Matinee Musings: Get Her Talkin' 'n Listen

Note: The pandemic effectively furloughed my teaching career, leaving D. H. Lawrence's "passion of instruction" with nowhere productive to go. Naturally, it has redirected itself into dating advice, a space in which I possess the impeccable credentials of someone who has not been single since Generation X were wearing three-cornered pants. So if you've need date questions inspired by Pre-Code movies, I'm here to help. What could go wrong, apart from everything?

Matinee Musings: Dating Advice for Fans of Pre-Code

The best women like a guy who can talk. But they like even better a guy who can listen.

That's where the amateurs get into trouble. They think a date is an audition. They arrive armed with stories, opinions, and enough self-promotion to launch a congressional campaign. Then they wonder why there isn't a second date.

The smart man asks questions.

Not because some dating guru said so. Not because he wants to control the conversation. He asks questions because he wants to find out who is sitting across the table from him. Let the lady talk. Listen closely. Listen for what excites her, what frightens her, what she admires, and what she cannot stand. Before long you'll know more about her values than any profile could ever tell you. Then you can decide whether your match was made in heaven or in one of those charmingly furnished circles of hell found in Pre-Code movies.

Take The Cheat (1931). Tallulah Bankhead plays a woman who loves excitement so much that she mistakes the rush of poker for happiness. That's a useful thing to know about a person. So ask your date: "Do you think Elsa was really in love with anybody, or was she mostly in love with excitement?"

Now listen.

If she says life is for taking chances and risks, you'll learn something. If she says Elsa's recklessness hurt everybody around her, you'll learn something else.

Try another: "What did you think of Elsa keeping her big financial problem to herself?"

Because how a person answers tells you how they think about trust.

Or: "What do you think was up with Livingstone, how he treated people?"

You'll discover a great deal about what she considers healthy behavior in relationships.

The beauty of movie questions is that nobody feels examined. You're discussing Tallulah Bankhead, not your date. But somehow, your date ends up revealing herself anyway.

And for Pete's sake, don't do that phony listening routine. You know the one. Lean forward. Furrow the brow. Nod solemnly. Say "uh-huh," "interesting," and "wow." Then immediately launch into the story you were planning to tell all along.

That's not listening. That's waiting for your turn.

If she says Elsa's gambling wasn't really about money, ask why she thinks that. If she says Livingstone is obviously a creep, ask what gave him away. If she thinks Elsa's husband is partly to blame, ask her to make the case.

Real listening requires a follow-up question.

Anybody can talk. Plenty of men can pretend to listen. Very few can hear an answer, think about it, and respond to what was actually said. Practice improves quick-wittedness in conversation. 

So practice.

Do that, and whether the relationship goes anywhere or not, you'll leave the evening knowing far more than the poor devils in most Pre-Code pictures ever managed to learn about one another before disaster struck.

The Kalends of Exploitation: Sing Sinner Sing

Note: This is the kind of movie that ought to be a mess, and maybe it is a little, though it looks better than many Poverty Row productions. But Leila Hyams keeps the whole thing on the rails. She's likable, believable, and never acts like she's above the material. The movie may be a minor Pre-Code oddity of interest only to Pre-Code fans like us Thirties buffs, but Hyams makes it feel like something worth sticking around for.

Sing Sinner Sing
1933 / 1:04
Tagline: “Would You Plead Guilty to a Crime You Did Not Commit---To Save Some One You Love?”
[youtube]

In this tale of modern Babylon, we are introduced to a floating casino moored off the coast of Los Angeles - a vessel not of commerce, but of pleasure, where jazz music and bathtub gin flow in equal measure. Here sings a lady of torch and torment, whose voice, though sweet, is steeped in sorrow. She is bound, not by love, but by a tempestuous entanglement with the ship’s proprietor - a man of volcanic temperament and dubious fidelity.

Upon discovering his dalliance with a chorus girl of questionable virtue, our heroine, in a fit of wounded pride and reckless ambition, resolves to marry a millionaire playboy. This gentleman, though possessed of wealth and charm, is pursued by a specter more fearsome than poverty: the hereditary madness that haunts his bloodline. He drinks not for pleasure, but to silence the howling of ancestral banshees. His descent into hopeless drunkenness is portrayed with a frankness that startles us post-modern movie-goers in 2026, accustomed as we are to the innocuous buffoonery of the comic relief drunks of Code-era Hollywood.

Paul Lukas, a gentleman of Hungarian extraction, imbues his role with a fiery Magyar nobility, though the lines he is given are as wooden as a church pew. Leila Hyams, the torch singer, is a vision of loveliness and restraint, her performance elevated by the presence of Ruth Donnelly, who plays the worldly-wise companion with a wit as dry as vermouth. Don Dillaway, as the doomed heir, astonishes with a moment of clarity and rebellion, denouncing the snobbery of his wealthy guardians with a fervor worthy of a Dickensian hero.

The sets, borrowed from a more prosperous studio, are sumptuous, and the costumes - particularly Miss Hyams’ beaded gowns - are of such elegance that My Bride, a fiber artist of exacting taste, insists they be mentioned in tribute. The music, a curious blend of fox-trot jazz and early swing, is delightful, though the musicians remain anonymous, as if swallowed by the very fog of the era.

The plot, it must be said, is melodrama of the highest order, but the film’s true distinction lies in its origin: the Pre-Code era, that brief interregnum between the advent of sound and the iron rule of censorship. Here, the moral atmosphere is low and thick, like the air in a gambling hell. Women are brazen, men are debauched, and virtue is a thing to be mocked. The film does not flinch from showing the consequences of folly, nor does it pretend that wealth can purchase peace of mind.

In conclusion, this picture is not a moral beacon, but a lantern held up to the darker corners of human desire. It is a cautionary tale, wrapped in sequins and shadow, and though I am a man of puritanical leanings, I confess: it held me fast.

European Reading Challenge #9

I read this for the European Reading Challenge 2026.

A Coffin for Dimitrios - Eric Ambler

This well-regarded thriller from 1939 kicks off when a Turkish police officer invites Charles Latimer, a former British academic now a mystery writer, to a corpse viewing. Police pulled from the Bosphorus one Dimitrios, a con man and spy.

The policeman gives Latimer a sketchy account of Dimitrios’ life of crime: thief, killer, spy, narcotics trafficker, assassin and smuggler of human beings. Latimer, partly as an experiment, partly out of pique at being treated like an amateur by the policeman, decides to fill in the blanks in Dimitrios’ criminal history.

The story narrates Latimer’s meeting Dimitrios' former victims, marks, and henchmen. Things start to get messy and dangerous. Rum guys wonder why a professorial type should be interested in somebody whose death relieved a lot of dodgy people.

There’s no whining about the big bad world but there’s no ethical ambivalence either, a point I like in these old suspense novels. Although all the thrillers Ambler wrote in the 1930s are worth reading, A Coffin for Dimitrios is the classic that has never gone out of print.

Perry Mason 172: Being Wrongly Accused

Note: Erle Stanley Gardner dramatizes injustice as emotionally real, not merely melodramatic or an example of the “cruel world” fallacy. Being wrongfully ensnared by the same authorities that are supposed to protect us causes shock, despondency and anger.

The Dread Machinery of Being Wrongly Accused

There is, in the Perry Mason canon, a recurring and rather alarming proposition. An ordinary citizen may discover that the apparatus of justice has decided that they are guilty because the circumstantial evidence says so. Presumption of innocence? Puh-leez. Not when a homicide detective’s “gut” says it probably happened this way.

The Case of the Velvet Claws (1933) presents a client who is intelligent, desperate, and duplicitous - repeatedly hindering Mason while trying to escape suspicion for her husband’s murder. Her deceit unsettles the reader but so does her vulnerability to a system that mistakes appearance for proof. Gardner taps a primal fear: the loss of control. The prospect of being powerless before authority is not abstract but visceral, rooted in our instinct to protect our autonomy and minimize risk - where over-reacting is often safer than trusting that members of the tribe will sort the dispute out in your favor.

Wrongly accused narratives hinge on a disturbing premise: truth may fail to prevail simply because it is too costly - too time-consuming, too inconvenient - for authorities with other priorities. Under such conditions, survival depends not on patience but on intervention, even subversion. In The Case of the Howling Dog (1934), the courtroom drifts toward theater: evidence is fragmentary, motives obscured, and the official story suspiciously tidy. The system appears less committed to truth than to closure. To counteract this, Perry Mason employs ethically questionable tactics - manufacturing a confession for the newspapers and hiring an actress to impersonate a witness. - drawing the reader into an uncomfortable ethical calculus. When fairness is not assured, must it be aggressively, even improperly, reclaimed?

Yet wrongful accusation in Gardner is not solely the product of institutional failure. Layered over this is Gardner’s surprisingly blunt sense of fate. Fortuna intrudes like the indifferent goddess she is. The Case of the Half-Wakened Wife (1940) presents a protagonist trapped by memory gaps and incriminating circumstance, unable even to reconstruct her own actions. The universe need not conspire; it merely has to misfire. The hardcore reader is reminded that a single random event* can upend the body, the mind, or a life’s trajectory. Under such conditions, how exactly is prudence supposed to proceed?

What makes these narratives so curiously sticky in the mind is that they mirror lesser injustices we have all experienced: the misinterpreted remark, the undeserved blame, the slow realization that explanation will not bring about exoneration.** Gardner scales that familiar discomfort into existential threat. The reader recognizes, uncomfortably, how easy it would be to be in that chair at the defense table, wedged between Perry and Della, looking like a deer in the headlights.

Unjustly accused stories endure not because they are dramatic, but because they speak to our amygdala and hypothalamus that are sensitive to threat. Gardner understood that the terror lies in the accusation - that devastating pivot from citizen to suspect, from member of the tribe to shunned outlaw and despised alien.

The Perry Mason novels explore the terrifying possibility that truth might require extensive professional excavation in the presence of a plausible motive and the absence of a water-proof alibi. And so we read, perhaps with more intensity than we admit, hoping not merely for resolution, but for reassurance that truth can still be uncovered, that fairness can still prevail, and that, should life pull a dirty trick on us, somewhere there will be lawyer to defend us even after finding out everything about our poor choices and dumb moves.

 

* In a universe where a random cosmic ray can bust into a cell’s nucleus and click “mutate” like it’s a radio button and start something that’ll make a hardened oncologist gasp … honestly, what are we mortals supposed to do about that? Mindfulness meditation?

** Husbands who've been married a long time have learned that concise explanations invite more questions and long explanations more suspicion. After twenty years, you learn the ideal answer is just detailed enough to sound truthful and just boring enough to prevent a follow-up.

Perry Mason 171: TCOT Calendar Girl

Note: Apparently, this 1958 outing is the one Mason case where nobody cares if the murder weapon had fingerprints. It’s also the first time Mason saves his client by practically convicting someone else… and then graciously takes that poor soul as his next client. Talk about job security. And the structure? Unfair. The reader gets zero clues until Mason drops them like plot grenades, so forget solving the mystery on your own.

The Case of the Calendar Girl – Erle Stanley Gardner

George Ansley the honest contractor, a paragon of virtue, finds himself entangled in a sordid affair involving Meredith Borden - a man whose business dealings reek of extortion and influence peddling. Borden, it seems, has the uncanny ability to call off building inspectors who, in their zealousness to enforce code, are making life miserable for Ansley’s construction crews. To keep his projects afloat, Ansley pays Borden off. A regrettable lapse, and Ansley hates having to be a payer, but not as bad as the intimidation of Borden’s extortion.

Then fate intervenes. Distracted and demoralized, Ansley crashes his car. The other driver? A woman of striking beauty and suspiciously persuasive charm. Despite her apparent injuries, she convinces Ansley to drive her home. There, she proceeds to disarm him with feminine fragility, flirtation, and a kiss - a trifecta of manipulation that would make any distracted dude forget his best interests.

Later that evening, Ansley recovers his sense. He seeks legal counsel from Perry Mason, cornering him and his ever-present secretary, Della Street, in a restaurant. Mason, ever the sleuth, insists on inspecting the accident scene. They arrive at Borden’s estate, only to be repelled by barbed wire and vicious dogs.

Coincidentally - or perhaps not - Borden is murdered that very night. The police, diligent as ever, begin their search for suspects. Mason, in his usual obnoxious fashion, embarks on a parallel investigation, tracking down “calendar girls” - models who straddle the line between commercial photography and so-called “art.”

Now, I must object to the narrative liberties taken. Gardner’s storytelling, while brisk, sacrifices fair play. Evidence is withheld, clues obscured, and the resolution hinges on exposition rather than deduction. The reader, like the jury, is denied the opportunity to weigh the facts. In this case, Gardner’s usual flair falters, and the verdict on the novel’s merits must be: mildly disappointing.

Perry Mason 170: Five Perry Mason Starters

Note: New to Perry Mason? Start with five cases that showcase Gardner at his most cunning - plots that snap, dialogue that crackles, and courtroom fireworks that pop. From parrots with secrets to mink coats with murder stitched in, these novels prove why Mason still hits the legal-thriller notes for many hardcore readers.

Five Perry Mason Starters: Murder, Mink, and Mason’s Magic in Court

The Case of the Perjured Parrot (1939)
A Perry Mason gem with a gimmick that works: a murder witnessed by a parrot. Gardner spins it fast and tight - no padding, just plot. Della teases Mason over paperwork until Charles Sabin hires him to block a greedy widow and solve Fremont Sabin’s killing. Fremont, a publicity-shy rugged type, ends up dead in his mountain cabin while Casanova squawks, “Helen, put down that gun!” Which Helen? Wife or librarian? Depression-era despair gives bookish Helen Monteith depth, and Gardner salts the mix with will-law tangles and Sgt. Holcomb’s bullying bluster. The coroner’s inquest finale delivers a twist that’s pure Gardner - audacious and satisfying.

The Case of the Vagabond Virgin (1948)
Gardner serves up a cocktail of sex, money, and murder with a twist that stings. Addison, a retail tycoon, plays Good Samaritan to a platinum-haired waif - and lands in a tabloid trap. Enter Mason, cool as gin, to untangle blackmail and scandal. Then a partner turns up dead, and the courtroom becomes a chessboard. DA Burger blusters, Holcomb huffs, and Mason slices through the bluster with surgical precision. Gardner skips psychology for pure propulsion: greed, lust, and panic drive the plot. The ending? A jolt - rushed but daring. Call it Gardner at his gaudiest: fast, flashy, and fun.

The Case of the Moth-Eaten Mink (1952)
Gardner hits high gear with a mink that’s more trouble than glamour. A waitress vanishes, a shabby coat turns up, and Mason dives into a whirl of pawn tickets, lipstick scrawls, and mob whispers. The trail leaps from L.A. to Seattle, dragging in a cop’s murder, a boyfriend on the hook, and a rising body count. Gardner keeps it lean - dialogue fresh, tempo racing - while Mason juggles roles as counsel and witness. Lt. Tragg shows grit, Holcomb rages, and the finale delivers Gardner’s trademark surprise. No frills, no fat - just a taut, twisty ride that earns its perfect 10.

The Case of the Hesitant Hostess (1953)
Gardner trades plush parlors for neon glare - nightclubs humming, gambling joints grinding, hostesses as bait for bruised egos and busted wallets. It’s noir with a sociological snap: middle-class dreamers lured into a racket greased by cops and graft. Yes, the client’s late to the party and motives wobble, but Gardner compensates with velocity - two courtroom clashes, Mason pounding pavements and pulp-style punches. The mystery’s no brain-bender, yet the dialogue rocks, the pace sizzles, and the energy leaps like a live wire. When the gavel drops, you’re grinning like a canine smelling bacon.

The Case of the Queenly Contestant (1967)
Gardner swaps neon noir for satin and scandal. Ellen Adair - department-store duchess with a beauty-queen past - hires Mason to muzzle a hometown newspaper exposé of her single motherhood. Behind the gloss: a vanished lover, a secret child, and blackmail that sours into murder. Gardner threads the Sixties shift in attitudes toward single mothers through a brisk plot of bent cops, fixer-lawyers, and courtroom pyrotechnics. Yes, gender assumptions creak like Victorian floorboards, but the pace is taut, the rogues vivid, and Mason - cool, relentless -steals the show. Verdict withheld, but Gardner proves he can still lace a whodunit with social sting.

Perry Mason 169: The Best of Season 5

Note: In the classic Perry Mason TV series, cultural quirks of 70 years ago abound: nearly everyone seems to keep a firearm tucked in a glove compartment or handbag, a norm that feels startling today. And then there’s the fashion. My Bride points out that Della Street sports what can only be described as “Barbie shoes”—even when traipsing through rugged foothills alongside Perry and Paul in pursuit of clues. Practicality clearly wasn’t part of the costume design brief. Plus, the show is sepia-toned postcard from a California that hadn’t yet been strip-malled into oblivion. Back when palm trees were romantic, not ironic, and the freeways hadn’t metastasized like an experiment in urban planning gone horribly wrong. Even in monochrome, those locations had a kind of accidental enchantment, the kind you can’t fake with CGI. 

The Best of Season 5 (1961-62)

The Case of the Shapely Shadow. Elaine Devry lights up the little black and white tube as the wallflower secretary turned into hachi-machi with the help of a makeover. With Devry, the viewer wonders how in hell she made her red hair and green eyes come across on the monochrome screen. Not to mention any responsible cardiologist would advise us codgers to avoid prolonged exposure to her ultra-feminine voice and manner. The court room scene is excellent with Burger falling into Mason’s cunning trap and having a blustering sputtering meltdown. That’ll learn him for all of those triumphant smirks.

The Case of the Travelling Treasure. Any episode that has Lisa Gaye in swimsuit gets an automatic four stars. But in fact the acting is top notch in this episode. Arch Johnson plays a cranky gangster who ends up croaked in a locked cabin on board a fishing boat. Our pal Vaughn Taylor plays a mild-mannered chemist who’s too absent-minded to be devious. Familiar TV face Jeff York plays Perry’s client, a relatable working man. Most of the action is set on boats so it’s invigorating to be outside for half of this episode. Rare too for the story to turn on a classic puzzle mystery involving a locked room.

The Case of the Absent Artist. Many different personalities engage our attention: loud boy cartoonist Pete Manders (Wynne Pearce), world-weary sculptor Alexander Glovatski (Victor Buono), and a sneaky artist Otto Gavaert (Mark Roberts) that yearns to get away from it all and paint like the louse Charles Strickland in The Moon and Sixpence. Plus, the snoopy landlady Daphne (ZaSu Pitts), sensuous beat girl Fiona Cregan (Arline Sax), and nervous accountant Monty (Richard Erdman). Besides the outstanding cast, unique settings make episode unlike any other: an oily fishing village that’s also an artist’s colony and the craft and business of syndicated comic strips. Finally, in the studio of the sneaky artist, in the background, we spy the purple woman painting from season 2 and a crying cherub painting from Season 3.