by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The other feature on this archive.org download was Shadows
on the Stairs, a 1941 Warner Bros. “B” that
couldn’t have been more different stylistically from The Case of the
Frightened Lady — fast-moving instead of
slow; the director was D. Ross Lederman, who has one truly great film on his
résumé (Tim McCoy’s radical 1932 pro-Indian Western, End of the Trail — though clearly McCoy, who had got the inspiration
for the story while interviewing Native survivors of the battle at the Little
Big Horn for an oral history project in the 1920’s, was the auteur) but was otherwise pretty much an ordinary
“B” schlockmeister. It also had a
heavy-duty, virtually wall-to-wall musical score by the uncredited Bernhard
Kaun — this was one film that met Jack Warner’s demand that the music start
when it said “Warner Bros. Pictures Present” and not stop until it said “The
End” — whereas The Case of the Frightened Lady had virtually no music other than the piano music by
Jack Beaver that represented Marius Goring’s effusions — and it had the
rambunctious pacing and fast-paced acting style typical of Warners’ movies even
though the only really talented players in it were Frieda Inescort (as the
proprietess of the boarding house where virtually all of it took place — it was
based on a play called Murder on the Second Floor by Frank Vosper that premiered in 1929), Miles
Mander (who starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s first film as director, 1925’s The
Pleasure Garden, and played the hapless
Lewin Lockridge Grayle in Murder, My Sweet) as her mild-mannered chess-fancying husband, and Turhan Bey as an
(East) Indian named “Ram Singh” who was clearly up to no good, since he was
involved in a plot to smuggle half a million pounds in a large cedar box into
the building and who had a knife concealed in his bed post which he apparently
used to murder another tenant.
Needless to say, the people start dropping like
flies pretty quickly in this production, and the juvenile leads, aspiring playwright
Hugh Bromilow (Bruce Lester) and his girlfriend Sylvia (Heather Angel, another
person I’d heard of in the cast but who was showcased much better in most of her other films), get perplexed as
they attempt to solve the crime. Midway through the story there’s an insert of
a letter “Bromilow” has received from his producer that reveals to us he’s
actually the well-known
playwright Dwight Winston and he’s hiding out in the boarding house for reasons
his producer, the author of the letter, can’t fathom — and at the end the
killer turns out to be Mr. Armitage, Mander’s character, who knocked off fellow
boarding-house resident Joseph Reynolds (Paul Cavanagh) because Reynolds and
Mrs. Armitage were having an affair, then kept killing people for reasons Vosper
and writer Anthony Coldeway (I’ve seen his name spelled “Coldewey” on some of
his other credits) don’t stop the plot long enough to explain. Once again, both
Charles and I guessed whodunit — the murder required Mander to don drag as a
disguise, which would seem difficult given his moustache, though he explained
he merely wore a scarf over his face — but Charles correctly guessed that the
story would really end with a
metafictional Seven Keys to Baldpate-style
fillip in which the entire plot would be Dwight Winston’s latest story and all
the boarding-house characters that had been “killed” would turn up, very much
alive. It was nice that Warner
Bros. picked up this plot device after RKO dropped it in the later “official”
remakes of Baldpate, but Shadows
on the Stairs remains a rather dull
would-be thriller in which Miles Mander’s performance is the only one of any
real distinction. After that Charles ran a 2013 New Zealand short called The
Shoe Box which also featured sinister shadows on a staircase and a man
smuggling in a box to his room — only the box was shoebox-sized. For a while it
looked like Warren Philp, who starred, directed and wrote, was ripping off the
Coen brothers’ Barton Fink (and
Emlyn Williams’ play Night Must Fall
before it!) and the box contained a human head, but eventually it turns out to
be a knockoff of E.T. instead —
the box contains a tiny female (Joyce Cocchi) from another planet who just
wants to go home!
