Note: Gail Patrick moved beyond ingenue parts when she played Cornelia the mean sister in My Man Godrey. After dozens of parts as the socialite bad girl, retirement from acting drove her batty with boredom. With her husband Cornwell, Gail Patrick Jackson formed the company that produced from 1957 to 1966 the greatest courtroom TV series in creation. One wonders if it was due to Jackson – a lifelong Democrat - that the writers so often returned to themes such as class inequality and friction, the treatment of marginalized groups, and the various forms of corruption in the business world and the entertainment industry.
Murder
by Pictures
1936 / 1:09
Tagline: “Forty Witnesses Saw the Killing, But Not One
Could Pick the Killer!”
[internet archive]
Gangster Nate Girard (Onslow Stevens) hosts a shindig celebrating his acquittal from a murder charge. But the party is pooped when his attorney is shot to death. No gun is found, but, as the tagline hints, forty witnesses are all suspects.
In this large pool is Meg “Nutmeg” Archer (Gail Patrick) stands out because her father was killed by Girard. She could have provided evidence that convicted Girard, so Girard wants her to take the fall for the lawyer’s killing. The flatfoots suspect that news photographer Kent Murdock (Lew Ayres) is helping Nutmeg evade the meshes of the law. A flashback explains how a photo of the actual shooting exists and like the rifle in that famous Western (Winchester ’73?), the negative keeps changing hands.
At only 69 minutes, this comic mystery can’t help but move briskly. The clever twists and non-stop turns make up for the now creaky wisecracking. So much in style then, nowadays nonsense grates if the viewer is not in the right mood for period word play. "Aw, come on. Skin back your ivories. You're as limp as spaghetti. You're the saddest group of courtroom victors I ever trained a lens on."
Granted, though, classic American tall-tale wackiness hits the mark when a deadpan cop reports: “We got her life story from Oklahoma. When she was 12 she shot out all the candles on her birthday cake. They call her Nutmeg.”
Beware: Confusing is the first fifteen minutes. The acquitted killer gives useful information in an aside that is easy to miss due to the muddy sound. Three brash newspaper reporters – Lew Ayres, Benny Baker, and Paul Kelly – all seem to be named Murdock. Trying too hard to hit the screwball comedy note, Ayres takes to the shower with his pants on. Also, Gail Patrick’s backstory is related to what everybody at the time would have known but we post-moderns have totally forgotten: that in the middle Thirties the Osage Nation in Oklahoma were the richest people per capita in the world, which attracted murderous ofays on the ruthless hunt for oil money.
There is one connection to the classic Perry Mason TV series. Appearing in this movie as his usual comic relief bumpkin is a 30-year-old Benny Baker, who in his fifties was to appear in three episodes of the series. He was good as a cold gambling commission bureaucrat in TCOT Gambling Lady, but he was great as the nasty henchman in TCOT Carefree Coronary and the worst adult male role model in the world in TCOT Shifty Shoe-Box with the great Constance Ford.
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