The Kennel Murder Case (Warner Bros., 1933)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Tuesday, October 6) my husband Charles and I finally caught up with the film I’d thought I’d be watching the night before: The Kennel Murder Case, the fourth and last film William Powell made playing the celebrated fictional sleuth Philo Vance. Vance was the creation of art critic Willard Huntington Wright, who’d made his reputation in the early 20th century as an uncompromising advocate of modern art. He was also a strong Germanophile whose support for Germany during World War I cost him most of his newspaper jobs. Wright became a cocaine addict, and in 1923 while in rehab (or what passed for rehab in the 1920’s) he began reading a large amount of detective and crime fiction. Deciding he could do better than most of the authors he was reading, he created the character of Philo Vance and debuted him in The Benson Murder Case (1926). To protect his reputation as a serious literary critic, Wright decided to sign his detective novels with a pseudonym, and he chose “S.S. Van Dine” because he hoped to make a lot of money from the Vance novels which he wanted to spend on the two things that meant the most to him, eating (“Dine”) and travel (“S.S.”). Wright published the first three Vance stories, The “Canary” Murder Case, The Greene Murder Case, and The Benson Murder Case, in one book and Paramount bought the film rights to all three at once. (Wright titled all the Vance novels the same way: The ______ Murder Case, with the second word a noun of exactly six letters.) They cast William Powell as Vance and made all three movies in 1929 and 1930. Then in 1932 Warner Bros. did a major contract raid on Paramount’s roster and lured Powell, Ruth Chatterton, and Kay Francis to their studio, and as part of the fallout from this decided not only to make their own Philo Vance movie but to have Powell repeat the role. Indeed, both the credits of The Kennel Murder Case and the original ads for the film made a big deal of this: they announced, “William Powell Returns as Philo Vance.” I first heard of The Kennel Murder Case when I read the late William K. Everson’s book The Detective in Film (1972); he named it in a chapter as one of the three greatest detective movies ever made, along with The Maltese Falcon (1941) and an obscure British mystery called Green for Danger (1947). When I read that I’d already fallen in love with The Maltese Falcon but had never seen the other two, and when I finally caught up with The Kennel Murder Case I was sorely disappointed in it. I still am (as I was with Green for Danger, too).

The Kennel Murder Case deals with the killing of Archer Coe (Robert Barrat), a thoroughly despicable piece of work who has built up a major collection of Chinese ceramics with the uncredited aid of his Chinese cook and manservant, Liang (James Lee in a marvelously understated performance that’s one of the best things in the film). Coe has cut a deal with Eduardo Grassi (Jack La Rue) to sell his collection to a museum in Grassi’s native Italy, but every time Grassi thinks he’s successfully negotiated the deal Archer reneges on it. (Charles and I have often complained about alleged murder mysteries with too few suspects, but Wright a.k.a. “Van Dine” erred in the other direction, giving us too many people with motives for murdering the victim and making it hard to keep track of them all.) Archer lives in a large house with his brother, Brisbane Coe (Frank Conroy), and controls the finances of his niece, Hilda Lake (Mary Astor – so two of the three films on Everson’s all-time greatest detective movies list featured her!). He’s also fiercely jealous of any man with whom Hilda gets romantically involved, including his secretary, Raymond Wrede (Ralph Morgan) and the one she’s really in love with, Sir Thomas MacDonald (Paul Cavanagh), whom she intends to marry and move with him to his native England. (In a modern movie we’d assume that he had an incestuous crush on her, but that would have been too far for Hollywood to go even during the so-called “pre-Code” period of loose Production Code enforcement between 1930 and 1934. His stated motive is merely to protect her money from fortune-hunters.) Philo Vance enters the story when he and Coe have rival entries in a dog show sponsored by the Long Island Kennel Club, though both their dogs lose to a rival entered by the Coes’ neighbor, Doris Delafield (Helen Vinson). Coe is found dead in classic “locked-room mystery” fashion, in his bedroom with the door bolted shut from inside. The various regular supporting characters from Wright’s novels – district attorney Markham (Robert Wade); police sergeant Heath (Eugene Pallette, billed third and ready to beat the shit out of the most obvious suspect to get a confession out of him, an all too common practice among real police officers at the time); and quirky coroner Dr. Doremus (Étienne Girardot), who’s forever complaining that he’s called on to examine a body just when he’s settling down to a nice meal – show up even though the police initially are convinced Coe’s death was a suicide, especially since the body was found with a revolver in his hand.

In a seemingly interminable series of deductions, involving a book Brisbane Coe was reading called Unsolved Murders and two fragments from a particularly valuable vase in Coe’s collection until it was mysteriously broken, Vance decides that two separate people tried to kill Archer Coe that night. One was his brother Brisbane, who elaborately faked an alibi that he was allegedly on his way to Chicago on a particular train the night of the murder and returned to kill Archer, not realizing that Archer had already been fatally wounded by someone else – though it was he who fired the revolver into Archer’s body and used an elaborate mechanism, copied from a case in Unsolved Murders, involving darning thread, a bent needle, and a sliding lock to make it appear that the room where Archer’s body was found was locked from the inside. The other was [spoiler alert!] Raymond Wrede, who’d got into an argument with Archer Coe over his desire to marry Hilda Lake and clubbed him with a fireplace poker, then stabbed him with a rare Chinese dagger whose silken handle wouldn’t register any fingerprints. Unfortunately, as he was trying to dispose of the dagger, he did so by dropping it into the ultra-rare vase (ya remember the vase?), shattering it in the process. (There’s a continuity glitch in which the first time we see the broken vase, the bottom two-thirds of it are still intact, but later we see it as a whole pile of fragments.) Wrede also killed Brisbane Coe with the same dagger (there’s a great scene in which Vance has deduced that Brisbane’s suit is in a particular closet – and when the door is opened the suit is there, all right, but so is Brisbane’s dead body) and tried to stab Sir Thomas MacDonald, though unlike the Coe brothers MacDonald survived the attack and he and Hilda pair up at the end. Vance reveals all this in a climactic scene involving two ultra-detailed models of both the Coes’ home and the apartment building next door where Doris Delafield lived (and Charles wondered how Vance and whoever assisted him were able to construct such detailed models of the two buildings in just the two days since Archer Coe’s murder). Realizing that the evidence against Wrede isn’t strong enough for a conviction, Vance entraps him by sic’ing Doris’s prize-winning Doberman pinscher (whom Wrede had clubbed during one of his attacks on the Coes) on him until he confesses and the police arrest him.

The Kennel Murder Case was adapted by Robert Presnell, Sr. (who also produced) from “Van Dine”’s novel, with Robert N. Lee and Peter Milne credited with the actual screenplay. The director was Michael Curtiz, who actually turned in an excellent job, keeping the camera in almost constant motion and thereby enlivening what could otherwise have been a static and ponderous movie (as the three Powell Vances for Paramount, made during the problematic early years of the silent-to-sound transition, had been). But The Kennel Murder Case is otherwise an annoying movie, with Philo Vance an uninteresting and overbearing character who wears out his welcome pretty early on. The Kennel Murder Case was a box-office disappointment and one of the films that led to Warner Bros. dropping William Powell from their contract list after only a year. Powell’s agent was able to parlay a nibble of interest in him from Columbia Pictures and get the biggest and most prestigious studio of all, MGM, to sign him. MGM gave him back-to-back blockbuster hits, Manhattan Melodrama and The Thin Man (both 1934), which not only restored Powell’s career but sent him into superstar orbit. MGM then had the idea of reuniting Powell and Myrna Loy from The Thin Man in another Philo Vance story, The Casino Murder Case (1935). But Powell, who’d long disliked the character of Vance (when he was married to Carole Lombard she would needle him by nicknaming him “Philo”), told his bosses at MGM that now that he’d played a great detective character like Nick Charles in The Thin Man he was no longer interested in playing Philo Vance again. MGM finally made The Casino Murder Case with an outrageously miscast Paul Lukas as Vance and Rosalind Russell (in her fifth film) in the part originally intended for Loy. (Russell had made her film debut in the 1934 movie Evelyn Prentice, ironically another vehicle for William Powell and Myrna Loy. Later Evelyn Prentice was remade as an MGM “B” in 1939 called Stronger Than Desire with Walter Pidgeon in Powell’s role, almost three decades before Pidgeon once again remade a William Powell role as Florenz Ziegfeld in Funny Girl.) Frankly, I’d have liked The Kennel Murder Case better if it had ended like The Maltese Falcon did, with Mary Astor’s character as the murderer!