The Benson Murder Case (1930, Frank Tuttle)

The most interesting part of The Benson Murder Case is the Black Tuesday setting. I missed the newspaper dates for the montage about the stock market crash so I’m not sure if they do the Black Tuesday or just a Black Tuesday, but the movie opens with broker Richard Tucker selling off all his clients’ positions. They come to the office and yell at him and threaten him, so we get a parade of the suspects.

There’s gigolo Paul Lukas, who used the money his sugar momma May Beatty sent to cover her stock positions on pearls for Natalie Moorhead, which he then stole from her to give to Tucker as collateral on a forged check. It’s wordy complicated, not useful complicated; they just need to establish motive. Moorhead’s a working girl made good, but she believes Lukas loves her because… it’s unclear. Tucker wants to whisk Moorhead off her feet but she won’t go for him, money or not, because he’s ugly.

Then there’s gambler, rich guy, and apparently indicted but never convicted killer William 'Stage' Boyd, who’s pals with Tucker because they’re both in it to win it. Apparently it’s a bond.

After everyone meets at Tucker’s office to yell at him and get the light bulb about bumping him off, they soon end up at his country house to plead with him for financial mercy and maybe kill him. Mostly it’s just Tucker berating them for being thinly written characters and Boyd being slightly creepy.

Coincidentally and conveniently, Tucker lives next door to the district attorney, E.H. Calvert, who stops by for a chat during the gathering of the potential murderers. Again coincidentally and conveniently, Calvert’s got his pal—playboy amateur sleuth Philo Vance (William Powell)—along with him. So right before the murder there’s a lot of Boyd posturing for Powell.

After the murder, numbskull police sergeant Eugene Pallette shows up for a lot of solid comic relief. The murder happens around twenty-five minutes into the picture, which runs just over an hour, so Pallette’s got a lot to keep moving because the red herring suspicions Calvert’s got are obviously red herrings. He’s ranting about them while Powell just sits calmly and says wait for the last seven or eight minutes then they’ll know everything.

Benson Murder Case is mildly engaging, not much more. Director Tuttle showcases everyone except Powell (and maybe Beatty) and gives Tucker and Boyd the spotlight. They’re both fine. Powell’s charming, Pallette’s funny….

The mystery itself is kind of blah—the biggest reveal happens offscreen; besides Powell, Pallette, and maybe Boyd, the biggest selling point is the short runtime.

City Streets (1931, Rouben Mamoulian)

The first third of City Streets is this awesome bit of experimenting from director Mamoulian as he tries to figure out how to make a sound picture. Lots of great shots and camera setups, usually with too dawdling cuts. William Shea holds everything just a few seconds too long. But the montage imagery itself is fantastic. And Mamoulian carries it over into the narrative a bit too, though he eventually stops with it after sort of peaking.

But even for all Mamoulian’s experimenting, Streets is never experimental. There’s always the script to drag it back to reality. Oliver H.P. Garrett (adapting a Dashiell Hammett original story, with help form Max Marcin) writes some great scenes and some excellent characters… he just doesn’t write the right ones excellent. Or, if he does, at the wrong times. There’s no reason Wynne Gibson, as a jilted mobster’s dame, ought to end up giving the most dynamic female performance in Streets. It’s literally Sylvia Sidney’s movie and she loses it to Gibson for the finale. Gibson’s great, but great because the movie doesn’t give Sidney a presence much less a chance. Possibly because no one realized Gary Cooper doesn’t work without Sidney around. His performance is better, but he doesn’t function right in the plot without her.

Streets is a crime melodrama. Sidney works for her step-father, a truly singular Guy Kibbee as an abject sociopath, who in turn works for crime boss Paul Lukas. Lukas is a classy European guy who seduces the women of his gang and then kills off his romantic rivals and promotes some duplicitous underling. He’s a psychopath, but one in the guise of a sociopath. Lukas is pretty awesome. He’s not as good as Kibbee because no one’s as good as Kibbee, but Lukas is frightening. Of course, Lukas doesn’t meet Sidney through Kibbee, rather through Gary Cooper. Cooper starts the movie a dope of a cowboy who’s found his way to the big city, just waiting until the circus shows up and he can join up. He’s Sidney’s fella. And he wants nothing to do with the bootlegging gangsters.

At least until Sidney’s in a jam and, being a complete moron, Kibbee’s able to talk Cooper into it to help her. Shame the only thing Sidney’s able to hold onto is the knowledge her fella would never get involved with the bootlegging gangsters.

There’s some great romantic scenes between Cooper and Sidney, which occasionally get messed up by the edits, occasionally amplified. The first one is on the beach and is exemplar good sexy until they cut to a two-shot in the studio instead of the location. Then one where the lovers are separated by a screen. Sidney’s amazing in that one. She also gets a few great thinking scenes, one accompanied by a sound flashback (the first in film, according to the IMDb), and then one where she’s got to figure out how to save Cooper.

Because once Lukas gets a look at her, he’s not going to stop at anything to get her.

And Kibbee’s more than happy to go along. And Cooper’s a dope who thinks Lukas is his pal.

There’s a better movie in the story, but maybe not much better. Cooper’s okay. He’s actually better as the plotting gangster than the dopey cowboy stud. Sidney’s excellent, but the material’s not always with her. Kibbee, Gibson, Lukas. William Boyd’s kind of blah as Lukas’s number two. Not bad just blander than he ought to be. Some of it’s the script.

There’s a great montage sequence of Cooper and all the mob guys looking at each other. I wonder how it’d sound with Ennio Morricone.

The film’s most impressive for Mamoulian’s direction. Unfortunately, you could cut together a ten minute reel of all the best directed stuff and be fine. For whatever reason, Mamoulian drops the experimenting in the second half and the melodrama stalls. It even drags, not good for an eighty minute picture. Maybe it needs to be longer….

The film just can’t figure out how to make all its pieces work; Mamoulian tries a lot of successful things, they just don’t add up. And he seems to get tired of trying, which hurts it.

But City Streets is still an amazing piece of motion picture making.

The Benson Murder Case (1930, Frank Tuttle)

I wonder how Eugene Pallette felt–more, how his co-stars felt–about having the closest thing to a close-up in The Benson Murder Case. I’ve never been more acutely aware of shot distance than I was during the film. Tuttle has a standard pattern. Long shot–usually a lengthy long shot, sometimes an entire scene is one shot–followed by a medium shot for emphasis. At the end, Pallette gets the European medium shot (waist up) for one of his punch lines. Sadly, Pallette’s only got three or four jokes as his befuddled police detective in this Philo Vance entry. He and William Powell–who work well together–probably only have five scenes together.

What makes Benson Murder Case even more peculiar is its pacing. It’s a murder mystery where the murder doesn’t occur until almost a third of the way into the film–the film runs just under seventy-minutes and I don’t think Richard Tucker dies until after minute twenty. I wondered, as the film concentrated on Tucker’s dealings with his various co-stars, if there was supposed to be some confusion about who was going to die. Then I remember it was called The Benson Murder Case, which just made it stranger. While Tucker is supposed to be an unlikable jerk–he’s a stock broker who puts solvency ahead of his clients’ whims during the Crash of 1929–anticipating his death isn’t really all that interesting. After minute ten, I figured there was a chance he’d make it through most of the film. It would have been more interesting if he had.

The long first act introduces not just Tucker, but his antagonists–Natalie Moorhead, Paul Lukas, William ‘Stage’ Boyd and May Beatty–and then the second act refocuses on Powell and the investigation. There’s also district attorney E.H. Calvert’s re-election bid, which the film’s running time can’t make space. The result is the film’s initial characters disappearing for a while, only to reappear as subjects–Powell’s not even the protagonist until the latter half of the second act (remember, the film’s only seventy minutes), spending almost an entire interrogation off camera.

It’s a disjointed experience, bound together by some competent acting and a sufficiently mysterious mystery. Boyd is a fine villain, Moorhead and Lukas are good. Powell’s good, but Benson really shows how an actor needs close-ups to identify with the viewer. He’s got a character here, not a personality.

Tuttle’s quizzical direction also draws attention to the artifice. It’s obvious the film was shot on three-sided sets. They’re real high and well-decorated, so they’re interesting to look at (they have to be, given the length of the takes), but they’re empty of any meaningful content.

It’s an amiable seventy minutes, the kind of film good for passing time and nothing else.