Haunted Honeymoon (British MGM, 1940)

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

The film Charles and I watched last night after The Last Airbender was about as different as you could imagine: Haunted Honeymoon, a 1940 production at the British studio of MGM, which had been founded three years earlier but pretty much expired after this film due to World War II. It was based on the last Dorothy Sayers mystery novel featuring her upper-class amateur sleuth detective Lord Peter Wimsey (Robert Montgomery – and yes, I find it rather bizarre that MGM at different points in its history should have regarded Montgomery as appropriate casting for both Lord Peter Wimsey and Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe) – or at least the last one she finished. Years after her death, a partial manuscript and extensive notes for another Wimsey story, Thrones, Dominations (which sounds more like a Game of Thrones episode title), were discovered among her effects, and her publisher hired another writer, Jill Paton Walsh, to complete it – though Sayers’ notes specified who the murderer would turn out to be so Walsh didn’t have to make that decision herself. The basis for this film was a Sayers novel called Busman’s Honeymoon, in which Wimsey and his girlfriend, mystery writer Harriet Vane (Constance Cummings) get married (the opening scene shows them poring over the wedding gifts) and try to have a honeymoon. As part of their nuptials they have decided to forswear any more involvements with crimes – she in making up and writing stories about them, he in solving them after the typically incompetent police in these stories fail to do so. To symbolize their determination not to get involved with crimes anymore, they’ve each given the other a bracelet with a charm of a pair of open handcuffs, symbolizing their release from the bondage of criminal involvement.

Of course,they don’t get off that easily: as his main wedding present for his new bride, Wimsey has gone off to Devon in the English countryside and bought the old house and estate where Harriet grew up., What he doesn’t realize – but we soon learn – is that the person he’s buying it from, Noakes (Roy Emerton), is a thoroughgoing rotter. He’s threatened to disinherit his niece, Aggie Twitterton (Joan Kemp-Welsh), over her affair with his handyman, Frank Crutchley (Robert Newton). He’s somehow been able to corrupt the local cop, Constable Tom Sellon (James Carney), over a debt of just 10 pounds. And, needless to say, he’s also been horrible to his servants, not only Crutchley but his long-suffering maid Mrs. Ruddle (Louise Hampton) and the rest of his household staff. Of course any hardened (or even not-so-hardened) fan of mysteries will get what Sayers is doing: she’s creating a central character so widely hated that when he’s killed during the story there’ll be an ample-sized pool of suspects to keep us guessing. Like most of the British MGM films, the studio sent one or two of their American stars to England to make it but filled the supporting characters with British actors, including Leslie Banks as Inspector Andrew Kirk of Scotland Yard (who, though the crime didn’t take place in London, is sent out anyway to take over the official investigation from the local police – are jurisdiction lines in Britain that much more fluid than they are here?) and a real surprise as the chimney sweep, William George Puffett: Frank Pettingell, who played Sir John Falstaff in the 1960 BBC-TV miniseries An Age of Kings, based on Shakespeare’s cycle of plays on British history from 1399 to 1485. (A few years ago An Age of Kings came out on DVD – I suspect at least partly due to the later international stardom of two names in the cast, Sean Connery and Judi Dench – and I got the chance to see them again, This time I found Pettingell way overacted and oppressive as Falstaff – but as I’ve written before in these pages, it is one of the tragedies of 20th century cultural history that the actor who would have been perfect for Falstaff, W. C. Fields, never got to play him.)

For the first 45 minutes of this 83-minute movie there’s a brief, ambiguous scene of Noakes bending over a console of some sort and turning on a radio – and then the scene cuts away and the next time we see him it’s several reels later and he’s lying dead in the house’s cellar. But Wimsey deduces that he was actually killed somewhere else and knocked down the stairs into the cellar by the blow from a blunt instrument which killed him. I had an interesting history with this movie – I first watched it with Charles in the early days of our relationship and about all I remembered was the typically elaborate mechanism by which the murder was committed, one of those preposterous gimmicks a lot of British mystery writers (especially women) were known for. Then I was working as an in-home caregiver for a woman who was a huge fan of mysteries in general and Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers in particular. She had been checking out of the public library DVD’s of all the TV miniseries the BBC had made of the Lord Peter Wimsey novels in the 1970’s and 1980’s, and one day she told me why the BBC hadn’t filmed Busman’s Honeymoon even though they’d done all the other novels in the series. I told her there had been this film of it made at MGM’s British studio and guessed that MGM or its successor companies had still held the rights so the BBC couldn’t include this story as part of their package. I got this DVD and lent it to her; she was upset at the title change – the film had been called Busman’s Honeymoon in Britain but MGM in the U.S. changed the title to Haunted Honeymoon because their sales department didn’t think American audiences would “get” Sayers’ pun on the slang phrase “busman’s holiday” (meaning an alleged vacation on which you end up doing the same things you do on your job). Charles hadn’t remembered seeing this film at all and the only part I remembered was, as I mentioned above, the elaborate way Noakes was murdered [spoiler alert!]: handyman Frank Crutchley, knowing that Noakes turned on his radio every night precisely at 9 p.m. to listen to a news program, rigged up a wire from the radio’s lid to the heavy ceiling lamp just over the radio so that when the lid was opened, it would release the ceiling lamp to swing out and deliver a death blow to whomever had opened the lid.

I had remembered how the murder was committed but not whodunit, and this time around I was a bit ticked off at Sayers’ classism to have the one person in the story who was actually trying to better himself – he was hoping for Noakes’ niece to get money from Noakes and use it to stake him to open a garage – be the killer. Still, after the fantasy pretensions of The Last Airbender, Haunted Honeymoon was a breath of fresh air: a movie about realistic people in at least outwardly realistic situations, and a film whose characters, however preposterously drawn, were at least not only physically conceivable but genuinely charming and amusing in that odd combination of murder mystery and screwball comedy, kicked off by the enormous success of the Dashiell Hammett-derived The Thin Man (1934), that generated a lot of the best crime films of the late 1930’s. (Ironically, it would be another Hammett-derived film, 1941’s The Maltese Falcon, that would drive the humor out of crime films and kick off what became known as film noir – and, as I noted above, Robert Montgomery would change with the times, playing noir detective Philip Marlowe in The Lady in the Lake just seven years after doing Lord Peter Wimsey here.) Haunted Honeymoon had a committee-written script – Sayers has a credit not only for the source novel but an intermediate play adaptation with Muriel St. Claire Byrne as her collaborator, and the script is credited to Monckton Hoffe, Harold Goldman and future Hitchcock collaborator Angus McPhail) – but it also had an unexpectedly interesting director, British-born Arthur Woods. He’d been making films since 1933 and, judging from their titles (his directorial debut was something called Spy 77), he seems to have been a thriller specialist. Judging from this film – and in particular the number of camera moves and trick shots he put into what could otherwise have been an awfully stage-bound piece – Woods was a potentially major talent whose career was cut short by World War II. Having worked as a stunt pilot in films involving flying, he volunteered for the Royal Air Force and was killed in 1944 on a British patrol mission against German air raids.