The Lady in the Morgue (Universal, 1938)

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

After my husband Charles came back from work last night, I ran us a movie on YouTube called The Lady in the Morgue, a 1938 production from Universal based on a series of novels published under the rubric “Crime Club.” Most, though not all, were by Jonathan Latimer and featured a wisecracking private detective named Bill Crane (Preston Foster, not usually one of my favorite actors, but his light and somewhat obnoxious approach fits the character) and his sidekick, Doc Williams (Frank Jenks). They work for an outfit called the Black Detective Agency, though like “Charlie” in the old Charlie’s Angels TV series, Mr. Black himself is almost invisible (the cast list names actor Gordon Hart as playing him, but I don’t recall seeing him). In this case they’re assigned to investigate an unknown young woman who’s lying in the morgue – at least until someone mysteriously absconds with her body. Al Horn (Byron Foulger), a man who worked at the morgue, gets killed in the process of the body being removed, and it’s a shame we lose him so early because, like Jerome Cowan as Sam Spade’s scapegrace partyer Miles Archer in the 1941 Maltese Falcon, he’s one of the most interesting characters in the film and played by one of its most talented actors. I also loved the morbid wisecracks Latimer and the film’s screenwriters, Eric Taylor and Robertson White, gave to Al Horn, including some bizarre jokes about young men giving their girlfriends the morgue’s phone number so Horn gets crank calls on a regular basis, often asking for “Mr. Stiff.” He explains that he tells them, “I’ve got plenty of Stiffs here, but none of them can come to the phone.”

Once Horn gets killed and the mystery body gets removed, the film becomes a rather odd succession of leads for Crane and Williams as they trace the missing body to a funeral home and a graveyard, the Edgemoor Cemetery. The director is Otis Garrett and the cinematographer is Stanley Cortez, who after years in the “B” salt mines “made his bones” in 1942 when Orson Welles hired him to shoot The Magnificent Ambersons, though when the film went over budget Welles sent a testy note to the head of production at RKO blaming the cost overruns on a “criminally slow cameraman.” The lady who disappeared from the morgue is originally thought to have committed suicide, but Crane soon deduces that she was murdered. The suspects include spoiled rich guy Chauncey Courtland (Gordon Elliott), who thinks the body is that of his sister and who hired the Black Detective Agency in the first place because he was worried about what the shock of having his sister die would do to their mom; and Sam Taylor (Roland Drew), a hot jazz trumpet player who was the mystery woman’s boyfriend. There are also a number of red herrings, including Kay Renshaw (Barbara Pepper), a hard-edged vamp who’s the mistress of a rich man who throws a penthouse party relatively late in the film but that doesn’t stop her from hitting on Crane and, it seems, virtually every other man in the cast; and Horn’s widow (Minerva Urecal), who upbraids Craini and out of nowhere accuses him of murdering her husband.

Eventually it turns out that Chauncey Courtland killed Al Horn, but only by accident after Horn threatened to expose him and his interest in the mystery woman. He also tries to take responsibility for the other murder, but it turns out that one was committed by Sam Taylor, who also killed his own wife because she wouldn’t give him a divorce so he could marry Courtland’s suster Kathryn (Patricia Ellis), who disguised herself by darkening her hair. Crane catches her out by bringing in a basin full of liquid that will dissolve her hair dye, and that leads her to acknowledge her true identity. As for “the lady in the morgue,” that turns out to be the real Mrs. Taylor, killed by her husband and faked to look like a suicide victim. The basic plot of The Lady in the Morgue would have made a pretty good basis for a film noir, but 1938 was a little early for that sort of thing (albeit some movies from the late 1920’s and early 1930’s had anticipated film noir, including William Wellman’s Safe in Hell and Charles Vidor’s Sensation Hunters) and the film as a whole is pitched uneasily between the comedy-mysteries that were in vogue during the late 1930’s (a trend began by The Thin Man and its sequelae) and the classic films noir that displaced them after the huge success of The Maltese Falcon. It’s also a mightily confusing movie; I was nodding off through much of it when I watched it with Charles, but I watched it a second time by myself this afternoon and it didn’t make much more sense than it had before!