Matinee Musings: Ned Sparks

Note: Ned Sparks (1883 -1957) was born in Guelph, Ontario and raised in St. Thomas. As a teenager prospecting in the Klondike, he ran out of money and took to performing. After some turns to a seminary and the railways, he got chosen for his first New York show in 1912.

Ned Sparks: Canadian, Comedian, Curmudgeon

Pull out my fingernails and the nuclear codes die with me. Make me carry a box of glazed donuts, though, and after ten minutes of sticky fingers I’ll sing like a canary about what makes Ned Sparks so goddamn funny. Everybody has a breaking point. Mine is sticky fingers.

Most comedians of the early sound era attack a scene. Sparks endures it. Hal Skelly and Jack Oakie would get a laugh being a clownish type. Sparks would just perch a sour face atop that neck, a neck so tom-cotton thick for such a slight man that it looked like it had been borrowed from sumo wrestler Chiyonofuji.

Trixie Lorraine: Isn't there going to be any comedy in the show?
Ned: Oh, plenty! The gay side, the hard-boiled side, the cynical and funny side of the Depression! I'll make 'em laugh at you starving to death, honey. It'll be the funniest thing you ever did. - Gold Diggers of 1933

The typical comic performer of the Thirties is all motion, all enthusiasm, all noise. Wheeler does the innocent, Woolsey plays the sharper, Eddie Collins makes mouth noises. Sparks reacts as though he has just been informed of a yet another damn thing comin’ down the pike. His face conveys the nagging suspicion that he is always the last to find out. Always.

What makes this work is that he never appears to know he's being funny. The run of comic actors want the laugh. Sparks seems to regard the laugh as yet another glitch in the works. He delivers every line in that famous gravel-dump monotone, as though the effort of speaking exceeds the value of communication.

Ned: Without my wife, I'm comparatively alone in the world. Even with my wife, I'm comparatively alone in the world. - The Bride Walks Out

And yet, somehow, he is usually the funniest person on screen.

The secret, I think, is contrast. Put Sparks next to romantic lead Joel McCrea delivering a heartfelt declaration and he becomes hilarious as the humorless puritan (Kept Husbands). Put him next to put-upon heroine Mae Clarke and he becomes even funnier as not the least of her trials (The Fall Guy). The greater the emotional temperature around him, the more amusing his glacial indifference becomes. He is a one-man corrective to excessive enthusiasm.

T. Fenny Sylvester: You know, dat song gives you somethin' to work to. Sort of a prod to do big things. In the hustle and bustle of daily life, a guy's liable to forget his mudder. But that song brung me back me babyhood. Ain't them words swell? "Who calmed your baby fears, and brushed away your tears? Your mudda." Boy, nuttin' can take the place of your mudda, can it?
Ned: You can't prove it by me - I was an incubator baby. - Sing and Like It

There is also something surprisingly modern about him. Many silent and early talking-picture funny guys can feel trapped in their own period. Sparks does not. The deadpan one who refuses to play along with the emotional assumptions of the room is now a staple of American comedy. You can draw a line from Sparks to Jack Benny, from Benny to Bill Murray, and from Murray to every sitcom character whose principal personality trait is being tired of everybody else's nonsense.

Mae Clark: And get cleaned up!
Ned: I already took a bath. I'm so clean I'm uncomfortable. - The Fall Guy

The strange thing is that many Ned Sparks jokes are not especially remarkable on paper. Read them and you may smile politely. Watch Sparks deliver them and they become funny through sheer force of personality. The line is rarely the joke. Ned Sparks is the joke. His exhausted gaze, his world-weary voice, his absolute certainty that mankind cannot be helped: that is the schtick.

Ned: Yeah, what's caviar to the few is applesauce to the gander. – Kept Husbands

He perfected a comic character so thoroughly that he turned pessimism into a performing art. The perpetual irritation of Sparks’ supporting character stole scenes for years, much in the stock character of fluttery fragile ZaSu Pitts whom audiences also loved. W.C. Fields cultivated a larger-than-life persona: a blustery, self-serving schemer with verbal flair and physical comedy. In contrast, though Ned used his stiff movements to great comic effect – talk about man in crying need of yoga time on the mat - Sparks embodied sardonic restraint.

Nobody ever looked less delighted to be in a motion picture. Nobody ever got more laughs from it.

Dave the Dude: If we have to dig up a husband for Annie, let's to it and get over it.
Ned: Now you got to dig up a husband for...
[shouting]
Ned: Where you gonna get a husband just like that?
Dave the Dude: How about you, Happy?
Ned: Me?
Missouri Martin: Oh, that's a swell idea. I think you'd be just precious.
Ned: That's a wonderful idea but there's one thing that stands on the way. I got a wife that is very fussy. She don't like me to go around and marrying people! - Lady for a Day

Perry Mason 162: TCOT Duplicate Daughter

Note: I’m not a reader that pays much attention to titles. The thing is, titles of Perry Mason books always promise meaning, but often in the same way horoscopes do: vaguely, and only after you’ve shrugged off confirmation bias. In this 1960 production, the title is practically the only clue we get - until the courtroom explodes like a Fourth of July firecracker. Is it fair that the next real clue arrives when the novel is 96% over? Of course not. But fairness is for afternoons in May and virtue ethicists, not Perry Mason plots. Gardner knows his readers will wait patiently for that last-minute twist, because nothing tastes sweeter than watching Mason pull a rabbit out of a hat while Burger is still deciding between the homburg or the fedora.

The Case of the Duplicate Daughter – Erle Stanley Gardner

The story begins with a game of deception so subtle that the reader, if reading too fast, will be left bewildered by its sudden reversals. Carter Gilman, investment wizard and pillar of respectability, vanishes one morning while his twenty-year-old daughter Muriel (talk about a name that screams dutiful daughter) is preparing the kind of Anglo breakfast that has sent generations of men to early graves - bacon, eggs, buttered toast.

When she returns, her father is gone. In his workshop, she discovers a broken chair, a pool of crimson liquid, and ten thousand dollars in hundred-dollar bills scattered like confetti. Convinced she has stumbled upon a murder scene, Muriel obeys the instructions in her father’s briefcase: “If anything happens, call Perry Mason.”

Mason arrives to find the “blood” is paint, but the money is real - worth over a hundred thousand in today’s currency. He dispatches Paul Drake to probe the Gilman household: Carter, his daughter Muriel, his second wife Nancy, and Nancy’s daughter Glamis. Before the detective can report, Gilman materializes in Mason’s office, delivers cryptic instructions, and disappears again - this time for good.

Enter Vera Martel, a private investigator with ethics as flexible as a rubber band. She telephones Mason, warning him to abandon Gilman’s cause and to tell the man his troubles are worse than imagined. Mason, intrigued, consults Drake, who brands Martel a blackmailer - a woman who turns sensitive information into cash. Soon after, Martel is found dead, and Carter Gilman is indicted for her murder.

The courtroom becomes a theater of psychological warfare. Hamilton Burger, savoring the prospect of humbling Mason, subpoenas him as a witness for the prosecution. But Mason, master of timing, unmasks the killer before taking the stand. The solution, resting on an ancient fictional device, is not fair play - but it is dazzling.

Beneath the legal fireworks lies a motive steeped in the mores of mid-century America. Nancy’s youthful Bohemianism - she was an artist, which in the 1950s was shorthand for the moral laxity of beatniks - becomes a weapon in the hands of the prosecution. Gardner exploits this cultural hypocrisy with relish, reminding us that blackmail thrives where society clings to its taboos. Today, when scandal has lost its sting, such plots seem quaint.

This late-career Mason novel is a study in contrasts: the glitter of money against the shadow of murder, the brittle façade of respectability against the raw nerve of desire. It is a story of greed, fear, and the perilous games people play when secrets become currency.

Perry Mason 162: Goodbye, Tragg; Hello, Procedure

Note: By the time Ray Collins was cast as Perry Mason’s nemesis, he was a seasoned actor on the stage, screen and radio. Collins had one of those movie careers that wandered cheerfully from Citizen Kane to Ma & Pa Kettle.

Goodbye, Tragg: Hello, Procedure (Or, How the Fun Got Filed Away)

Ray Collins played Lieutenant Arthur Tragg, the gruff homicide detective on Perry Mason. He did it with the kind of lived-in authority as though he’d been on the scene for every murder in Los Angeles since Prohibition. He remained a comforting fixture on Perry Mason until emphysema forced him to retire in 1963 - an exit that felt less like a casting change and more like a frail uncle quietly leaving the family party early so that no one who liked him would worry he’d overdone it.

As a kid, I just accepted Tragg as a kind of prehistoric lawman - at least a generation older than Perry Mason, possibly older than the courthouse itself. He had that “I remember when the uniform’s finishing touch was a rubber hose” vibe.  So imagine my adolescent shock - eager to take umbrage as teenagers are - when the novels reveal that Tragg and Mason are roughly the same age. Suddenly Tragg isn’t a veteran but a contemporary who seems to have aged an extra twenty-five years from presiding at crime scenes that would make EMTs blanch.

Ray Collins’ played Lieutenant Tragg in the spirit of the novels. Though adversaries, Tragg and Mason feel grudging admiration for the detective skills of the other. They respect each other, though Tragg would mockingly call Mason “Counselor ” and Mason would say tightly, “I feel I spend all my time introducing you…,” when Tragg would pop in unannounced during an office conference with the hapless scared client.

Tragg circled Mason like a seasoned chess adversary, occasionally smiling as if to say, “Well played – till next time.” In the first three seasons, the show breathed the smoky pulp air of radio suspense and film noir. Tragg’s authority rested in experience and force of personality, not in paperwork or protocols. He intuited, from seeing it scores of times before - how the pieces of evidence probably fit - not usually correctly, but with enough good faith that his thinking errors felt human, never lazy or malicious or stupid.

Enter Lieutenants Andy Anderson and Steve Drumm, played with a clean, almost antiseptic efficiency by Wesley Lau and Richard Anderson respectively. Suddenly the temperature drops. These dour dudes are not there to play; they are there to get the Freedom Deprivation Logistics humming. If Tragg embodied the instincts of the beat cop elevated by experience but eschewing the rough methods of yore, Andy and Drumm are the modern bureaucrats shaped by college degrees and workshops on Carceral Workflow Optimization.

Andy and Drumm do not wink. They never seem bemused. Della is not granted their courtly attention. One suspects they file reports in triplicate and torture subordinates over trifles. Where Tragg sparred with Mason, Andy and Drumm simply stand in opposition, bitterly assuming Mason is just a showboat trying to get the obviously guilty off for who knows what nefarious reasons.

The tonal shift is unmistakable, if understated. Without Tragg, the cases still unfold and Mason still prevails - but the journey ticks like an administrative metronome. The law, once personalized through Burger and Tragg’s relatable fallibility, becomes impersonal - an apparatus staffed by professionals who don’t have time to add respect to an adversarial relationship.

In replacing Tragg, the show traded passion for efficiency. The stories become cleaner, yes, but also colder. And in that chill, we glimpse Sixties television’s own evolution: from storytelling that invites audiences to play along to storytelling that expects them simply to watch - and to endure hearing, yet again, “You’ve got 24 hours to wrap this up.”

Perry Mason 161: The Count of Nine

Note: I use AI as an editorial tool so that my writing weaknesses won't annoy you or waste your time. AI helps identify excess wording, repetition, plot-heavy passages, unsupported claims, and places where my fondness for silly metaphors or wooly-headed abstractions obscures the point. I review its suggestions critically and use them to make the writing clearer, more concise, and more focused on analysis rather than summary.

The Count of Nine – Erle Stanley Gardner writing as A. A. Fair

Donald Lam has finally made partner in the private detective agency run by Bertha Cool - an achievement long overdue. Ex-lawyer Lam has always done most of the legwork while Bertha lines up the cases, spends the fees, and keeps expenses tight enough to squeak. Partnership doesn’t change the balance of power much, but it does give Lam a little leverage, which proves useful when Bertha lands what looks like an easy job: guarding a high-society party from gatecrashers.

The client is Dean Crockett, a wealthy eccentric obsessed with privacy and security. Three weeks earlier, one of his lavish parties ended with the theft of a valuable carved jade Buddha. This time, Crockett wants absolute control. He lives alone on the twentieth floor of an apartment building with a special elevator that runs only to his penthouse. Guests must be cleared at the front desk, approved again by Crockett himself, and possess a verified invitation before they’re allowed upstairs. Bertha is there to check names and keep out gatecrashers. Simple enough.

Naturally, the security arrangements fail. Despite Crockett's elaborate precautions, another theft occurs, pushing Cool and Lam from security guards to investigators and drawing them into a case that soon turns deadly.

Gardner's great strength is efficiency. Scenes arrive late, end early, and rarely waste a sentence. The result is a novel that moves at a brisk pace while giving Lam plenty of opportunities to demonstrate his understated intelligence. Unlike the hard-boiled detectives who dominate much mid-century crime fiction, Lam wins through observation and persistence rather than toughness. His small stature and unassuming manner encourage others to underestimate him, usually to their regret.

Gardner is known for his plotting, not characterization but in this outing amusing is the comic friction between Lam and the people he meets along the way. A lecherous photographer prides himself on manipulating women, prompting a sharp, funny exchange where Lam pretends admiration for the lady’s man while despising every word the crumb says. The reader catches the contempt immediately; the photographer, blinded by ego, misses it entirely.

The Count of Nine is the eighteenth book in Gardner’s long-running Cool and Lam series, written under the pen name A.A. Fair. Bertha is her usual loud, greedy, tightfisted self, eternally convinced she can handle things alone. Lam - slight, brainy, and chronically underestimated - ends up doing the real detective work, taking a few beatings, attracting unwanted romantic attention, and finally putting the pieces together. Gardner's portrayal of the police is decidedly unsympathetic; they are as fallible, stubborn, and self-interested as anyone else in the story.

Structurally, this is Gardner’s version of a locked-room mystery. Most of the action takes place over a only a day or two, with little emphasis on gunplay or brawls. It showcases Gardner's strengths: airtight construction, memorable eccentrics, and a detective whose intelligence consistently proves more effective than force. For readers who enjoy classic puzzle mysteries with a hard-boiled edge, it's an easy recommendation – no wonder Hard Case Crime re-released it in 2018.

The Ides of Ann Harding: Condemned

Note: Ann Harding was to the play the gallant lady many times in the first half of the Thirties. By 1935, soured by the Depression that had no end in sight, stoked by a press that didn’t like her not talking to reporters, a cynical America was sick of the self-sacrificing roles of brave Ann Harding. A movie-goer also wonders if what happened to Harding was what happened to Anne Hathaway: one gloomy day America decided they disliked Ann/Anne because she was too smart, too beautiful, too famous, too rich, too talented, over-staying her welcome among us homely fickle mortals. Perhaps due to feeling over-exposed by a nasty press corps and coupled with a rancorous custody battle, Harding went on a break in 1936 and didn’t return to movies until 1942 with Eyes in the Night, in which she was scolded by cruel Donna Reed for being so noble.

Condemned
1929 / 1:26
Tagline: “Ronald COLMAN As A Rough, Tough Convict Who'd Kill For A Kiss”
[internet archive]

Devil's island was a French penal colony in the Salvation Islands of French Guiana, demonstrating the diabolical talent of The Man to turn a tropical paradise into a hellhole. Set in the late 1920s, the warden Vidal (Dudley Digges) scolds his wife Mme. Vidal (Ann Harding) for having no sense of her high position as the wife of an important man in the colony.

Disrespecting her feelings and opinions as usual, he brings in the incarcerated individual Michel Oman (Ronald Colman) as a houseman. Michel is Parisian thief who took the fall for a bank robbery gone bad. But like Charles Boyer trapped in the Casbah in Algiers, Michel is debonaire and a dandy given the chance.  How Vidal justifies to himself having such a good-looking man spend days with his comely wife is left unexplained. Maybe he figures his peasant wife is so cowed by his blustering, that marriage vows are so sacred to her, and the power of gossip so over-powering among the expatriate women that the obvious and cynical predictions will never come to be.

Mme. Vidal warns her husband he’ll be sorry for bringing an incarcerated individual into the house. But in the end, as we would expect of a country woman who grew up with 13 brothers and sisters in a village in Alsace in the early 20^th century – now there are some onerous intersectionalities -  she is submissive to her sadistic buffoon of a husband with the caterpillar mustache and revolting soul patches. As Michel points out when they talk while shopping in the outside market, they are both prisoners.

Movie-goer, Mme. Vidal and Michel fall in love. Michel buys her a capuchin monkey on which she needs to lavish her love  and concern. This gesture pisses off the warden who is a pet-hater on top of being conceited. His tossing the simian out a window precipitates a crisis with a climactic chase after two escapees through a jungle swamp at night.

A movie-goer has to be patient when watching an early talkie. They tend to be stagey, with the actors motionless and intoning theatrical lines in front of a camera. But the experimentation with camera movement in this picture is cinematic and interesting. Many scenes are outdoors. The tossing ship at the opening, with water water everywhere, was totally unexpected  A fast tracking shot pictures the warden as he snarls his welcome address to a new batch of unlucky wretches, “Prison is a poor place to be proud.” The camera pans as we movie-goers take in silhouettes of the prisoners, some of whom we can guess are cognitively disabled, others acting out anger and hatred. Within and without solitary confinement is filmed like a nightmare of a French existentialist.

The light and camera make 27-year-old Ann Harding look about five years younger. She wears strange Romany makeup in the heart-to-heart conversation scene but this is balanced in another scene in which she lets down her ash blonde hair. Be still, O beating heart. This sight is almost as affecting as her looking into space with a worried look in which you can see her anxious thoughts racing each other. In the scene where she finally shucks the upbringing to keep your (female) opinions to yourself and tells the warden where to get off, she’s dynamite. I believed her when she said she would die for Michel. At the end, Harding stands on the ship as it pulls out and the light on the water does that bobbing thing light on water does and Harding gradually leaves the frame, holding back her tears. It’s emblematic of her intensity and her restraint in the entire picture.

Another point about early talkies, the veteran movie-goer expects the sound to be so-so unless it is a monster movie where they really get into tolling bells, creaking doors, and screams in the night. However, in the movie the soundtrack is excellent. In the opening there is a swirl of sound as the wind blows, water splashes, the ship creaks and the inmates jeer at each other and the guards. The inmates sing a mournful song as they march back from hard labor. The maniac boy screams when solitary drives him around the bend. The motor on the boat pursuing our heroes sounds like technology gone ape.

Anyway, this movie should also be seen for Ronald Colman. Besides that great voice, he puts in a fine reserved performance, one that got him a Best Actor nomination that year. Harding and Colman make an attractive couple. Dudley Digges’ warden was sometimes over the top, but he was pretty effective as the character that richly deserves his ultimate fate at the hands of Louis Wolheim as Colman's convict friend – he’s got a dotted line tattooed on this neck “cut here.”

Perry Mason 160: Murder Most Furry

Note: Erle Stanley Gardner was very much an outdoorsman. He wasn't just a courtroom author - he was a hunter, camper, archer, sportsman, and prolific travel photographer. Gardner documented extensive hunting trips, camping expeditions, bow‑hunting competitions, fishing trips, and yachting adventures across the Western U.S., Baja California, and even Alaska, Mexico and the Philippines. He was an animal lover.

Murder Most Furry: Three Perry Mason Tales with Animals

The Case of the Grinning Gorilla (1952)
Perry Mason buys a dead woman’s diaries for five bucks and, naturally, all hell breaks loose. Helen Cadmus is missing, drowned, or just being difficult. Enter Nathan Fallon, a cousin with the ethics of a pickpocket, and Benjamin Addicks, a millionaire who dabbles in gorilla neurology - because why not? Addicks waves money; Mason waves him off. Mason hates lies more than unsound logic.

Paul Drake snoops, finds gorillas, and a mansion fortified like Fort Knox. Cue murder. Addicks ends up dead, stabbed with something sharp enough to make Freud blush. The housekeeper is accused, and she’s as talkative as a clam. Mason nearly dies twice, which is twice more than usual.

The case? Weird, wild, and worth every page.

The Case of the Careless Kitten (1942)   
Published during WWII, this Perry Mason novel hums with wartime tension even though it never says so outright. The story pivots on identity: Komo insists he’s Korean, but everyone else calls him Japanese. In those days, truth didn’t matter - perception did. Gardner uses Komo as a quiet indictment of snap judgments.

The mystery begins with Franklin Shore, a banker who vanished a decade ago. Now he resurfaces - sort of. Mason arrives for a meeting and finds a corpse instead. What follows is eighteen hours of relentless motion: no trial theatrics, just Mason maneuvering while Della Street takes the fall and Burger grins like a cat in cream. There’s a kitten too - Amber Eyes -whose soft fur hides sharp claws and sharper consequences.

Gardner keeps it taut, brisk, and oddly poignant. Beneath the puzzle lies a hum of fear and suspicion, a reminder of what America looked like when trust was rationed.

The Case of the Fan Dancer's Horse (1947)
This Mason romp is pure Gardner in overdrive: two fan-dancers, one horse, and a murder in which the overbearing rancher is skewered with a samurai sword. It starts with a car wreck and a wardrobe that looks like it escaped from a burlesque revue. Mason runs an ad to return the goods, and suddenly the plot is juggling mistaken identities, borrowed names, and a timetable that eats half a page. There’s a victim, an ostrich burr on the blade, and a client who buries evidence like it’s a garden chore.

The courtroom scenes? Fireworks. Gardner doesn’t do character studies - he does detonations. Perry blows up a witness like a pinwheel on the Fourth of July. Sure, you can guess the killer, but who cares? The ride is the thing. If you want plausibility, read a tax manual. If you want fan-dancers, a horse, and a murder with style - step right up.

Matinee Musings: Lady of Burlesque

Lady of Burlesque
1943 / 1:31
Tagline: “Mirth! Murder! Melody! Mystery! and Girls! Girls! Girls!”
[internet archive]

Barbara Stanwyck slips into Dixie Daisy’s sequined skin with a verve that feels like liberation. Forget the noir siren or the ruthless schemer - here, Stanwyck is earthy, commonsensical, and unpretentious. Dixie is  shimmying her way to the top, armed with a grin and a gag. She sings, she dances, she cracks wise, and suddenly an opera house turned burlesque palace hums with her electricity.

But success breeds venom. Enter Lolita La Verne, a redhead with a temper - how unusual -  and Princess Nirvena, a White Russian with hauteur to spare. Both rivals wind up strangled, and Dixie - our accidental femme fatale - must pivot from pirouettes to peril, sleuthing her way out of a noose of suspicion.

William Wellman directs with his trademark robustness, giving the backstage chaos a pulse that’s equal parts grit and glitter. Edith Head’s costumes - feathers, sequins, and audacity stitched into every hem - are practically characters themselves. Arthur Lange’s score, Oscar-nominated, swells and swoons like a knowing wink to the absurdity of it all. Yes, Michael O’Shea’s Biff Brannigan can grate - his wisecracks clang like cracked cymbals in 2026 - but maybe that’s the point: burlesque thrives on noise, on excess, on the gaudy collision of artifice and appetite.

The film’s pleasures are tactile: the authentic seediness of the setting, the backstage antics that teeter between silly and sly, the one-liners that land like water balloons. And those costumes - outlandish, unapologetic, a parade of fantasy. Really, what more could you want, even if you're a fashion ignoramus like me?