Charlie McCarthy, Detective

After a long wait, I finally got hold of a copy of Charlie McCarthy, Detective (1939), a Universal mystery/comedy directed by Frank Tuttle (known for Philo Vance and other crime-oriented films).

First of all, the running time currently listed on IMDb for this film (as of May 8, 2017) is incorrect. It says 65 minutes, and one of the reviewers here concurs, saying the film runs barely over an hour. But the reviewer, and whoever supplied the 65-minute time, must have seen a shortened edition. My version runs at 74:39. If you have seen only a 65-minute edition, you've missed some of the plot. (Note: I have submitted a request to correct this running time.)

This is a delightful film. It's a murder mystery, of course, with Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy taking a break from their nightclub act to work on the case. But before that, we get to see some of the nightclub act, and it's some of the best Bergen/McCarthy stuff on film, even including a "title song" with Charlie dressed up Sherlock Holmes, announcing his brilliance as a detective. Working with Edgar and Charlie in the act is Constance Moore, whose character sings two pretty romantic songs, apparently written especially for the film. There is also plenty of witty repartee between Bergen and McCarthy throughout the film, and several bits of comedy relief by Mortimer Snerd, who is also better than normal in this film.

This film is a treat for fans of old films who love to see their favourite character actors pop up in odd places. Here we see, in major and minor roles, Louis Calhern, Samuel Hinds, Harold Huber (as a comic-bookish gangster), Warren Hymer, Edgar Kennedy, Grace Hayle, Charles Lane (as a doctor!), Milburn Stone, and (for only a quick look) the pretty Universal contract player Anne Gwynne (as one of Lane's nurses). And oh, don't forget, Bob Cummings has a major role in the film, and second-string romantic lead John Sutton (as the love of Constance Moore's life) has a substantial role as well.

As a mystery, the story is only so-so, but that's hardly the point in this film. The point is to combine the genre of murder mystery with Bergen/McCarthy/Snerd clowning, and it's done very well.

I don't go out of my way to catch Bergen/McCarthy films, but this one is worth seeing at least once. It deserves at least a 7 out of 10, and maybe more. My rating of 8 is a bit too high, perhaps, but the 6.4 current average is way too low. It's not a superb comedy, but it's a breezy, entertaining one. If you can get a good copy at the full running time, and if you have no objection in principle to Bergen and McCarthy, and if you love 30s/40s film casts, you won't be disappointed with this one.

I suppose we could give this movie points for being different, but we certainly can't give it any points for being logical. "Charlie McCarthy, Detective" combines mystery with slapstick humor in a very uneasy mixture. The movie seems deliberately intended to be surreal. All the characters in the film act as if Edgar Bergen's wooden dummies (McCarthy and Mortimer Snerd) are really alive-- at one point a doctor (Charles Lane) even operates to remove a bullet from Charlie. The movie was about halfway over before I realized that the characters were not insane, and we really were supposed to accept the notion that Charlie was an independent living creature. This takes nerve, but it would have helped if the script had somehow cued us into it. The movie is also absolutely crazy on the question of police procedure, and it prominently features a very stereotypical black character-- one of those servants who is slow on the uptake and terrified of his own shadow-- which may reflect the attitude of its times but is a bit hard to stomach today. The comedy dominates the mystery, and although the solution is somewhat intriguing, it almost comes as an afterthought to the movie's goofiness.

It sounds as if I'm saying the movie is terrible. It isn't. It isn't good, but it isn't awful. There are some good jokes, and Bergen, surprisingly, gives a pretty good performance. The supporting cast is, for the most part, strong. But I prefer my movies to make sense, and it's just impossible to take this film seriously.

Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy find themselves mixed up in a crime mystery. They perform at a nightclub with Sheila (Constance Moore), a singer whose boyfriend Bill (John Sutton) is hot on the tail of a powerful swindler (Louis Calhern). He is being held in South America for the proof of his accusations, but one-by-one his friends are being killed. It is up to the gang to get Bill back in one piece.

This is really a curiosity piece today; we don't really have anything equivalent in modern society. Candice Bergen said in her book that her father really belonged to the vaudeville stage and was able to extend his career into the radio and TV era. His style of entertainment is an old one, and it is hard for modern audiences to forgive Edgar's lips moving when he does Charlie's voice, or laugh at the corny jokes he tells.

But some people will get it, and they'll love it. Sure Charlie's humor is a bit outdated, but that doesn't make it unfunny, just different. He gets some really great one-liners, especially making fun of his "master," which he was famous for. Mortimer Snerd is my favorite, though, a doofus all over, with a hilarious drowsy face and a voice to match. He pops up randomly throughout the film and provides wonderful breaks from the plot.

Now, this isn't a great movie by anyone's standards. The mystery is dull and the supporting cast members seem like they belong in another movie. Bergen and his pals are the stars, but they just seem to weave in and out of the story without any real reason for being there. But it is enjoyable enough and a great way to SEE Bergen and his famous pals rather than to simply hear them on the radio.

I don't think I'd ever seen anything with Edgar Bergen and his dummy Charlie McCarthy apart from in a Biography on Bergen's daughter. Not too impressed by them! Candice Bergen is definitely more talented than her father.

Bergen and McCarthy have an act following a singer at a club. McCarthy is dressed up as Sherlock Holmes. Whether he's actually supposed to be a detective, I'm not sure. Dummy Mortimer Snerd also shows up from time to time, never held by Bergen. Charlie is occasionally left alone by Bergen, and will speak and move by himself on those occasions. The rest of the time he's being carried around.

Movie magic could have allowed Bergen and McCarthy to speak at the same time, but Bergen is actually doing his ventriloquism, for whenever McCarthy speaks, Bergen's lips are very obviously moving.

The movie has a fairly simple plot, I guess. A man has information on a newspaper owner's ties to a criminal, and various people try to protect him from being killed. The way it is played out just seems crazy, and I had some trouble following it and my grandmother was pretty lost.

Ray Turner plays a bootblack nicknamed "Gravy" (check out his filmography - it's depressing). Unfortunately, the role is a stereotypical one. When we first meet him, he's on trial for stealing a man's shoes. The judge decides to turn to Charlie McCarthy to decide how to decide the case - McCarthy and Bergen are sitting right next to him. What the heck?

Gravy's eyes bug out, he runs at the least hint of trouble, he's scared of ghosts and zombies. Other characters call him "boy." Oh boy.

At one point, the newspaper owner shows off a surrealist painting he owns. If not a Dali, it's very much his style. A woman is sitting on a beach with parasols, perhaps nude, her back turned. There's a square cutout through her torso like a window. The purpose of the scene? Not sure! It seems to be there so McCarthy can make some lame jokes (Aldrich: "This is a surrealist painting." McCarthy: "Sur-really...?") and so Gravy has something else to spook him.

Everything ends in a big free-for-all, with people running around, fighting, falling through elevator shafts and laundry chutes. Bergen figures out a clue, and there is a surprise regarding one of the killings in the movie. As a mystery, it's pretty much a dud. As a comedy, it's pretty lame too, but it's occasionally funny.

I picked a slightly fuzzy DVD of this pre-war comedy because of a course I teach on the mystery format and a curiosity as to how Edgar Bergen and his character Charlie McCarthy would fit into the genre (loosely). Others have observed that Bergen wasn't much of a ventriloquist technically (in close ups in movies and television where he was extremely popular in later years it was never hard to see his lips move), but his short comings were never a problem in the large vaudeville theatres and radio programs where he established his fame, and by the time his audience got to see him close up, the ventriloquist's chief tool, the willing suspension of disbelief based on characters the viewer WANTS to watch and effective comedy material far outweighed any minor flaws in his technique.

CHARLIE McCARTHY DETECTIVE, at barely over an hour in length, is a delightful piece of genre fluff made on something of an assembly line by the studios when they still owned chains of movie theatres and had to stock them with fresh product every week; "programmers." Many of these were better than all right and developed real followings on their own - the wonderful and long running Charlie Chan and Mr. Moto series from 20th Century Fox were prime examples of the popularity mystery programmers mixing healthy touches of comedy with mystery could achieve - so why not a mystery with the popular specialty act? Basically no reason at all - except that creating an effective mystery with Poe's "five elements" (something to solve, clues, red herrings, atmosphere and a satisfying solution) is not as simple as some might suppose. In addition to diverting cues and red herrings just obvious enough for the audience to guess along, but obscure enough to keep them at least slightly mystified until the solution is revealed, you have to leave them happy with the final reveal.

CHARLEY McCARTHY, DETECTIVE starts promisingly enough with the easiest part, acknowledging the artificiality of the concept and the leads - Bergen and McCarthy are delightful "atmosphere" as entertainers in a night club performing a bit (and a title song for the film!) with McCarthy dressed as a puppet version of Sherlock Holmes and comic lyric references to other popular detectives of the day. For fans of period mystery movies, this opening scene is reason enough to see the film. It also introduces the film's main characters: a villainous magazine editor smoothly played by the always suave Louis Calhern, with ties to an equally oily mobster played by Harold Huber (moving up a step from the well remembered snitch, Nunheim, he had played three years before in THE THIN MAN), a girl singer played (and sung) charmingly enough by Constance Moore (possibly best remembered in her long career for her Wilma Deering in FLASH GORDON films) and her stalwart reporter beaus, Robert Cummings (later an inexplicable favorite Hitchcock hero in several feature films and a sitcom star in his own show) and John Sutton (much later "Col. Tarleton" in Disney's "Swamp Fox" series - here missing for the first part of the film trying to evade assassination by our evil editor while getting back from South America with evidence against said editor).

Naturally, one of the main characters - three guesses who and the first two don't count (it's not anyone billed above the title) is killed. It isn't Mortimer Snerd who is also above the title, although many in the audience wouldn't have minded; he's a self confessed clueless character dropped into the film as an extra comic relief mainly because he was then one of Bergen's most famous characters, after McCarthy, on radio. Almost everyone except Bergen and those he is literally attached to comes under suspicion and before the hour is quite up Bergen himself solves the fast paced problem forcing a confession from the killer.

Therein lies the film's main problem, if it has one (in fairness, as a real mystery it never develops strong enough cases against alternate suspects). The clue Bergen hangs his solution on and the killer's motivation on (he's "a sentimentalist"), while very well written and played in the actual scene, may not strike the viewer as satisfying. There was much the same problem with the pilot episode of Angela Lansbury's "Murder She Wrote" TV series, but that didn't preclude a seven year run for the Lansbury series on CBS-TV.

CHARLIE McCARTHIE, DETECTIVE didn't spark a series, or even a sequel, but if you're curious for what the 30's phenomenon of Edgar Bergen was all about, it's an enjoyable sampling with a fair pastiche of shoot-'em-up 30's murder mystery mixed in and a diverting afternoon's viewing. Recommended as such, if not much more.