case-50

In 1948 the classic era of old-school murder mysteries was already coming to its end and while this little movie was definitely not one to revive the genre or add anything new to it, it is still a pleasant little timepasser if you do not have very high expectation. The story (about a murder on a campus during a concert and the ensuing hunt for the killer by the "teenagers" and their clashes with the police inspection) is so-so, the characters are paper thin (but some of them are still loveable), the songs are of very uneven quality, the script has a couple of holes, but still, the film has a good pacing, the solution is actually kind of clever and the whole movie has a charmingly simpleminded quality to it. It is the kind of film that is not good, but is just... nice, and you cannot be angry at it for its shortcomings.

I am not at all familiar with Monogram's relatively short-lived The Teen Agers series which came to its end with this picture, so I don't know if it is better or worse compared to the other enries, but well... while it is quite obvious that those teenagers are anything but actual teenagers, they still do a proper job with their roles (unlike some of the supporting cast). And of course Donald MacBride shines as always as the grumpy cop/daddy.

The film seems to be in public domain and the copy I have seen is the rather low quality one up in ArchiveOrg, which clocks a bit below 57 mins.

Another classic mystery that I watched right after I finished reading the book it was based on, so this review will be more about the comparison of the two and not another one about the story and the actors (that others has done a great job of already).

This one was probably the most faitful of these lesser known mysteries that I watched after reading the books: basically there are only two significant changes and none of those is directly related to the story itself. One of them is right in the beginning: here our heroine is a bored and somewhat ill-tempered hospital nurse who, out-of-the blue, is called to help a police investigation, while in the book she is a professional private nurse who has already worked with the police several times before (actually Miss Pinkerton was Rinehart's second book about the Ms Adams character... published 18 years after the first one, 1914's The Buckled Bag). And the second one is the quite suddenly erupting romance between her and the police detective. This part is completely missing from the book and there it is only hinted at the very end that the detective likes Ms Adams quite one bit.

But other than these minor changes (that does not really add or take anything) the story follows the book rather faithfully... which could be a god thing, but actually it turns out to be the film's only shortcoming. The book itself is a charming little one, well written, featuring loveble characters, but honestly, its story is not its strongest part. It was written in a time when mystery writers already struggled to come up with new twists and ideas and in this case it resulted is an overcomplicated story about a race after an old lady's heritage. The character's motives are not really clear even in the book and when the story is squeezed into the film's hour long running time, it becomes even more messy. The book spent some time introducing everyone, while here, besides the leads, hardly anyone has enough screentime to realy explore the charachters.

But even with its shortcomings, the movie is an entertaining little quicky, Blondell, while seems miscast at first, eventually does a good job and C. Henry Gordon is also a delight to watch. Switch your brains off, do not try to follow the story, just go along with the flow and you will be in for an hour worth of fun.

I love the crazy campy gore extravaganzas of Herschell Gordon Lewis and I also love the classic murder mysteries, but when I finally got around to see this one, I never expected to see a mixture of the two... and what a perfect mixture it is!

The movie is basically built up as a hard boiled murder mystery with all its typical charachers and story elements. We got some murders (of the most gory kind of course, this is a HGL movie afterall!), we got a very cynical, respected and amusingly egocentric private detective, we have a pretty lady reporter as his (at first) not too appreciated side-kick, an inept police officer who is annoyed by the detective, some fist figths, actual detective work, decoy suspects and a surprise revelation at the end. And all of this works surprisingly well, it is actually a good mystery movie, with great (yet super campy) characters and very funny witty dialogue all along, not just some poorly written stuff that is only there to lead up to the bloody murders.

But the people who are here for the more typical HGL treatment also get all they signed up for: sleaze, extremely nasty gore, strippers (even an amateur strip contest!) and all else any gore and exploitation fans can hope for. Definitely my favorite HGL movie.