Evelyn Venable 4/5

Note: This week we are looking at some movies with Evelyn Venable. She was considered a "poetic" type of actress with exquisite features and a beautiful speaking voice. Her voice is genuinely warm, friendly and assured in an educated way – she came from a family of teachers. Venable had a gentle, wholesome, and somewhat demure on-screen persona, which stands in contrast to her being cast as bit of a go-getter in this B-comedy.  Her aura of intelligence and dignity might have worked against her in the cashbox minds of producers who wanted  “independent women” like Kay Francis or “sex bombs” like Jean Harlow.

Hollywood Stadium Mystery
1938 / 1:06
Tagline: “Ringside seats for a crime!”
[internet archive]

Let’s be honest: the screwball elements are tepid, and the mystery is strictly by-the-numbers. But what elevates this Thirties B-picture above the usual studio filler is its leads - Neil Hamilton and Evelyn Venable - who bring unexpected sophistication to a noisy genre that usually leans on pratfalls and punchlines.

Hamilton plays Bill Devons, a District Attorney with no patience for pulp fiction nonsense. Venable is Pauline Ward, a mystery writer who’s clearly read her share of Havelock Ellis and Bernard Shaw. Both characters are articulate, ambitious, and refreshingly adult - like they’ve just stepped out of a grad seminar with Cyril Connolly on The Taming of the Shrew. It’s a welcome break from the usual B-movie archetypes: the lunkhead guy and the wisecracking dame.

Hamilton toggles between suave and smug with ease, even when saddled with clunkers like, “Marry me and then I'd have a legal right to box your ears in.” Venable, meanwhile, is a revelation. Her performance is precise and expressive, her voice cultured without being affected. You get the sense that her intelligence may have been a liability in an industry that preferred its leading ladies either glamorously vacant or sassily streetwise. At 5’8” with a her own face that defied the studio mold, Venable may have been too much herself for the system.

Barbara Pepper steals her two scenes as Althea Ames, a brassy actress caught up in the murder of a boxer. She delivers zingers like, “You liked it enough last night,” with the kind of timing that makes you wish she had more screen time. Her resigned line - “All you men ever think about is eating” - lands with a sigh and a wink to all women.

Clocking in at just over an hour, the film moves briskly. The sets - especially the offices and boxing arena - feel surprisingly authentic for a Republic Pictures production, a studio not exactly known for lavish realism.

For fans of 1930s cinema, this film is a time capsule of cultural quirks: brass bands at boxing matches, comic relief via mouth noises (thanks, Smiley Burnett), and yes, the regrettable appearance of blackface as a disguise - an uncomfortable reminder of what passed for humor in the era.

As a bonus for us Perry Mason fans, both Hamilton and Pepper would later appear in the classic TV series - he as the uptight male that thinks he’s got the bead on life, she as the salt-of-the-earth type.