Not Even Eb

[one from the vaults]

[originally published August 27, 2024]

Once upon a time a couple of years ago, I was commissioned to write an appreciative essay as the lead-up for an online presentation of screwball comedies. Given my pick of the less celebrated contents of the packet (I was asked to focus on a single film, and surely no one needed yet another hoopla over Bringing Up Baby), I chose 1945’s Murder, He Says, probably for no better reasons than that I liked the title and had never seen it.

It didn’t go well.

“We were actually hoping for something a bit more . . . appreciative,” the commissioning editor noted, kindly, having read what I handed in.

We managed to salvage the situation with another essay, about a film I did indeed appreciate and then some, and I tossed the poor, sad, unwanted piece into a folder.

I note that TCM is screening Murder, He Says over the weekend as part of a day-long salute to Fred MacMurray, so what better (or any) excuse to expose this neglected meditation of mine to some good, healthy, cleansing daylight and be done with it.

Waste not, want not, and all that.

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In November 1949, a play titled That Lady opened on Broadway, hobbled along for seventy-nine performances, closed, and was never heard from again, perhaps not a surprising fate for the sort of historical drama whose curtain rises on “a drawing-room in the Eboli Palace, Madrid, September, 1577.” Its star was Katharine Cornell, a leading stage actress of the middle twentieth century whose name has dwindled into footnotery to a large extent, I’d say, because—like her barely better documented contemporaries Ina Claire, Lynn Fontanne, Eva Le Gallienne, and Laurette Taylor—she left behind virtually no film record, save, in Cornell’s case, a sweet cameo, barely two minutes long, in Stage Door Canteen (1943), in which she coos a bit of Shakespeare’s Juliet to stagestruck GI Lon McAllister as the great Aline MacMahon looks on, beaming. (I recall that when Cornell died, in 1974, I read her obituary on the front page of The New York Times and wondered, budding theater idolator as I was even then, why I’d never so much as heard of her.)

            As to That Lady, the critic George Jean Nathan brushed it off as “a snail-paced spoken novel,” and John Mason Brown down-thumbed the play itself while gushing over the glamorous Cornell and offering a conciliatory apology to “people in whose debt our theatre stands so deeply,” adding, pointedly and, I think, eloquently, “In the arts the wonder is not that lightning does not strike again and again but that it ever strikes.”

Henry Stephenson and Katharine Cornell in That Lady, sketch by William Auerbach-Levy.

            You may not believe me—you’re under no particular obligation to, I suppose—but that sentiment of John Mason Brown’s flitted through my head as I was watching, recently, Murder, He Says, a 1945 country bumpkin caper from the famously urbane Paramount Pictures studio that perches on an obscure branch of the family trees of murder-thriller-farces like The Cat and the Canary and Arsenic and Old Lace and, if you really want to press the point, as I’ve been asked to here, of screwball comedy.

            A screwball comedy, the critic Andrew Sarris once declared, is “a sex comedy without sex,” which is a jaunty phrase that doesn’t actually say anything: Don’t most sex comedies celebrate the chase (and its inherent frustrations) over the actual act? Other elements of the genre, depending on whom you ask, include snappy dialogue, slapstick, mistaken identity and disguise, class conflict, the undermining of standard-issue masculinity, and an aggressively madcap female lead. Which is a roomy-enough tent to give space to the varied likes of Twentieth Century (1934), My Man Godfrey (1936), Nothing Sacred (1937), the aforementioned Bringing Up Baby (1938), The Lady Eve and Ball of Fire (both 1941), and that absolute lunatic explosion of sense and propriety The Palm Beach Story (1942). To say nothing, now that I think of it, of Twelfth Night (1601).

            As to the present Murder, He Says (its title copped, no doubt, from the raucous ditty that Betty Hutton detonated in the 1943 Paramount comedy Happy Go Lucky), it was directed by the journeyman George Marshall—you know him, if not necessarily by name, via Destry Rides Again (1939), The Blue Dahlia (1946), and, particularly relevant to the present discussion, The Ghost Breakers (1940), a vastly superior comedy thriller starring Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard that gets a meta referential shoutout in Murder, He Says, the sort of self-conscious self-commentary you might expect in a Bob Hope–Bing Crosby Road picture and that mostly serves, in the present Murder etc., to make you long for Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard.

Bob Hope and Paulette Goddard in The Ghost Breakers. I’ll always want to post a photo of Paulette, given even half a chance.

Murder, He Says goes heavy on the slapstick, including a tabletop lazy Susan variation on the old switching-the-poisoned-glass bit, except here the poison is concealed not in a cocktail but in a plate of hominy grits, and a climactic if inadroitly staged chase through the unlikely secret passageways of a rotting old farmhouse; light on the class conflict (its hero is a bumbling city slicker wannabe and his antagonists are a family of deranged homicidal rubes); so-so on the mistaken identity and disguise and aggressively madcap female lead; and, as to snappy dialogue, precisely one moderately effective comic line, in which something called the Trotter Poll is described as being the “same as the Gallup Poll, only we’re not in quite as much of a hurry.” As to the undermining of standard-issue masculinity, our leading man is the virtually definitive standard-issue Fred MacMurray, who, amid potent episodes of dick swinging in films like Double Indemnity and The Apartment, spent an awful lot of his later career, including in the insufferable sitcom My Three Sons and the Disney comedies The Absent-Minded Professor and its utterly unnecessary sequel, Son of Flubber, as a dully respectable milquetoast capon wearing a cardigan.

            Now, Fred MacMurray is no Katharine Cornell, and Murder, He Says certainly isn’t a historical drama even partly set in a drawing-room in the Eboli Palace in sixteenth-century Spain, but it is undoubtedly, back to John Mason Brown, a supreme instance of lightning not striking and a vigorous reminder, even for those of us who once believed that any black-and-white movie made before, say, 1948 was a potential source of joy and then sat through one too many Kay Francis melodramas or even just one Wheeler and Woolsey so-called comedy (already one too many, if you ask me), that a lot of golden age Hollywood films, no matter how much we may be rooting for them as the opening credits roll, don’t much work.

            Murder, He Says is not, I must admit (if only, mostly, to be nice), without its modest virtues, including squawky Marjorie Main, in a sort of warm-up to The Egg and I (1947) and the subsequent mini-industry of Ma and Pa Kettle sequels, as a bullwhip-wielding hillbilly matriarch of chillingly casual brutality; Porter Hall as her incongruously professorial third husband; spiffy identical-twin special effects and a glow-in-the-dark grandmother who bears an uncanny resemblance to Boris Karloff in The Invisible Ray (1936); and the lively arrival at about the film’s halfway point of one Bonnie Fleagle, a bank-robbing pistol-packin’ mama played by the cherishable Barbara Pepper, best known to us all as Arnold Ziffel’s mother, Doris. (One certainly gets one’s hopes up when Murder, He Says opens in a general store very much like that owned by Sam Drucker, the crossover treasure of Green Acres, Petticoat Junction, and The Beverly Hillbillies, but hopes are quickly dashed when no Mr. Haney, Ralph Monroe, or even Hank Kimball arrives to liven up the proceedings. Not even Eb.)

Let’s hear it for the great Barbara Pepper! Who knew she was such a babe?

            Otherwise there’s an awful lot of pallid Helen Walker, a lesser Marjorie Reynolds who (this is the sort of film during which one periodically pauses to look up its actors’ résumés) later played the chilling Lilith Ritter in Nightmare Alley (1947); Jean Heather (Barbara Stanwyck’s stepdaughter, Lola Dietrichson, in Double Indemnity) as a fey halfwit surely modeled on Tobacco Road’s Ellie May Lester; a bit of relentlessly repeated nonsense doggerel that’s meant to lead to a stolen $70,000 (golly, I thought, heading over to the inflation calculator, that’s over a million bucks in today’s money!); and a steady stream of our Fred looking bewildered and, at one point, navigating his way through a desperately overextended pantomime involving the purported ghost of a murdered pollster colleague that makes one long for Jules Munshin to sidle over from Easter Parade and make a salad for an hour or three.

            There’s another genre that Murder, He Says belongs to, I think: the film first encountered, usually on television, in childhood—good, bad, middling, it really makes no nevermind—for which one develops, for whatever reason or no reason at all, a deep affection and then periodically revisits over the years, perhaps recognizing the flaws and the longueurs and loving the film not really despite them but because of them, a film to cuddle with like a fraying stuffed bear. My champion in this field is the Abbott and Costello supernatural comedy The Time of Their Lives (1946), which features not only the aforementioned Marjorie Reynolds but also the invaluable Gale Sondergaard as a mediumistic housekeeper, and which I guess I was hoping this Murder, He Says would be: a sort of retroactive childhood treat. Ultimately, alas, the persistent wonder remains, at least in this particular case, that lightning ever strikes.

We’ll always have Gale. And Bud. And Lou. To say nothing of Marjorie Reynolds, Binnie Barnes, and, as they used to sing on Gilligan’s Island, the rest.

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The By Now Traditional Fine Print

Thank you for being here, thank you for following, thank you especially for subscribing. All of this substackery of mine is free and will remain that way, which means that if you have chosen to contribute to its and my upkeep,¹ in larger or smaller ways, you are doing something you don’t have to do, which makes your generosity that much more resonant, and I am profoundly grateful. If you’re not yet part of that contributing crew and there’s a part of you that’s thinking “Who would have thought that apostrophes and old movies could be so much fun?” and you choose to join the crew, I will be eternally (or at least monthly or annually) in your debt.

Benjamin

1. To say nothing of Sallie’s!