by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Two nights ago Charles and I screened Detective Kitty
O’Day, a 1944 Monogram comedy-thriller that
proved surprisingly good, even though William Beaudine’s name on the director
credit provoked groans from both of us (“Well, someone had to direct it!” said Charles). It begins in the
office of a company owned by Oliver Wentworth (Edward Earle) — well, actually it
begins on the street outside the Wentworth building, where Johnny Jones (Peter
Cookson), a Wentworth employee, is supposed to be delivering a briefcase
containing an incredibly valuable set of negotiable securities to Wentworth —
only he leaves it in the car and the cop who was driving has to tell him,
“Didn’t you forget something?” After that brief bit of byplay — which lets us know that this is basically going
to be a funny movie even though people are going to die in it — we meet Kitty
O’Day (Jean Parker) herself. She’s another Wentworth employee and she and
Johnny are dating, though their attempts to go out together are systematically
being frustrated by Wentworth continually calling her in to work for him at
night and having her over to his home — which has understandably led Johnny to
think that Wentworth has the hots for Our Kitty himself. It’s established that
Mr. and Mrs. Wentworth (she’s played by the marvelously named, and regrettably
under-used, Veda Ann Borg) had an unhappy marriage and that she had a boyfriend
on the side, Harry Downs (Douglas Fowley, reuniting him and Parker from the
cast of PRC’s marvelous vest-pocket thriller Lady in the Death House, made the same year), also that he was planning an
out-of-town trip and he told Kitty it was to Boston but his ticket was actually
to South America, where he was going to abscond with all those securities —
only someone came along and murdered him, and later on killed Harry Downs and
the Wentworths’ butler Charles (Olaf Hytten).
The identity of the murderer
wasn’t hard to dope out — once a portly-looking middle-aged man with a
moustache entered the action and was introduced as Wentworth’s attorney, Robert
Jeffers (Herbert Heyes), I guessed him if only because of Monogram’s casting
department’s penchant for casting portly middle-aged men with moustaches as
their killers — but the motive was:
it seems as if he, Downs and Charles were all part of a plot to steal those
securities, only Jeffers decided to knock off his co-conspirators so he
wouldn’t have to split the money with them. What’s most interesting about the
movie isn’t the murder plot but the sheer joyous ditziness of Parker’s title
character — it’s the sort of part one could readily imagine Lucille Ball
playing in full “Lucy Ricardo” cry — and the predictable but still entertaining
set-tos with the official law-enforcement officers, particularly Inspector
Clancy (Tim Ryan) and his sidekick, Joe Kasinski (Fred Roberts). Director
Beaudine, working from a script by Ryan and Victor Hammond, actually brings
some life to this one and doesn’t just plod along the way he usually did
(especially when he wasn’t working with a major star like Mary Pickford, Carole
Lombard or W. C. Fields); the film has real energy and drive, and is a lot of
fun to watch. Though the plot didn’t seem to leave room for a sequel, Monogram did make one, Adventures of Kitty O’Day, in 1945 — and that would be fun to watch!
