by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2015 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
After that unusually interesting film it was back to the
archive.org salt mines again for The Shadow Laughs, a 1933 indie made in New York by something called
“Trojan Pictures” and written and directed by Reefer Madness screenwriter Arthur Hoerl, which we watched from one
of those annoying archive.org downloads whose uploader decided to shrink the
file size slightly by lopping off the opening credits. The film was described
by imdb.com as, “The police investigate a bank robbery, and when they don’t
seem to be making much headway, a newspaper reporter decides to investigate it
on his own.” That’s sort of what
seems to be going on; in the opening scene two armed robbers do indeed invade a
bank, but when they leave it again they have a hostage with them: a middle-aged
bank executive who had been embezzling to get money to feed his gambling
addiction. The robbers steal five $1,000 bills from the bank vault (in addition
to money in smaller and thereby easier to spend or fence denominations) and
murder their hostage. The cops in charge of the case are the relatively
competent Captain Morgan (Harry T. Morey) and Sgt. Owens (John F. Morrissey),
and Morgan’s idiot “comic-relief” assistant Clymer (Harry Short). The hero is
reporter Robin Dale (Hal Skelly, male lead in the 1929 Paramount musical The
Dance of Life, a.k.a. Burlesque — the title of the stage show it was based on — but
considerably less oppressive here even though Hoerl was obviously having him channel Lee Tracy), who joins the police
investigation after bluffing his way onto the scene at the bank; originally
irascible Captain Morgan doesn’t want any part of a reporter at his crime scene, but he ultimately yields.
Eventually other people, including the embezzler’s killers, are themselves
found dead with $1,000 bills in their hands, and the police, Robin, his
girlfriend Ruth Hackett (Rose Hobart, the “nice” girl in the 1932 Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, here giving one of the
most authoritative and least stuck-up performances I’ve ever seen from her) and
the audience are all mystified about what’s going on and why. It all seems to
center around Ruth’s brother George (Robert Keith), gangster Jack Bradshaw
(Bram Nossen) with whom George naïvely got involved, Bradshaw’s henchman Tony
Rico (Cesar Romero, in his first film, appearing in only one scene but readily
recognizable even though he’s at one end of the frame and the brilliant camera
positioning by Hoerl and cinematographers Don Malkames, who as late as the late
1940’s was still the go-to guy
for producers shooting movies in New York, and Nick Rogalli keeps cutting off
the back half of his body in his side shots). Though there are no shadows,
there’s no laughter and this film has nothing to do with the famous pulp and
radio crimefighter The Shadow, The Shadow Laughs has some occasionally interesting shots in which
Hoerl takes his camera up and shoots down at some of the action from oblique
angles — unfortunately, those shots end up being strictly for display in an
otherwise awfully plainly directed film, one of those movies in which the
director seemed to give up on the actors and let them play scenes in whatever
way they wanted. After that dynamic opening robbery sequence, which seemed to
promise a much better movie than the one we got, The Shadow Laughs settles into a comfortably ponderous groove of
slackly paced so-called “thrills” and ends up as one of those movies I call
“less a whodunit than a whocareswhodunit.” In the end, if you cared, the culprit turns out to be Tennant (Walter
Fenner), a bank official who worked directly under the original embezzler and
saw the opportunity to steal from the bank himself and set up the embezzler for
what Tennant stole as well as his own ill-gotten gains — though how hiring
gangsters to knock off the embezzler, and then hiring other gangsters to knock
off the first gangsters, was going to do any good was a mystery locked in
Arthur Hoerl’s head. Or was he already doing his, um, first-hand research for Reefer
Madness and writing this one largely “under
the influence”?
