Adolphe Menjou is a weary Police Commissioner on vacation in upstate New York. He gets entangled in a nearly bankrupt circus, and endeavors (unsuccessfully) to prevent THE CIRCUS QUEEN MURDER.
This crisply directed and well-acted little drama is perhaps the best test of the auteur theory one could devise. Director Neill is best known as director of most of the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movies, and the fantastic film noir Black Angel. If you ever catch his other Columbias on TCM, one notices that his movies have a distinct visual flair, and always seem to be moving on to the next plot point.
In this one, Neill has a real problem -- and it is one he probably suffered with a lot. The story (as opposed to the script, which has a decent batch of the usual 30s wise talking) is terrible. The "mystery" is no mystery -- the killer is well known before the murder actually happens and there are only one or two "deductions". The murder itself happens far too late in movie (and is so telegraphed by the title of the movie, that it does not come as any surprise). Menjou, by the operations of the plot, seems ineffectual, rather than the clever unraveler of mysteries. And, courtesy of the story, there are long patches of film where there really is nothing going on.
So what's an auteur to do? Well, at the beginning of the film, we get a montage of gangster action, with newspaper headlines. We get atmospheric rain when the circus wagon comes into town. We get circus atmosphere and more circus atmosphere. We get chilling cries of fearsome circus animals (even though those animals have very little to do with anything going on on the screen.) We also get Adolphe Menjou, acting the part of an elegant but burnt out policeman, with so much grace and elan that we do not notice that he really isn't doing much of anything. We also get lots of Dwight Frye (who thinks Renfield is a model for any character he might play) chewing the scenery in the sort of role Peter Lorre would have got (and actually acted) had the film been made 7 or 8 years later. Finally, we get lots of dangerous trapeze action. And, at last, we have the final confrontation between policeman and murderer, and the witty closing line (to which Menjou gives the perfect reading).
In other words, we end up with an entertaining movie but an unstisfying one. It probably played well on the top half of a Columbia double feature, but a little time and effort by the scenario writer could have made this one great, as opposed to an interesting time-passer. The message here is that 30s film was always a collaborative medium and failure in one aspect of the production was really difficult to salvage through brilliance in one of the other ends.
Oh -- and what's the spoiler? Given the structure of the movie, the worst spoiler is repeating its title.
This crisply directed and well-acted little drama is perhaps the best test of the auteur theory one could devise. Director Neill is best known as director of most of the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movies, and the fantastic film noir Black Angel. If you ever catch his other Columbias on TCM, one notices that his movies have a distinct visual flair, and always seem to be moving on to the next plot point.
In this one, Neill has a real problem -- and it is one he probably suffered with a lot. The story (as opposed to the script, which has a decent batch of the usual 30s wise talking) is terrible. The "mystery" is no mystery -- the killer is well known before the murder actually happens and there are only one or two "deductions". The murder itself happens far too late in movie (and is so telegraphed by the title of the movie, that it does not come as any surprise). Menjou, by the operations of the plot, seems ineffectual, rather than the clever unraveler of mysteries. And, courtesy of the story, there are long patches of film where there really is nothing going on.
So what's an auteur to do? Well, at the beginning of the film, we get a montage of gangster action, with newspaper headlines. We get atmospheric rain when the circus wagon comes into town. We get circus atmosphere and more circus atmosphere. We get chilling cries of fearsome circus animals (even though those animals have very little to do with anything going on on the screen.) We also get Adolphe Menjou, acting the part of an elegant but burnt out policeman, with so much grace and elan that we do not notice that he really isn't doing much of anything. We also get lots of Dwight Frye (who thinks Renfield is a model for any character he might play) chewing the scenery in the sort of role Peter Lorre would have got (and actually acted) had the film been made 7 or 8 years later. Finally, we get lots of dangerous trapeze action. And, at last, we have the final confrontation between policeman and murderer, and the witty closing line (to which Menjou gives the perfect reading).
In other words, we end up with an entertaining movie but an unstisfying one. It probably played well on the top half of a Columbia double feature, but a little time and effort by the scenario writer could have made this one great, as opposed to an interesting time-passer. The message here is that 30s film was always a collaborative medium and failure in one aspect of the production was really difficult to salvage through brilliance in one of the other ends.
Oh -- and what's the spoiler? Given the structure of the movie, the worst spoiler is repeating its title.