The Benson Murder Case (Paramount, 1930)

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

When my husband Charles came home from work we watched a YouTube video post of The Benson Murder Case, third and last in the series of movies made by Paramount based on the first three Philo Vance novels, with William Powell starring as Vance. As I’ve noted in previous posts about this series, “Philo Vance” was the brainchild of author Willard Huntington Wright, though he wrote the Vance stories under the pseudonym “S. S. Van Dine” because it combined the two things Wright hoped he’d get to do more of if the Vance novels were commercially successful (which they were), eat (“Dine”) and travel (“S.S.”). He published the first three Vance stories, The “Canary” Murder Case, The Greene Murder Case and The Benson Murder Case, in a simgle book before he lengthened each one and republished them as separate novels. The Benson Murder Case was actually the first one published, in 1926 – which is somewhat surprising because the plot as presented in the movie, adapted by The Racker playwright Bartlett Cormack from “Van Dine”’s book, makes the 1929 stock market crash an integral part of the story.

Indeed, the opening scene is a quite effectively dramatized montage depiction of the crash and the Great Depression it kicked off, complete with images of falling stock prices literally melting across the screen (anticipating by nine years the marvelous montage of melting ticker tape machines montage director Don Siegel concocted for the 1939 Warner Bros. gangster film The Roaring Twenties). The plot deals with stockbroker Anthony Benson (Richard Tucker – no, not the later opera singer), who sells out all his clients when they don’;t respond to his margin calls – a feature of stock buying in the 1920’s in which people were allowed to buy stocks with only a small payment up front and expected to come up with the rest of the price when the stocks rose in value. Then the market crashed, the stocks stopped rising and started falling, and the brokers who held the stocks on margin had the legal right to sell then for whatever they could get, while the customers were left literally with nothing.

Needless to say, since The Benson Murder Case is a mystery, this leaves a lot of people with the motive to murder Benson – which indeed happens on the pruverbial dark and stormy night to which Benson has inexplicably invited a lot of people who have every reason to kill him. Among them are Paula Banning (May Beatty); her gigolo, Adolph Mahler (Paul Lukas, who five years later played Philo Vance himself in MGM’s The Casino Murder Case, with the young Rosalind Russell as his co-star; MGM had originally planned the film for William Powell and Myrna Loy as a follow-up to the 1934 smash hit The Thin Man, only Powell served notice that now that he had played Dashiell Hammett’s Nick Charles, he never wanted to play Philo Vance again); Fanny Del Rey (the marvelous Natalie Moorhead), the woman Adolph is cheating on Paula with; and Harry Gray (William “Stage” Boyd – he’s only “William Boyd” here because this was before the other William Boyd, the one who played Hopalong Cassidy, got fired by mistake for violating the morals clause in his contract; he was a victim of mistaken identity and suffered for the antics of this William Boyd, so he sued ahd won a settlement that,m among other things, required the bad William Boyd to bill himself as “William ‘Stage’ Boyd” in all his subsequent films, of which there was only one – a serial called The Lost City – before his drinking, drugging and womanizing caught up with him and led to his death).

The moment Harry Gray comes on, presents his credentials as a psychiatrist and tells Philo Vance that he can only solve murders in which the killer creates an elaborate ruse to cover the crime instead of just going in and killing the person without fuss, it became obvious that Gray would turn out to be Benson’s killer – and indeed he does. “Van Dine” actually anticipated Raymond Chandler’s criticism of elaborate mystery stories with complicated and implausible murder methods, and in oarticular the Vance novels as well as ones by Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers. Chandler said that any real homicide cop would tell you that the easiest murders to solve were the ones in which the killer tried an elaborate scheme to cover it up, and the hardest were the ones in which the killer and victim were best friends until moments before one killed the other. Alas, Gray not only kills Benson, he does not do so straightforwardly Instead he rigs an elaborate scheme to make Benson’s body fall down a flight of stairs in the house so he can have the murder discovered a few minutes after it took place, thus giving himself time to set up an alibi among the guests. Vance figures out that Gray shot Benson and then rigged a piece of twine and set it on fire so when the twine pulled past Benson’s body, it would release it so it would fall down the stairs the way Gray wanted it to instead of when Gray actually killed him, and he used a firecracker to simulate the sound of a bullet to make it seem like the shot was fired just before the body fell down, when really Gray had equipped a silencer-equipped derringer to commit the murder minutes before the body fell.

Despite the ludicrous nature of the murder mechanism, The Benson Murder Case is actually a quite good thriller, creatively directed by Frank Tuttle (who had also done the sound version of The Canary Murder Case – which had originally been shot as a silent by Malcolm St. Clair, only by the time St. Clair had finished it the bottom had dropped out of the market for silent films – and The Greene Murder Case), who used quite a few oblique camera angles and proto-noir half-lit shots to enliven what otherwise could have been a dull and talky film. It’s also nicely acted, though Paul Lukas seems stuck up as usual and May Beatty has just one good moment, when she watches Natalie Moorhead’s pursuit of available male affections in all directions and recalls how in her younger years she had the looks to do that as well. But the duel of wits between William Powell and William “Stage” Boyd is nicely played, and the movie as a whole is almost as good as The Canary Murder Case and considerably better than the deadly-dull The Greene Murder Case – indeed, there are sequences here that anticipate Tuttle’s later films noir, including the marvelous and underrated 1946 Monogram film Suspense.