The Crime of the Century

Jean Hersholt walks into the police station and confesses. He's a hypno-therapist, desperate for money because of Wynne Gibson, his second wife, and her spendthrift ways. So he has hypnotized a client into embezzling ten thousand dollars and bringing it to him. Hersholt killed him and took the money. Or he will.

Which, the cops inform him, isn't a crime until he does it. He goes with one of them to his home, where the patient is waiting..... and the corpses start to pile up.

It's a heck of a set-up, and a pretty good mystery in this definitely pre-code movie, in which reporter Stu Erwin falls in love instantly with Frances Dee, Hersholt's daughter and tries to solve the murder himself. With Torben Meyer, William Janney, Samuel S. Hinds as the patient and Fred Kelsey as a dumb cop.

A mystery the way they used to make them, full of clues, an on screen detective and the expectation that the audience is working hard to make sense of everything. Near the end, they stop the film and an announcer appears to give the audience a minute to guess.

The murderer is hard to guess, and this also has some interesting genre features. One is that the main suspect turns himself in before the crime. What mars this is that we have that one anti-cinematic device: the lights go out and events happen without us being able to see them. All crimes happen on-screen, but the crime itself is occluded. This happens twice, each time there is a murder.

As a narrative device, we have evolved away from this one, and I guess I am sad to see it go, because with it, you have purity: everything essential happens in front of you. But evolved away we have, to be replaced by off screen unknowns.

We have also lost the character who is our on-screen detective, but not as a result of cinematic development. These guys just faded from life in general, the newspaper crime reporter. That is a loss too.

The crime of the century wasn't quite the crime of the century. It was a doozy, it was a mystery, but it was also solvable. When I think, "crime of the century," I think of a crime that was gotten away with.

The movie began with Dr. Emil Brandt (Jean Hersholt) pleading to detectives Riley (Robert Elliott) and Martin (David Landau) to lock him up. Why? Because he planned to commit murder for money. If the cops locked him up then he couldn't commit the murder.

He had hypnotized a man by the name of Philip Ames (Samuel S. Hinds) and commanded him to steal $100,000 and bring it back to him by 8:15 p.m. He was then going to kill Philip and take the $100,000 for himself. The killing part is why he wanted to be locked up. He couldn't trust himself not to kill Philip, but police don't make arrests for crimes that haven't happened.

It turns out that Dr. Brandt needed the money to appease his wife, Freda (Wynne Gibson). She was a gold digger and was going to double cross Dr. Brandt and run off with the money with her lover, Gilbert Reid (Gordon Westcott). She never got that chance because a fourth person (someone besides Freda, Gilbert, or Dr. Brandt) entered the house, killed Philip, and took the money. The main suspects were the three aforementioned with an outside chance of it being one of the detectives, or the newspaperman, Dan McKee (Stuart Erwin), or the help, or another man who was anonymous.

There was enough intrigue with the murder and the cast of characters that I stayed tuned in. $100,000 is enough for just about anyone to commit murder, so everybody was in play. There was very little focus on characters with the exception of establishing who they were and a small glimpse of what type of person they were, and that allowed the movie to stay focused on the murder and solving the murder. That's what I want from a murder mystery. I don't need to know a whole lot about each character except what's germane to the plot. "The Crime of the Century" kept everything crime-centric even if it wasn't "the crime of the century."

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Dr. Emil Brandt (Jean Hersholt) staggers into a police station and confesses to murder ... only problem is he hasn't committed it yet. However, he has figured out all of the details and confesses what he intends to do to the police. He is a hypnotist and psychologist and his work involves turning people away from criminal activity. One of his current patients is a bank president who is feeling the urge to steal - Philip Ames. Brandt has already given him a command while under hypnosis - to bring him one hundred thousand dollars - a little over a million dollars in today's money. Tonight, when Ames returns to Brandt's house, it was Brandt's plan to put him under as he usually does with hypnosis, then take the money, kill Ames with a single wound to the heart, then dissect his body and dispose of it. The police would be searching for Ames when the money was discovered missing, but they'd be looking for a live thief not a dead victim of hypnotic suggestion.

Brandt confesses all of this because he is a moral man, is horrified by his own thoughts, and wants to be stopped before it is too late. How did things get this far? Because the moral Brandt is married to a very immoral woman, and she's been suggesting that she will leave Brandt unless their financial situation improves. The police say they can't arrest him for what he hasn't done but they will come to his house and make sure he doesn't carry out his plan. Brandt is thankful and relieved.

In spite of all of these precautions, Brandt does wind up - seemingly alone - in a room with his wife and a hypnotized Ames. The lights go out. Brandt's treacherous wife screams, hears a scuffle, then wrestles with someone in the dark, then flees into the street looking for help. The person who comes to her aid is crime beat reporter Dan McKee (Stuart Erwin). When the lights come back on Ames is dead in the manner described by Brandt in his plot, the money is gone, and Brandt lies next to Ames unconscious from chloroform.

McKee wants to bust this crime wide open for his paper, but he has to work around the police and deal with the fact that there are so many suspects - Brandt's daughter, Brandt's wife and her lover for obvious reasons, Brandt himself, the police who knew Brandt's plans, maybe even Brandt's servants - had they been snooping on private conversations?. Then there is some mystery man who shadows Brandt from the beginning of the film up to the time of the murder. Could he have done it? Brandt's daughter seems innocent enough, but she could have gotten into the house any time, plus McKee is sweet on her. Could she be the killer? What is unique and rather William Castle-like about this film is that about 15 minutes before the end the film is stopped and an announcer comes out and says that this film is moving so fast that the viewer doesn't have time to figure out who did it, so a brief intermission is declared as all of the suspects are shown on the screen while the intermission clock counts down. Then the film concludes.

I really liked this one. Although you are led to believe Jean Hersholt is going to be the lead in the beginning, it is actually Stu Erwin's picture most of the way, and he rises above his normal corn-fed supporting man image and comes across true as the hard-working crime beat reporter confident he can get the killer, get the story, and get the girl, even though it might be the girl herself or her father that he winds up sending to the electric chair.

This is an absolute hoot! It's like one of those silly murder mystery games you play at dinner parties and just as much fun. It's difficult to categorise this: it's a really intriguing who-done-it but doesn't take itself at all seriously. It's brilliantly made whist at the same time absolute garbage.

It's exactly the sort of picture which could have garnered a real cult following. You could imagine hundreds of fans dressing up as these outrageously cliched characters: bungling cops, a cocky reporter, a femme fetale, a roguish playboy, a mad scientist and his sweet innocent daughter.

Of course, having that fabulous unsophistication of early thirties pictures, after knowing each other for about six hours, the reporter and the daughter fall instantly in love and get married - so nineteen thirties! It's certainly not your typical B picture - it's cheap, tacky, unashamedly over-acted but brilliant, brilliant, brilliant!

Although all the clues are there, you'll never figure out who the murderer is. Even if you rewind back to the bit with the murder during the minute you're invited to guess yourself, you'll chase those red herrings down the wrong path cleverly laid out to trick you. For a B picture, it's got a surprisingly clever story (it is of course based on a play so Paramount can't take all the credit) You also benefit from dynamic direction from pre Will Hay-William Beaudine and even decent, atmospheric photography like a camped-up Old Dark House.

It would never win any awards for filmmaking but if you enjoyed SCOOBY DOO, you'll love this magnificent nonsense.