by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s movie was taken from a January 2016 Turner
Classic Movies tribute to Lew Ayres, Panic on the Air, a 55-minute Columbia “B” from 1936 (a bit late in
the day for the charmingly cheesy, cartoonish version of the Columbia logo that
appeared on this print) directed by D. Ross Lederman (I used to make fun of
him, joking that one should never trust the work of a director whose name looks
like it should have the letters “D.D.S.” after it, but then I saw the one truly
great film he made: End of the Trail,
the remarkable pro-Native American Western made by Tim McCoy at Columbia in
1932) from a script by Harold Shumate based on a short story called “Five Spot”
by Theodore A. Tinsley. Charles wondered if the word “Air” in the title
referred to aircraft or radio, but the diagonal shot of a radio transmission
tower gave that away, while the montage of various sporting events seen under
the opening credits indicate that Lew Ayres was going to be playing a
sportscaster. Actually his character, Jerry Franklin, has two jobs at the fictitious “Continental Broadcasting
Service”; in addition to sportscasting he’s also a late-night news reporter
doing a show called “You Heard It First” sponsored by Gordon’s Garters (it’s a
measure of how dated this movie is that Gordon’s company could stay in business
making nothing but garters),
whose slogan is “Gordon’s Garters Never Let You Down.” Gordon is threatening to
pull his sponsorship of Jerry Franklin’s show because the newspapers are
beating him to too many spectacular scoops. Jerry sees his chance to break a
big story and get back in the good graces of his sponsor when he and his
sidekick Andy (Benny Baker, a Stuart Erwin imitator who manages to be even more
obnoxious than the original) come across a $5 bill with what looks like a
moustache drawn across President Lincoln’s upper lip. On closer examination,
they realize it’s actually a string of numbers — 15-6-10-15 — only when they
take it to a cryptographer Jerry knows, Major Bliss (Wyrley Birch), he tells
them that the numbers aren’t part of any code he’s aware of and there aren’t
enough of them for him to be able to break it. Bliss tells them the meaning is
probably arbitrary, something that the sender and the intended recipient of the
message would be aware of but no one else would. Then Jerry and Andy, along
with their Asian houseboy who in a neat bit of humor on the part of the writers
is named “McNulty” (Eddie Lee), receive an anonymous note from a woman telling
them that their lives are in danger unless they rendezvous with her at a
particular time and place — the place being the lobby of the Cateret Hotel
(which was probably an odd name for a hostelry even in 1936) and the time being
6 p.m. that day.
They expect a hard-bitten woman and one duly materializes —
and Andy cruises her, only to find that she’s married and both her husband and
her family have violent tempers and know how to use their fists. The real woman
who sent them the note is Mary Connor (Florence Rice, who like Lew Ayres later
decamped from Columbia to MGM — at MGM she played simpering ingénues like Kenny
Baker’s love interest in the Marx Brothers’ film At the Circus, but here she’s surprisingly good, not at the level
of Joan Blondell but portraying a similar combination of surface toughness and
inner vulnerability), and when our intrepid radio reporters trace her to her
apartment, there’s a dead body inside. They realize the cops are going to
suspect Mary but Jerry, noting how much the victim’s blood has congealed and
deducing from that that the murder occurred while he and Andy were still with
Mary, deduces that she didn’t do it. The murder victim turns out to be the wife
of a notorious criminal who kidnapped a rich man and extracted a $250,000
ransom from his family, then got caught but only had $50,000 on him when he was
captured. The bill has been traced all over town by Martin Danker (Murray
Alper), member of the gang of Lefty Dugan (Gene Morgan), and when Jerry and
Mary finally catch up with each other they go to Major Bliss’s home to see if
their guess that the numbers are code for an address where the missing $200,000
is being stashed is correct. Only Bliss slips them a note that the gangsters
got to him first — before that I was wondering if Bliss himself was going to
turn out to be the mastermind behind the crime and that’s why he was so unforthcoming when Jerry and Andy
first visited him for help, but Tinsley and Shumate blessedly didn’t take us
down that set of clichés. Instead
they have the gangsters figure out the location of the money, and Jerry has to
phone his radio station and get himself broadcast over the phone line so he can
alert police captain Fitzgerald (Charles Wilson) to the address so the cops can
catch the crooks and recover the money. Once all the parties arrive there
there’s a surprisingly violent, especially for a 1936 “post-Code” movie,
shootout between cops and crooks; the cops win, though Lefty attempts to escape
with the money and gets taken alive even though the other three members of the
gang get killed, and of course at the end Jerry not only gets his contract
renewed, he gets Mary.
Panic on the Air is actually a quite well-done thriller; though one might have expected
a better movie to result from the collaboration of the star of All
Quiet on the Western Front and the director
of End of the Trail, what we have
here is quite stylish, fast-moving (it’s only 55 minutes long, unusually short
even for a “B” — a lot of “B” Westerns in the 1930’s were that brief but a “B”
with a contemporary setting usually hit at least the 65-minute mark), well
acted by the leads (though you do
want to strangle Bobby Baker — all too few of the so-called “comic relief”
characters in these films were actually funny) and moved at a quite smart and
engaging pace by director Lederman, who’s quick enough we don’t spot the plot
holes until we start thinking about this movie well after it’s over. It’s this
kind of nice, reliable, comfortable entertainment that you really don’t get
anymore — not in features (a modern movie based on the plot of Panic
on the Air would probably be at least twice
as long and would drag in sinister crime bosses and international intrigue — as
a motivator for criminal scheming, $200,000 just doesn’t go as far as it used
to!) and not on TV either (one could imagine Dick Wolf’s writers generating a
plot similar to this bout it would be a lot more violent and grim).
