Em Pleno Espetáculo

Yes, this is a B-picture. But as I said in my subject heading, this is a case of the B standing for Better.

The director, Robert Florey, did a remarkable job of covering up the strain placed on what must have been his modest budget. My favorite feature of this film is the innovative cinematography. Look at the use of shadows and its interplay with patches of light. Look at the use of Dutch tilts, making the environs of the studio look dangerous and mysterious. You can turn the sound off and just admire the camera man's craft.

There was one fascinating sequence involving the Batman. We spend a few moments on a set that looks like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari with a character that looks like Conrad Veidt. We learn that he's portraying a character called "the Batman." This movie was done in 1936. The Batman character that we know first emerged from the Batcave in May, 1939. This movie may mark the first appearance of a character named the Batman on a movie screen.

If you'd like a fun time capsule trip to see moviemaking in the mid 30's, this is your movie.

Rod Larocque is starring in the sound remake of one of the studio's great silent pictures. The original starred Conway Tearle and his wife, Gail Patrick, and was directed by Ian Keith. Tearle was bound for superstardom, but an accident claimed his looks, and shortly afterwards, another his life. The remake likewise stars Miss Patrick and her second husband, Mr. Keith, directs

However, Larocque has been getting threatening notes that he won't live to see the new picture. When he dies during the premiere, it turns out to be poison... and then, during the production of her next picture, a prop gun aimed at Miss Patrick turns out to hold real bullets.

It's a pretty good murder mystery, directed by Robert Florey, showing off the Paramount studio using a lot of Dutch angles. Florey spent his career as a good journeyman director, always trying out interesting shots, so much so that they dominated his pictures... and he never got much higher than the programmers. Paramount's wealth of talent, in front of and behind the camera helped make this a very watchable movie, with Karl Struss as DP, and a cast that includes Reginald Denny, George Barbier, Thomas Jackson and a wealth of faded but still skilled performers. Had this been a production at Fox or RKO or one of the minors, this would have been a top-grade A picture. At Paramount, it was just another interesting release.

The only disappointing aspect of this wow of a movie is that (aside from a brief shot of Charlie Ruggles which I suspect is a newsreel clip) we don't see any guest stars. But perhaps it's just as well. There's really no time for them. And there's always a danger they could slow up the action which moves like the proverbial express train from start to finish. Not only does director Robert Florey keep the wittily suspenseful screen-play sparking on all six cylinders, he does so by using an extraordinarily large variety and number of camera set-ups. Most shots are held for only a few seconds and very few (perhaps only five or six) of the set-ups are repeated (which makes for brilliant film-making, but it's also quite extraordinary).

By "B"-picture standards, production values are right out of the box. Not only are many of the multiple sets absolutely crowded with extra players but Florey has invented lots of inside gags. As might be expected he has used some of his technicians to augment the crowd, but has enjoyably switched their roles. Thus the assistant director Fritz Collings appears on camera as the sound man, while director of photography Karl Struss has been demoted to camera operator and film editor James Smith can be glimpsed as an assistant in his own cutting-room.

Needless to say, the whole movie was lensed on "location" inside Paramount Studios itself. These are the real sound stages, this is the real back lot, those are the real Paramount gates. That's why most of the action takes place at night. The movie had to be lensed when everyone else at the studio had gone home (which is probably the main reason we don't see any guest stars).

It's obvious that Florey had a lot of fun making this picture. I love his "horror" take with the bat man made up like the somnambulist in Caligari explaining to the director that he's actually scared silly because he's a vegetarian. And notice that director E. Gordon Smith is handed some Ernst Lubitsch mannerisms including peering at the action through the cameraman's viewing glass (actually borrowed from Struss for this occasion. He always wore it. He had it looped on a long cord around his neck).

The screenplay offers not only a tingling, fast-moving, hair-raising mystery thriller but a whole gallery of fascinating characters creatively brought to life by a group of surprisingly charismatic (if second-string) players. Oddly top-billed (her role is not only small but comparatively unimportant) is the now-forgotten Frances Drake who was enjoying a brief run as a leading "B"-movie star at the time. She's not only extremely pretty but delightfully personable, so the surprise is not that she's top-billed in this one, but that her reign extended for only five or six years.

For once, Reginald Denny does well by the hero spot and doesn't over-do the comedy. It's the stunning Gail Patrick, however, who walks away with the picture's acting honors, strongly supported by Ian Keith, George Barbier, Thomas Jackson, Conway Tearle and the little-known Jack Raymond who has one of his largest roles here in a largely uncredited 100-picture career.

And now a final few words about the marvelously film-noirish photography. Critics (both contemporary and present day) as well as Struss himself regard this as one of his finest films, so it's doubly good to see him on camera here, both artistically and histrionically (I think he even has one word of dialogue: "Yep!"), although I should mention that Struss had his own camera which he certainly used for the studio exteriors. I don't know for sure whether the bulky Paramount camera he's pretending to operate was actually used to photograph any scenes in the movie at all, but I would say probably not. The camera-work is so fluid it seems to me that Struss' own more portable camera with its turret lens was used throughout.

The star of "Song of the Toreador" receives threatening messages that he will not survive the preview screening of the film. The studio publicist works with the Director, the Producer and the police, to discover who is behind the threats.

Rather good mystery with a pacy plot, good chemistry between Reginald Denny and Drake - Drake plays an astrology obsessed person. Denny wants to marry her but she says their stars don't align. This is an entertaining mystery with a fine insight of film making of that period. A nice look at paramount studio backlot- the camera angles are great, capturing things nicely.

Originally, a 'B-movie' was a shorter film intended as a second or lesser film at a double-feature. This does not mean they were necessarily bad...just cheaply and quickly made. And, instead of being 90 minutes or more like most A-pictures, the B ran from 50-65 minutes. Because the budgets were low and turnaround time very fast, many of them were pretty bad...but most were just ordinary time-passers. "The Preview Murder Mystery" is something different...it's one of the better Bs.

A new movie is about to debut and something odd is happening...someone is sending death threats to the leading man. So, while it's supposed to be a breakout film making him a star, his shining moment is marred with concerns about murder. Well, despite the police watching carefully, the man IS murdered in the middle of the preview for this film. But this isn't enough for the killer...and soon other folks connected with this movie begin to receive similar notes and attempts on their lives.

While I picked up on who the killer probably was early in the picture, it didn't really ruin the movie for me. Why? Because, despite being a B, the acting, direction and script were quite good. While hundreds or more B-murder mystery films were made, this one is very different and doesn't suffer from the usual cliches (such as the REALLY dopey cops). It's solid and very entertaining...and deserves to be seen as better than just another B.