The Mystery Man (Paul Malvern Productions, Monogram, 1935)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 10 p.m. I ran my husband Charles a movie on YouTube: The Mystery Man, made by Monogram Pictures in 1935 and featuring the original Monogram logo: an animated shot of a monorail with two cars, one containing the letters “MONOGRAM” and one containing “PICTURES.” Surprisingly few Monogram movies survive with this logo in place because when what was left of Monogram sold their movies to TV in the 1950’s the TV distributors and syndicators lopped off the Monogram logo and substituted tacky ones of their own. The Mystery Man was directed by Ray McCarey (Leo McCarey’s considerably less talented brother: I remember once seeing his name on a film starring Bing Crosby’s brother Bob and joked, “So Bob Crosby wasn’t the only person associated with this film who had a more talented brother in the same business!”) from a story by Tate Finn, with William A. Johnston credited with “adaptation” and John W. Krafft and Rollo Lloyd with the actual script. Once again, one wonders why it took all those credited writers to come up with this ragbag of standard movie clichés, but it’s still a neat movie. It stars Robert Armstrong as Larry Doyle, hotshot reporter for the Chicago Record who has an uncertain relationship with his irascible editor, Ellwyn “Jo-Jo” Jones (Henry Kolker) and is about to receive a police commendation for having exposed the killer in a recent murder case.

He’s presented with a .45 caliber police special revolver and $50, which he and his reporter friends Whalen (James Burtis), Dunn (Monte Collins) and Weeks (Sam Lufkin) drink up at a club with a Black piano player doing a quite nice version of W. C. Handy’s “Yellow Dog Blues.” Later Jones fires Doyle and Doyle ends up coming to from his binge on a train to St. Louis, where he’s ensconced in a compartment reserved for a bridal party – which made me wonder if the writing committee were setting him up for being mistaken for the bridegroom and forced to marry a woman he’s never met. Instead he gets off the train at the St. Louis station and meets Ann Ogilvie (Maxine Doyle, who seemed stiff and flat in her early scenes but gets stronger as the film progresses: at the beginning you’ll be wondering “Whom did she have to have sex with to get this part?” and by the end you’ll be wondering, “Why didn’t she become a major star?”). Since they’re both broke, Larry and Ann hold one of those arm’s-length courtships that are a common feature of Depression-era movies in which she doesn’t have enough money to pay for her doughnuts and coffee, and I joked, “Remember what happened the last time Robert Armstrong picked up a girl from the streets? He ended up taking her to a desert island where she was menaced by dinosaurs and saved by a 50-foot ape.” (And by coincidence Fay Wray in King Kong was also playing a character named Ann.)

Larry hits on the idea of bluffing their way into the honeymoon suite at a nice hotel, confident that he’ll be able to pay their bill with the $200 he’s wired his ex-editor to send him – but the editor sends a reply wire saying he’s never heard of Larry Doyle and certainly isn’t going to send him money. The wire finds its way into the hands of the hotel manager he bluffed, Mr. Clark (Dell Henderson, who played this sort of role quite often, including in the Three Stooges comedy shorts) and Larry and Ann are forced to pawn the gun he got from the Chicago police in the opening scene. Meanwhile, a master criminal called “The Eel” is terrorizing St. Louis night spots and boasting about his crimes both to police departments and to the media. Larry, figuring if he can bust “The Eel” he can win a job on any paper in town, gets a tip that “The Eel” is at the Trocadero club, so he and Ann go together for a night of gambling, subsidized by a $50 bill his old cronies in Chicago won for him in a crap game with loaded dice.

Larry hangs out at the club and “The Eel” duly robs the place, only he mistakes Larry for his getaway driver (who’s actually been killed in a shoot-out with police) and tells him to meet him at “530” to give him the money. (We see the contents of the bag and it’s some of the phoniest-looking fake money I’ve ever seen in a film. The U.S. Treasury forbade the depiction of real money on screen until the 1947 film T-Men, which was about Treasury agents out to bust counterfeiters; the filmmakers were able to persuade the U.S. government to allow them to show real money because a key plot point was how to detect counterfeit money and tell it apart from the real green. One of Woody Allen’s funniest gags in his 1985 film The Purple Rose of Cairo, in which a movie character steps off the screen into real life, was about how the character’s prop money isn’t accepted in the real world.) At first we assume that “530” is a time, but it turned out it’s the location of the pawn shop where Larry pawned his gun, and the pawnbroker, Nate (Otto Fries), is a confederate of “The Eel,” who is Nate’s friend and business associate Kevin (LeRoy Mason).

He duly shows up and holds a gun on Larry to get back the money he stole from the Trocadero, but Ann ls holding a small derringer and she shoots the bad guy, then faints in horror at what she’s just done. The film ends with Larry’s big stories about capturing “The Eel” on the page of the St, Louis News (though he doesn’t seem to have got a byline on any of them). and him and Ann saying that as long as the rest of the world thinks they’re married, they might as well actually get hitched. The Mystery Man reminded me a lot of The Murder Man, another “B” produced in 1935, albeit by a major studio (MGM), with Spencer Tracy in his first film at MGM and James Stewart in his first film, period. The plot gimmick of that one was that Tracy’s character, a similarly hotshot reporter to Armstrong’s role in The Mystery Man, actually committed the murder he’s been suspected of, though he only blurts this out posthumously as part of his final story/deathbed confession which he brings his secretary and she types up from his recorded dictation. (One wonders if Billy Wilder and/or Raymond Chandler cribbed the ending of Double Indemnity nine years later from The Murder Man, since both show a dying killer record his final confession on a dictation machine.)

I found the ending of The Murder Man quite jarring and not at all of a piece with what had come before, while the ending of The Mystery Man seemed all too clichéd, too much of the stuff of other movies rather than of life, but Robert Armstrong is good in the lead role of the reporter and Maxine Doyle quite authoritative as the girl (even though my husband Charles joked that this hour-long movie was already well into its second reel when its writers finally acknowledged the existence of the female half of the human race). This film’s first half is quite frank about the Depression and what it had done to people, and in particular what lack of money had done to their sense of self-worth; later it abandons that quasi-realistic portrayal of economic struggle but it still works surprisingly well even though McCarey’s direction is flat and the story gets almost none of the film noir atmospherics it seems to cry out for – but then this was 1935, not 1945, and the lesser McCarey and his cinematographer, Harry Neumann, did the best they could with what they had.