Was Love her Crime?

Note: The Gail Patrick film festival continues. In the movie reviewed today she gets away from her early parts as nice secretary (If I Had a Million), nice research assistant (Murders in the Zoo) and nice aspiring singer (The Phantom Broadcast) and kind of nice rich girl (Death Takes a Holiday). What the hell, the reader wonders, is forgotten actress Gail Patrick doing on what is basically a Perry Mason blog? Gail Patrick Jackson found retirement a bore in the 1950s so she became the executive producer of the greatest teevee courtroom drama in creation - there is only one correct answer - Perry Mason. She and Raymond Burr butted heads over scripts and workload, but Burr said she was the soul of the series.

The Crime of Helen Stanley
1934 / 58 minutes
Tagline: “Make-believe drama that changed to grim tragedy!”
[internet archive]

In this production Gail Patrick plays a spoiled movie star of whom a studio executive says, “She never gave reasons. She made demands.” When she finds out that her sister and her ex-BF plan to marry, in a rage of jealousy she warns them to break it off, telling her favorite cameraman in classic diva style, “I made you and I'll break you just as easily.” It seems she has something on everybody so that she can coerce them to do her will. Nobody likes her intimidating ways. Nobody seems especially broken up when she is shot dead on set during the shooting of a scene in a nightclub, except movie-goers that would find easy to take more scenes of Gail Patrick in her drawers, in racy scenes typical of Pre-Code Hollywood.

But alas.

The main attraction is that Inspector Trent (Ralph Bellamy) takes us movie-goers behind the scenes of Columbia studios during the early days of sound. Imparting a feeling of unreality is the Thirties technology such as sets, lights, lifts, dollies, and other equipment so antique as to be unidentifiable. Also putting us off balance are the elaborate catwalks that the lighting guys have to navigate. The images are shot beautifully.                                                                                               

The camera work shows care and craft. Cutting from face to face for reactions was cool. Fascinating is the subjective camera on a trio of faces. As for the acting, Gail Patrick does domineering and spiteful skillfully, as she was to do as mean Cornelia in My Man Godfrey a couple years later. Bellamy uses his great voice to make weakish lines sound genuine.  But that’s about it. Shirley Grey has a kind of mature sensuality but muffs lines too.

Bellamy is adept at giving long looks that make persons of interest squirm. “Suspect: I didn’t do it. Bellamy: Then you have nothing to be afraid of” seems profoundly unsatisfying, but maybe we movie-goers have seen too many innocents railroaded in noir movies. The interrogation scene was well-composed throughout with four hostile detectives browbeating and tormenting one hapless thief. The po-faced perfectionistic European director being blackmailed by Gail over immigration ambiguities had to have been a take-off on tyrants like Fritz Lang, Josef von Sternberg and Erich Von Stroheim.

A genuine B-movie, of interest only to hardcore movie-goers or buffs of the 1930s.