features and comedy shorts, is completely bald in this installment, mainly due to the fact that he was playing Daddy Warbucks in LITTLE ORPHAN ANNIE (1932) with Mitzi Green, about the same time he was working in PENGUIN POOL MURDER.

Never distributed to video or DVD, and at one time a late night show favorite on commercial TV channels, and formerly shown on cable television's American Movie Classics from the 1980s to 1998, at then on Turner Classic Movies where it had once been presented some years ago as part of viewer's request night.

In spite of its age, PENGUIN POOL MURDER surprisingly holds up well, thanks to the perfect casting of the horse-faced Edna May Oliver and New York sounding James Gleason in the leads, a well written and occasionally witty screenplay by Willis Goldbeck, and although viewers might guess whom the killer might be before it is all over, it's certainly fun to sit through this one to see through Hildegarde's power of deduction how she gets to trick the killer into reveal him or herself. While not in the same league as an Alfred Hitchcock movie suspensor or Agatha Christie mystery story, but themes such as this have been an inspiration for many mystery writers, film directors or TV writers in later years, for that mysteries such as this continue to delight audiences even today. (**1/2)

... are the two lessons that this great little precode teaches us. The first lesson I think modern audiences know well, but the second we forget frequently, especially when it comes to romance.

The story is not a remarkable one. Socialite Gwen Parker (Mae Clarke) is unhappily married to stockbroker Gerald Parker (Guy Usher), and she has a lover. Both her lover and her stockbroker husband are broke. Only the stockbroker's life insurance remains as an asset. As the film opens, we also see that the curator of a local aquarium is angry with Gerald Parker because he thinks he ruined him and swindled him as well. We then see Gwen talking to her lover on the phone, but we never actually see who he is. Gwen has an altercation with her rightfully jealous husband that ends with him striking her. She then decides to leave him.

Later that day Gwen meets Philip Seymour (Donald Cook) at the local aquarium. Gwen's husband suddenly appears and accuses Philip and Gwen of being lovers. A scuffle between the two men breaks out and Philip knocks Gerald Parker unconscious and tells Gwen to wait for him downstairs in the aquarium. Philip then takes Gerald upstairs and the last thing we see of that scene are Philip's hands moving toward the unconscious man's throat. A few minutes later Gerald's dead body falls from above into the aquarium's penguin pool.Seems pretty cut and dried doesn't it? Well it isn't at all.

Add to all of this schoolteacher Hildegarde Withers (Edna Mae Oliver) is in the aquarium at the time of the murder with her students conducting a tour of the exhibits, and that she has quite the penchant for solving mysteries as well as agitating the detective on the case, Oscar Piper (James Gleason), and you have a great little precode mystery here.

What really makes this film stand out is the chemistry of the leads, Gleason and Oliver. Here are two middle-aged people, of middling income and less than middling looks in the conventional sense, yet I'll watch this film repeatedly just to see the two interact. You can see a respect and even attraction grow between these people despite the caustic remarks that they trade. Then there are those great precode one-liners from Oliver, not the kind of stuff you'd expect from a prim and proper spinster such as Hildegarde.

Highly recommended as an excellent start to a good series of mystery films starring Oliver and Gleason.

With the coming of sound to the movies and "the Crash" to the stock market, musicals, screwball comedies and tightly plotted "cozy" mysteries became staples of 30's film going and frequently a valuable, if unintentional, tour of the decade's culture (one of the potential motives of one of the suspects in THE PENGUIN POOL MURDERS is a "margin call" on a brokerage account about to be wiped out by falling stock prices!).

In 1932, a year after Dashiel Hammett had introduced the "hard boiled" detective to novels and films with his Sam Spade in THE MALTESE FALCON (a decade before the Oscar winning remake we all know today!), while Philo Vance was still at his peak, Charlie Chan had just started his marathon run, and two years before Dashiel Hammett would backtrack to seemingly invent the "comedy mystery" in the first of the THIN MAN series, Stuart Palmer's "Hildegarde Withers" stories were pointing the way to that perfect bantering comedy.

Miss Withers was one of the first screen characters to build on "the little old lady" detectives first introduced by Mary Roberts Rinehart and later to be highly polished - though with fewer comic overtones - in Agatha Christie's Miss Marple tales.

Beautifully acerbic character actress Edna May Oliver first assayed the plum role of Withers in THE PENGUIN POOL MURDER, playing every stereotype of the prim, corseted but observant, spinster school teacher for all they were worth against the background of a solidly plotted mystery and a grand supporting cast headed by perennial mystery fixture James Gleason as the much put-upon Inspector Piper. A New York City now long vanished became an active part of the supporting cast.

While Miss Oliver chose not to be pinned down to the continuing Withers role after only three films (THE PENGUIN POOL MURDER - '32, MURDER AT THE BLACKBOARD - '34 and MURDER ON A HONEYMOON - '35), passing on the part to solid comedienne Helen Broderick for the less well written but enjoyable and frequently aired MURDER ON THE BRIDAL PATH - '36 and (with less effect) fine supporting comedienne Zasu Pitts for a final two (THE PLOT THICKENS - '36, and FORTY NAUGHTY GIRLS - '37), all the Withers' films are fun - but the Olivers are the best of the bunch.

Connoisseurs of period mystery should especially treasure THE PENGUIN POOL MURDER for its location shots of some now vanished (or at least radically transformed) Manhattan landmarks - most notably the then New York City Aquarium (long before the institution decamped to Brooklyn).

The building at Battery Park, at the tip of Manhattan, has since lost its roof and interior to be returned to its original (now landmarked) form as the actual battery (a fort - "Castle Clinton") which protected New York Harbor in the early 1800's. Before becoming the Aquarium shown in the 1932 film it was already a famous roofed building: converted in 1823 to the "Castle Garden" theatre where in the 1850's Jenny Lind, "the Swedish Nightingale," made her American debut and Lola Montes danced! From 1855 to 1890, it was the United States' immigration depot before Ellis Island was built, and as such, the first ground in America millions of immigrants set foot on. Then, for years it was the New York City Aquarium where Manhattanites could see examples of aquatic life (and the occasional movie corpse).

The Aquarium would not pass muster today for the cramped, indeed life threatening, conditions its inmates were forced to endure - but that in itself is part of the realistic picture of life in the 30's seemingly minor films like these can offer. While the Aquarium interiors were studio recreations, these had to be believable pictures of the world the audiences they were issued to lived in, and we can learn a lot from them about that world as a result. We have come a long way . . . in some ways.

Today, New York's Battery Park grows out from and around the building which beautifully starts of THE PENGUIN POOL MURDERS. The Park contains - directly in front of the former Aquarium - the most eloquent and complete memorial the tragedy of 9/11/01 could possibly have: the "fractured globe" which originally sat in the Plaza between the Twin Towers - now with an "eternal flame" at its base. If you're going to be in New York, don't miss this increasingly meaningful piece of sculpture - but first see its setting as it looked 70 years earlier in delightful PENGUIN POOL MURDERS!

Edna May Oliver is probably second only to Marie Dressler as the most famous character actress of the 1930's and Miss Dressler was a star whereas Miss Oliver tended to play mostly second leads. THE PENGUIN POOL MURDER is one of about a dozen starring features for Edna May and it an absolute treat, probably the funniest comedy-mystery ever made. The first of three films for Oliver as novelist Stuart Palmer's fiftyish caustic, snoopy schoolteacher Miss Withers, the movie was a major hit in 1932 and one can see why even today, the duologue is hilarious, the setting quite novel, and the cast is fine, especially Oliver and James Gleason who have such a superb team chemistry together is near tragic they only made three films together (Oliver left RKO-Radio Pictures in 1935 and the studio unwisely decided to carry on the series with different actresses much to moviegoers - and author Stuart Palmer's - displeasure.) The plot has been dealt with by other posters so I won't go in to it but even if murder mysteries are not your thing, if you love a good comedy you'll will thoroughly enjoy this picture as Oliver gets off some delicious zingers, mostly at the semi-incompetent Inspector Piper (Gleason)'s expense. As a mystery, it works very fine as well although I think most people might be able to pick out the murderer well before either Withers or Piper. The movie boasts two cultish 1930's leading ladies in support cast quite against character, Mae Clarke in an unusually glamorous role for her as one of the suspects and most surprising, Rochelle Hudson, best known for her ultra-wholesome ingénues, painted up like a back street hooker as a floozy of a telephone operator who has a hilarious run-in with Miss Withers. Every time I watch one of the three Oliver Miss Withers pictures I regret there are not more of them out there. At least there are a dozen or so Miss Withers novels by Stuart Palmer ( many still in print including THE PENGUIN POOL MURDER) for us to cast her again in our minds eye again in the role. I believe Hildegarde Withers is the greatest of all the old lady snoops in mystery novels and films - and that includes Miss Marple and Jessica Fletcher.