The Falcon and the Co-Eds (1943)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s “feature” was a 1943 entry in RKO’s “The Falcon” detective series featuring Tom Conway as amateur detective Tom Lawrence, The Falcon and the Co-Eds. Like the Abbott and Costello movie Here Come the Co-Eds from 1945, the title is a misnomer because the private college at which most of the action takes place, Bluecliff Seminary, is an all-girl school and therefore its female students are not co-eds. (Technically a “co-ed” is a woman student attending a gender-mixed college, though both RKO and Universal seemed to be using it as a generic term for female college students.) Directed by William Clemens – who’d also helmed the immediately previous Falcon film, The Falcon in Danger – The Falcon and the Co-Eds is surprisingly good. Clemens’ direction is atmospheric and the cinematography by J. Roy Hunt (who would later do some of RKO’s best films noir) is beautifully half-lit and creates a Gothic sensibility. I suspect there was some cross-pollination going on between the Falcon unit and Val Lewton’s contemporary horror productions at RKO, not only in personnel (Tom Conway was in four of Lewton’s RKO productions and his co-star here, Jean Brooks, was the actress who did the unforgettable walk with death at the end of Lewton’s vest-pocket masterpiece The Seventh Victim the same year, while Ardel Wray, who wrote the original story for The Falcon and the Co-Eds and co-wrote the screenplay with Gerald Geraghty, also worked for Lewton) but in the overall atmosphere and in particular Lewton’s less-is-more approach to scaring an audience.

The Falcon and the Co-Eds begins with Tom Lawrence encountering Jane Harris (Amelita Ward) outside Lawrence’s New York apartment building. She’s called him (actually she called the police first, but just to ask them for Lawrence’s phone number) to report the murder of kindly, popular old Professor Jamison at the all-women college she goes to, which is billed in its front-entrance sign as “Bluecliff Seminary.” (Charles pointed out that no one today would get the meaning of that word in this context, and I joked that calling this film The Falcon and the Seminarians would have been a box-office disaster.) Vicky steals Lawrence’s car and drives back to the college, where he has to take a bus to retrieve it and gets caught up in investigating Jamison’s untimely demise. The police and the coroner have ruled that he died of a heart attack, but Lawrence learns from the town’s undertaker, Goodwillie (Olin Howland), that he really died from an overdose of a sleeping drug and the school ordered it covered up because a suicide – let alone a murder – would have been bad P.R. Lawrence stumbles into a psychology class and has to pose as a visiting professor, where he delivers a gibberish lecture that made it sound like Wray and Geraghty had either read John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps or seen Alfred Hitchcock’s classic 1935 film of it (where the hero, Richard Hannay, has to impersonate a politician and give a public speech full of the usual platitudes).

The professor who hosted Lawrence’s sham lecture and roomed with the victim is Dr. Anatole Graelich (George Givot), and his foriegn accent and rather twitchy manner immediately marks him as a suspect in whatever happened to Professor Jamison. Later the school’s headmistress, Miss Keyes (Barbara Brown), is also murdered. Suspicion falls on Vicky Gaines (Jean Brooks), the school’s drama teacher (and Lawrence’s girlfriend de jour during his stay at the college), whom we see in several contexts, including rehearsing the Balcony Scene from Romeo and Juliet with one of the students as Juliet. (I was disappointed that we didn’t get to see the girl in FTM drag who would have been playing Romeo.) Along the way we also get to see three musical numbers, including a version of “Oh Dear, What Can the Matter Be” which starts out sounding like the glee club Carole Landis’s character was leading in The Powers Girl, but no sooner had I joked, “Where’s Benny Goodman and his band when we need them”?”, than the song took a hard turn into swing and the three Bluecliff girls who were singing it suddenly turn into Andrews Sisters wanna-bes. (The group is identified on the film’s imdb.com page – though not in the movie itself – as the “Three Ughs.” With a name like that, no wonder they didn’t go very far.) The other two numbers are sung as part of Bluecliff’s annual theatre festival: “I Get the Neck of the Chicken” (written by two illustrious songwriters, Jimmy McHugh and Frank Loesser) and “Can’t Take the Brooklyn Out of Me” (sung charmingly by Amelita Ward, whose character is supposed to be the daughter of a Broadway singing star), and they add to the fun of this interesting portmanteau movie that offers a little something for every conceivable audience member.

Like a lot of the Falcon movies, this one offers a solution to the mystery that seems pretty much beside the point – we learn whodunit but we don’t get much of an idea of the motive, so whydunit remains ambiguous – but the film does have a thrilling climax involving its most interesting character, Marguerita Serena (Rita Corday). Who looks like she walked over from Lewton’s unit, claims psychic powers and is the daughter of a famous composer who also died a mysterious death (ruled accidental but apparently really suicide). There’s a neat scene in which we get a traveling shot through Marguerita’s room and we hear a performance of one of her dad’s piano pieces; we get a shot of a piano but with nobody playing it, and my first thought was, “Does Marguerita have a reproducing piano?,” before the camera kept panning and ultimately discovers her hunched near one of the big cabinet phonographs popular then, listening to one of her dad’s records. The Falcon and the Co-Eds is one of the most genuinely entertaining and thrilling entries in this consistently interesting detective series, and it and The Falcon in Danger have considerably raised my estimation of the talents of William Clemens, who seemed to be zipping carelessly through the similar “B” detective scripts he’d got in his Warner Bros. days but brought more care and more visual interest to these RKO films.