ergot29

Monogram combined it's standard lowbrow crime/action with comedy for this film, which is a bit weak on the comedy side. It has it's moments, but you can't help but think the situation is ridiculous. A newlywed couple with only a day before the husband is shipped off to service in WWII chooses to travel instead of doing what a newlywed, presumably virgin couple with only a day would actually do. There is a subtext of lustful desire being thwarted, but it is obviously muted due to the era.

Through no fault of their own they get mixed up with gangsters who have been in their hotel room trying to kill enemies. Mix-ups with a missing body, police ineptitude and misidentification of the groom as gangster kingpin keeps this running for most of the film. This might have worked better with a cast and director who could pull it off, but it falls a bit flat here, though not entirely.

It has classic elements of 1930s screwball comedy, though a little late for Monogram in 1942 to begin cutting their chops. It's fun as a period piece, but far from great cinema.

If the title didn't tip you off as to what to expect, the prologue leaves little doubt. A somewhat lengthy Calvinistic dirge berating the audience for being selfish hedonists let's you know what sort of sermon it intends to be. You should be at home with your kids rather than out watching this movie. I don't think it is a coincidence that it was distributed by "Puritan Distributing Company."

The bad parents in the movie are laughable caricatures of inattentive, rich parents. The father is a power hungry rail tycoon (everyone during the Great Depression was)who only wants to make more money and fails to take his children to the zoo. The mother, who for some reason isn't expected to take the children to the zoo, is more concerned with her society friends and expensive clothes. She wants her husband to stop spending so much time at work so he can pay attention to her, but doesn't want to stop spending so much money, which he forces her to do. This leads to the divorce that "destroys" the family.

In a bizarrely unrealistic move, the judge grants the father the custody of the son, the mother of the daughter, and the siblings separate without ever making contact with each other until adulthood, where the story really begins. Each grown child has an unbelievable teen-angst temper tantrum about how they didn't get enough attention as children with their respective parent, and now we are to presume the kids are delinquents because of it.

That is where this moralistic story falls apart on itself however, as the children are actually very well adjusted, kind people. They get in to trouble, but it is none of their own doing. This story was presumably to show how a broken family would lead to degenerate offspring, but the children are quite well balanced, and the most morally centered people in the picture. Only because of bad luck and people doing them wrong do they ever have misfortune. If the film makers wanted to show that broken families lead to children who stray from righteousness, they failed miserably. The kids should have been the criminals, not the people around them.

Still, it is interesting to watch because of the absurdity of it all, and it does take some turns occasionally that you don't really expect.

An interesting whodunit that suffers mainly from flaws in motivational logic for the characters, as well as unbelievable legal procedures, but that is part of the sense of disbelief that has to be suspended for many B-movie crime dramas of the era.

Lionel Atwill is the state executioner, who needs his job to finance his research which is ironically, brining the dead back to life. He gives a brief explanation of his process theory, though it isn't important to the story. He feels he has to keep his job though because of the importance of it to his work, particularly financing it, despite the fact that his fiancée finds the job abhorrent and refuses to marry him when she finds out what he does.

In the opening scene you have seen her walking to the death chamber, with the story told in flashbacks by the detective played by Cy Kendall. Lionel Atwill's character you figure out early is in the unenviable position of being required to pull the switch on his girlfriend. As time is running out, Kendall tries to gather evidence to clear her.

Since it is told in flashbacks, some things that are to happen you learn early on, but the film telegraphs too much that it doesn't intend you to know, at least not for sure. There is never even the slightest doubt about who is innocent or hiding something, and the movie would have benefited from a little more ambiguity in the beginning, which could have been easily accomplished. With a little work on the script, this could have been a much better movie.

All in all not bad, and with a runtime of 56 minutes doesn't have time for you to grow weary waiting for the solution.

One aspect that seems amusingly dated today though is the crime Mary's father was convicted of when she was a child: Pinball racketeering. Largely forgotten now, but there was a time when pinball machines were a dreaded, evil scourge that many cities tried to stamp out with bans. Her father was railroaded by an aggressive district attorney, and for the purposes of the movie, it provided a "criminal" father who actually wasn't too bad, and was perhaps unfairly persecuted.