The Westland Case (Universal, 1937)

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

After last night’s organ concert in Balboa Park my husband Charles and I returned home and watched The Westland Case, a 1937 thriller from Universal as part of their so-called “Crime Club” series. The “Crime Club” was a line of mystery novels published by a subsidiary of Doubleday, and they sold the rights to do a series based on the books on radio as well as on film. The Westland Case was the first film in the series and introduced the character of Bill Crane (Preston Foster), a hard-drinking private investigator mostly based in New York, who in this case is summoned to make a last-ditch attempt to exonerate attorney and financier Robert Westland (Theodore von Eltz) from impending execution for the murder of his wife. The person who summons him is his attorney. Charles Frazee (Clarence Wilson, whom I’m so used to seeing as corrupt villains in W. C. Fields films – including his marvelous turn as a crooked attorney in Tillie and Gus – it was weird to see him playing a sympathetic character!), and Crane shows up with his inevitable comic-relief sidekick, Doc Williams (Frank Jenks), in tow. It turns out Westland was romantically involved with another woman, Emily Lou Martin (Carol Hughes), and that’s why the police and prosecutors were so convinced Westland killed his wife, along with the $30,000 inheritance Westland was going to get from her. They’re also convinced because her body was found in a locked room to which – stop me if you’ve heard this before – only Mr. and Mrs. Westland had keys.

It turns out Mrs. Westland was shot with a Webley-Fosbery gun, a British make of which few were ever imported into the United States and they were no longer being manufactured by the time this story takes place. The moment I heard the name “Webley-Fosbery” as the brand name of a gun I flashed back to The Maltese Falcon, in which a Webley appears as the gun with which Sam Spade’s partner Miles Archer was shot, and as in The Last Warning – based on a novel by one of Dashiell Hammett’s Black Mask colleagues, Jonathan Latimer, called Headed for a Hearse – the salient plot point about the gun is precisely that it’s unusual and no longer being made. Alas, the gun with which Mr. Westland allegedly shot Mrs. Westland is missing, so there’s no way to do ballistics tests on it. Crane and Williams assemble the usual list of suspects, including Emily Lou Martin; Miss Brentino (Astrid Allwyn), the firm’s faithful secretary (and, it’s hinted, herself in unrequited love with Robert Westland and thereby presumably interested in eliminating the competition). Agatha Hogan (a classic “bad girl” played by Barbara Pepper in an unusually close imitation of Mae West – the same breathy sighs, the same come-hither attitude, the same no-nonsense demands that her would-be lovers come across with both money and sex whenever she demands them), and Westland’s business partners, Richard Bolston (George Meeker) and Mr. Woodbury (Russell Hicks).

On the last day before Westland is about to be executed for the crime he didn’t commit, Crane flies out to Peoria to interview the dealer from whom the real murderer bought the gun – he shows the man a photo and the man recognizes him as his customer, but we don’t get to see the photo so we’re kept in the dark for another reel or so. Then Crane announces that he’s going to get all the suspects in a room together at the prison (once again, does this sound familiar?), with a man from the governor’s office ready to call off the execution but only if Crane can produce the real murderer. Of course he can: the real killer is Richard Bolston, who not only was buying fraudulent bonds and substituting them for Westland’s legit ones, he was also secretly married to Emily Lou Martiin – though why he would have wanted her to vamp Westland and string him along is never quite explained. (Neither Jonathan Latimer nor screenwriter Robertson White were all that big on plot consistency.) In the end Robert Westland is exonerated and leaves prison with Miss Brentino on his arm, and Bill Crane’s hopes to get Agatha Hogan in the sack are foredoomed by Charles Frazee, who leaves with her on a flight to Miami. It’s not clear whether she’s interested in him or his bankroll, but Crane books a seat on the same flight just to keep an eye on them. The Last Warning is a competent thriller that could have been the framework for a great film noir if it had been made a decade or so later and with a writer more sensitive to the potentials of some of the characters – Emily Lou Martin could have been turned into a great femme fatale and more could have been done with Agatha Hogan as well. But noir-izing the story would have required making the detective character much more serious and eliminating the comic-relief sidekick altogether.