The Greene Murder Case

This all starts with a sort of roll-call where a lawyer checks the presence of the "Greene" family at the bedside of their mother. A condition of their late father's will is if they don't all live together for fifteen years after his demise, then they don't get a sou. Not surprisingly, they don't exactly see eye to eye so when one of them is shot, it's hardly a shock. The police - the instantly recognisable Eugene Palette as "Sgt. Heath" - duly arrive and enlist the help of detective "Philo Vance" (William Powell) who quickly discovers that any one of them could have done it. Thing is, the killer isn't content with just the one - and when the family start to drop like flies, the investigators must get a move on in case it is just them who are actually left at the end! It's very stage-bound, this, but the pace is break-neck and there are a few characters - not least the bed-ridden and grumpy mother (Gertrude Norman), to keep the investigation moving along until it's slightly unexpected conclusion. It's a bit of an hybrid of other "Dark House" style stories, but Powell and Pallette deliver simply and quite well here.

...and how far his film persona has traveled since 1928's Forgotten Faces! In the silent era, Powell had played a heavy. But that distinguished sounding voice may not have been what the audience expected, but it was what they wanted once they heard it. So parts arrived for him that matched that distinguished voice.

This film opens with the dysfunctional Greene family going over the terms of the late Mr. Greene's will that says the family must live in the estate for 15 years before anything more than living expenses is awarded to any of the heirs. All share equally, and if any die or decide to live somewhere else, their share is distributed to the others. They are 10 years into the 15 years, so New Year's Eve 1934 gives them all their money and their freedom. And none of them likes the other. Mrs. Tobias Greene is bedridden because she cannot walk. Ada (Jean Arthur) dotes on her, and Ada is always being taunted by Sibella Greene (Florence Eldridge) as an outsider since she is adopted. Sibella has some secret between herself and her mother's doctor.

Then, one by one the members of the Green family begin turning up dead. The police call in Philo Vance to help, and lest the audience think it strange that a civilian is helping in police matters, several references are made to "The Canary Murder Case" in which Vance solved the crime. Vance keeps emphasizing that these things usually boil down to psychology, and that is his focus throughout the film - the psychology of the members of the Greene family, both the dead and the living. Did I mention that the servants share some in the will too and there are some very strange household servants? Eugene Palette plays Sgt. Ernest Heath of the police, and does the most interfacing with Vance. Paramount paired Powell and Palette quite a bit in the early years of sound and their contrast seemed to be very synergistic, both of them with trademark voices of a very different kind from one another.

I'll let you watch and see how this all turns out. There are quite a few surprises in the plot. I'd recommend it.

The reviews printed here are all over the place subject-wise. It's unfortunate that some of these were written by contemporary viewers with apparently little or no appreciation for the age of a motion picture, the date of its making, or the public's taste at the time. Myself, I usually find early-talkies of much interest, having been produced when sound was new (as opposed to film shows with live musicians providing the score), and revealing the maker's lack of creativity, or, conversely, creativity of a high order, still impressive today. "The Greene Murder Case" (Paramount; 1929) is rather an amalgam of both. Mysteries at the time were often very atmospheric; this seemed to be part and parcel of the attempts at sound recording. And Frank Tuttle, who directed this effort, was a fine craftsman who went on to direct motion pictures now regarded as classics. Some shots were done silently so as to free up the camera (a scene where it quickly ascends a staircase comes to mind), but most impressively, a cable was strung well over the exterior of the Greene mansion, itself a full-scale set, so that the attached camera could (unexpectedly) be hoisted, revealing the intimidating height of its roof garden, this serving to intensify the film's climax wherein the murderer plummets from it to certain death. In the 1928 S. S. Van Dine novel, the climactic car chase - one of the most exciting things I've ever read - was probably considered too difficult to film effectively; hence the top of the mansion serving as a similarly-exciting substitute. The sequence, as related by Van Dine, was, in effect, effectively achieved by director John Cromwell's car-chase finale to "The Mighty", a George Bancroft crime opus also made at Paramount in 1929, wherein he, Cromwell, took his mobile camera out into busy Los Angeles streets! An irony is that he had been a successful Broadway director, brought, with others, to Hollywood because they knew how to deal with dialogue, and here he was, refusing to have his motion pictures restricted by "talkie" requirements. "The Greene Murder Case", incidentally, is one of Van Dine's finest murder-mysteries (popular author John Dickson Carr, no less, selected it in the Forties as being one of the very finest of all such fare!); but, unfortunately, moviemakers of the day could not have done cinematic justice to its elaborate, yet brilliantly subtle, writing.

• Ray Cabana, Jr.

William Powell returns as Philo Vance, this time under the direction of Frank Tuttle. The Greene family -- matriarch Gertrude Norman, daughters Florence Eldrege and Jean Arthur, sons Lowell Drew and Morgan Farley, are required to meet every year to satisfy the will of Miss Norman's late husband; after seven years, any survivor inherits, and the library goes to the New York Police Department. But following the latest get-together, they are murdered one by one. Sergeant Eugene Pallette calls in Powell to help him investigate.

Unlike the earlier entry in the series, this was planned as a talkie from the beginning. Because of the still-primitive sound equipment, it is a visually dull movie. Like most mysteries so constrained, it is very talky. The cast, composed of former stage actors, offer restrained performances under Tuttle. While the mystery is a good one, there are too many clues offered after Powell has made his conclusion. Its principal interest is in the performers themselves, several of whom would become important stars in sound films.

As a life long fan of murder mysteries in general and William Powell in particular, I was thrilled to finally get a chance to see this early sound Philo Vance mystery. A follow-up to Paramount's THE CANARY MURDER CASE (1929), this was adapted from "SS Van Dine's" third Philo Vance novel(originally published in 1928 to runaway business) and also stars the wonderful Eugene Pallette as Sergeant Heath and a young Jean Arthur in the ingenue role of Ada Greene.

The intricate plot finds gentleman detective Philo Vance assisting his old friends District Attorney Markham and Sergeant Heath in a case of multiple and attempted murders at the Greene Mansion in New York's Upper East Side. It seems that someone is killing members of the Greene family, ostensibly for a stake in the large inheritance left by the long dead patriarch, Tobias Greene, whose fortune was accumulated (we come to suspect) by less than honorable means.

I'll admit that, although anxious to finally see this film after reading about it for years, I wasn't expecting much. I had heard that the film was talky, creaky, and static, as many early sound productions seem to modern sensibilities. Perhaps it was because of these lowered expectations, but I was pleasantly surprised by some of the great stuff found here. The film abounds with wonderfully creepy atmosphere and a real sense of menace, and the climax, set in the rooftop garden of the formidable Greene mansion (a fantastic set, by the way), is thrillingly shot, with trick photography and a last minute-in the nick time-rescue.

The screenplay is a faithful simplification of the Van Dine novel (the book's first two murder victims, for example, are compressed into one and the character of Julia Greene is jettisoned) and Powell's Philo Vance is much more likable than his literary counterpart. The identity of the murderer, while possibly surprising to the relatively innocent audiences of 1929, is fairly easy to spot by the more jaded modern viewer raised on scores of mysteries and taught to always suspect the least likely. This does not detract from the fun.

Playing the part of Philo Vance was a huge boost to Powell's career, and allowed him to move from villainous heels to debonair man-about-town roles. After a parody appearance as the detective in 1930's PARAMOUNT ON PARADE, Powell played Vance twice more [in Paramount's THE BENSON MURDER CASE (1930) and Warner Bros. THE KENNEL MURDER CASE (1933)] before moving to MGM and forever being associated with the role of Nick Charles in THE THIN MAN series (an even BIGGER boost to his career!)

Yes, the film is invariably hampered by the limitations of the early sound era, but once the modern viewer accepts these limitations, there's a lot to enjoy here.