The Garden Murder Case (MGM, 1936)

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

Late last night my husband Charles and I watched a 1936 MGM “B” film (yes, I’ve mentioned several times in these pages that MGM studio head Louis B. Mayer threatened to fire anyone who referred to an MGM film as a “B” movie, but this one ran only an hour and three minutes and Lucien Hubbard, a low-budget specialist, was the producer) called The Garden Murder Case. It was based on one of the Philo Vance novels written by Willard Huntington Wright, though he signed them “S. S. Van Dine” in honor of the two things he was hoping to do more of if the books were successful (which they were; though all but forgotten today, when Van Dine was writing them Vance was considered the American Sherlock Holmes), eat (“Dine”) and travel (“S. S,”). It was directed by Edwin L. Marin, who’d previously tried his hand at a Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, for the short-lived Sono-Art World Wide Pictures in 1933; and his best-known credit was probably MGM’s 1938 version of A Christmas Carol, in which his Sherlock Holmes, Reginald Owen, was tapped to play Scrooge at the last minute after the originally set actor, Lionel Barrymore, developed such severe arthritis he lost the ability to walk and had to use a wheelchair in all his subsequent films. (Lionel Barrymore had become so identified with Scrooge on radio that he appeared in the film’s trailer.)

In some ways the screenwriter, Bertram Millhauser, was more interesting than the director; like Marin, he would work on films featuring Sherlock Holmes – he would write the last few episodes in the Universal Holmes series in the 1940’s, with Basil Rathbone (who had also played Philo Vance in a 1930 MGM film called The Bishop Murder Case) the ideal Sherlock Holmes. Indeed, Millhauser self-plagiarized the ending of this film for one of his Rathbone Holmes scripts, Sherlock Holmes and the Spider Woman, seven years later. The Garden Murder Case begins with a scene at a horse-race track (“played,” as usual in Hollywood films, by Santa Anita – Charles asked me later if I could think of any movie Hollywood ever made about horse racing that staged original footage for the racing scenes instead of using stock clips, and I suspect the most recent Seabiscuit film might have but that’s the only one I can think of) in which oen of the so-called “gentleman jockeys” who’s supposed to ride in the big steeplechase, Floyd Garden (Douglas Walton, who along with Gavin Gordon was one of the great Hollywood weaklings and usually played screaming queens) starts mumbling about how he’s going to ride in the big race and break his neck in a fall.

This duly happens, and among the suspects are self-made tycoon Edgar Lowe Hannle (Gene Lockhart); his niece, Zelia Graem (pronounced “Graham”) (Virginia Bruce, wasted as usual; she got the role of a lifetime in the 1934 Monogram version of Jane Eyre, in which she totally out-acted Joan Fontaine in the same role nine years later, but it’s a movie almost no one has seen and she almost never got a role that good from a major studio); a nurse with a dark past, Gladys Beeton (Benita Hume, Mrs. Ronald Colman); and hanger-on Woode (pronounced “Woody”) Swift (Kent Smith, for once not playing an architect as he did in Cat People and The Fountainhead). Philo Vance (Edmund Lowe) enters the action when he was a guest at the racing party, and he falls for Zelia Graem but they’re a singularly uninteresting couple. Vance deduces – wrongly, as it turns out – that a woman knocked off Edgar Lowe Hannle, who was shot with one of his own dueling pistols, on the ground that the pistol was pulled down from the gun collection on Hannle’s wall and a male killer would have gone for the revolver, while a woman would have just grabbed the first gun they saw. Midway through the movie Gladys Beeton announces that she knows who the murderer is, but of course she herself is killed before she can tell anybody: she falls off the top deck of a double-decker bus after having said in the same hypnotized voice as Floyd Garden earlier, “I’m going out to get killed.”

Ultimately Vance realizes that the actual killer is Major Fenwicke-Ralston (H. B. Warner, whose revelation as the villain must have freaked out 1936 audiences because his most famous role was as Jesus Christ in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1927 biopic The King of Kings), or at least someone posing as Major Fenwicke-Ralston. In the scene Millhauser self-plagiarized for Sherlock Holmes and the Spider Woman the pretend “major” attempts to hypnotize Philo Vance and get him to walk off the roof of a tall building, falling to his death. Only Vance has successfully resisted Fenwicke-Ralston’s hypnotic spell – the only explanation we get is when Vance says, “Some people just aren’t so easily hypnotized.” Vance tells the usual dumb cop, Sergeant Heath (Nat Pendleton), that he had to pretend to be hypnotized to worm a confession out of Fenwicke-Ralston since he did such a good job of covering his tracks that without a confession the police and prosecutors could never have convicted him.

The Garden Murder Case is a typical Vance story (though I must confess I’ve never read one of the “Van Dine” Vance novels, and I have no idea whether that ending was Van Dine’s idea or Millhauser’s), dramatically preposterous but still fun. In his book The Detective in Film William K. Everson was unimpressed, to say tle least, by Edmund Lowe; he wrote that apart from his star-making turn opposite Victor McLaglen in the 1926 Fox film What Price Glory?, “Lowe never seemed to attempt an in-depth characterization, Whether he was playing Chandu the Magician or Philo Vance, he was always exactly the same” the veneer was polished but there was no subtlety or differentiation of roles beneath it.” (The main thing I remember about the 1932 Fox film Chandu the Magician, in which Lowe played Chandu and Bela Lugosi the villain Roxor, is how totally Lugosi out-acted him when he got to play Chandu himself in the 1934 serial The Return of Chandu; it was one of the rare occasions in which Lugosi got to play a role with real emotion and depth, and he soared to the challenge!) It also doesn’t help that so many of the young men in it, including Lowe as Vance, are wearing those annoying “roo” moustaches, and as a result it got hard to tell who was who.

The Garden Murder Case is a pleasant time-filler but it is not a great movie, and one can understand why William Powell (whom Everson thought was as pre-eminent among Vances as I think Basil Rathbone is among Sherlock Holmeses) refused to play Vance again after his marvelous turn in MGM’s 1934 adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's The Thon Man. His attitude seems to have been, “After I’ve played a great detective character like Nick Charles, why would I want to go back to that Vance crap?”