Murder in the Music Hall (Republic, 1946)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at 10 I ran Charles a 90-minute video off YouTube of a 1946 film called Murder in the Music Hall, hosted by Randall Schaefer. I had assumed from the title and the relatively long length that it was a British production; instead it was a vehicle from U.S.-based Republic Pictures for their ice-skating star Vera Hruba Ralston. She was born in Prague on July 12, 1923 and competed as a figure skater in the 1936 Winter Olympics in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany. Though she didn’t win the gold medal – Sonja Henie of Norway did, winning her third consecutive Olympic gold and earning herself a contract with a major studio, 20th Century-Fox – Ralston fit the Nordic ideal of the Nazis well enough that Adolf Hitler asked her, “Would you be willing to skate for the swastika?” Ralston answered, “I’d be willing to skate on the swastika,” and shortly after insulting Der Führer she got the hell out of Germany and Europe altogether. She arrived in the U.S. in 1941 and, as Vera Hruba (her original Czech name) made two films with the Ice Capades revue for Republic Studios. At the time Republic was owned and run by Herbert J. Yates, who had previously been in charge of the American Record Company before selling it to CBS in 1938.

Yates was ferociously anti-labor and he also fell in love with Vera, who after her two Ice Capades movies was given the last name “Ralston” and put in a relatively big-budget horror movie called The Lady and the Monster, an adaptation of Curt Siodmak’s Donovan’s Brain with Erich von Stroheim (as a mad scientist) and an aging Richard Arlen (as her leading man). She appeared with Stroheim again in her next film, Storm Over Lisbon, which comes off as a bizarre, misfired attempt to do an unofficial sequel to Casablanca, though the gap between Ingrid Bergman and Vera Hruba Ralston as actors or screen personalities is all too obvious. In broad outline, the story of Herbert Yates and Vera Ralslon may seem to resemble William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies, but at least Davies was a genuinely talented light comedienne who made some entertaining movies like The Patsy, Show People and Five and Ten. Ralston quite literally couldn’t act at all; as Harry and Michael Medved put it when they nominated her for Worst Actress of All Time in their book The Golden Turkey Awards (I’m quoting from memory here), “For someone so agile on skates, Miss Ralston appeared hopelessly clumsy on dry land.”

With her bovine stare, her facial immobility and her hopelessly incomprehensible accent (Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich were able to make their foreign accents sound sexy and alluring; Ralston just sounded annoying), Ralston walked through one vehicle after another, racking up 27 screen credits and driving Republic’s one bona fide star, John Wayne, out of the studio. He actually got a release from his Republic contract because he feared for his own future after Yates kept co-starring him with Ralston, and it also eventually got to be too much for Republic’s shareholders, who confronted Yates at a stockholders’ meeting and asked him point-blank why he was blowing so much of the studio’s money on his girlfriend (and, after 1952, his wife). Yet Ralston continued to star in film after film until 1958, when Yates sold the studio just as it was about to go bankrupt (the physical plant became CBS Television City) and the two lived in a relatively comfortable retirement until Yates’s death in 1966 (just as the success of the Batman TV series created a market for feature-film adaptations of the old Republic serials – but that’s another story).

Murder in the Music Hall (a misnomer because the titular murder doesn’t take place in the music hall, but in a penthouse apartment on top of the building that houses it) was Ralston’s seventh film, and it was an attempt to showcase what Ralston could do best – what would now be called ice dancing – mixed in with a film noir. The story was by Arnold Phillips and Maria Matray (I’ve never heard of him, but she was a figure in pre-Nazi German cinema and directors Douglas Sirk and Joseph Losey recalled having to deal with her when they wanted to remake German silent and early-sound classics from the Weimar era) and the script by Frances Hyland and Lászlo Görog (who would have a sole credit on one of the worst films of all time, 1956’s The Mole People), while the director is reliable Republic hack John English. The fllm opens with an elaborate skating routine that’s part of the show Lila Leighton (Vera Hruba Ralston) and her three friends perform at the titular music hall (which doesn’t seem to have any other name). Though Jack Marta is listed in the opening credits as director of photography, the ice-dancing sequences were photographed by the great John Alton, who five years later would get a similarly split credit on the 1951 Academy Award winner An American in Paris.

On An American in Paris, Alfred Gilks shot the rest of the movie but, after director Vincente Minnelli worked with Alton on the low-budget sequel to Father of the Bride, Father’s Little Dividend, he decided he wanted Alton to shoot the big ballet at the end based on George Gershwin’s tone poem of that title – and of course the big ballet is the only part of that film anybody remembers, and it earned both Alton and Gilks an Academy Award. In fact, when my husband Charles and I were watching Murder in the Music Hall, I found myself wondering if Alton had been involved in some of the rest as well – notably the heart-stoppingly beautiful film noir compositions – though Marta had a pretty major résumé of his own, starting with Raoul Walsh’s What Price Glory? in 1926 and extending to 1971, when he worked with Steven Spielberg on his first film, the TV-movie Duel (a horror piece in which Dennis Weaver played a motorist who finds himself being chased by a truck that seemingly has no driver) and with Tom Laughlin on The Trial of Billy Jack, The Master Gunfighter and the unreleased Billy Jack Goes to Washington.

Alas, Lila gets a note from an old flame of hers, Carl Lang (Edward Norris), who used to be the promoter of her ice show until he went to prison for criminal negligence five years before in the death of her skating partner Douglas. Five years earlier Douglas and Lila had been a couple off the ice as well, until he jilted her for her friend Diane (Julie Bishop) and then met his death from ammonia fumes from a gas factory near the theatre. Now Lang is ready to promote a new show and he demands that Lila star in it, and if she doesn’t he’ll tell the police that she actually murdered Douglas over her jealousy that he dumped her for Diane. Lila meets with Lang for half an hour and then leaves to return to the show, only when she realizes she left her purse in the apartment she and the show’s bandleader, Don Jordan (William Marshall, a relatively attractive man whom Randall Schaefer denounced as having no acting talent, which seemed to me to be unfair to him: he’s not bad, just mediocre, and he’d been a sideman in Fred Waring’s band before briefly leading a band of his own, though as things happen it’s easy enough to see how Fred MacMurray was able to parlay a career as a band musician into major stardom while Marshall was not), take off in the middle of the performance to retrieve it. (The participants in this show have a remarkable ability to bail on it for long periods of time; it’s hard to believe anybody in a real show could leave it for that long without being fired.).

When they enter the apartment they find that Carl Lang is dead, murdered by someone who grabbed an ornamental dagger from the wall, and for the rest of the film they race back and forth across New York City (where all this takes place) trying to find the murderer before the police, headed by Inspector Wilson (William Gargan, who seven years earlier had played much the same character in a better film, Joe May’s The House of Fear from 1939), can find them and arrest them. The chase across the city is interspersed by some pretty spectacular skating sequences – a woman named Fanchon (imdb.com gives no other name for her) was the choreographer and the dancers included Don Condon and Mary Bohland, Red McCarthy, Patti Phillippe, John Jolliffe and Henry Lie as the skaters. The cutting back and forth between the police investigation and the skating numbers gets to be tiresome after a while, though during the course of the investigation Lila and Don meet some interesting characters; including Rita Morgan (Nancy Kelly), wife of prominent newspaper columnist George Morgan (the marvelously dry character actor Jerome Cowan, who was never used to his full potential: in his most famous movie, as Miles Archer in the 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon, he’s killed off in the first reel), and the blind streed peddler who could confirm or totally blow out of the water Rita’s alibi. The script for Murder in the Music Hall seems just a bit “off,” with claracters doing things that don’t match up to any normal human behaviors (I particularly found myself infuriated by the scene in which first Don and then the police touch virtually every exposed surface of the murder apartment without regard for fingerprints),

Ironically, the same year Republic made Murder in the Music Hall, an even tackier studio, Monogram, made a strikingly similar movie called Suspense that attempted to bring together an ice-shating musical and a film noir, only it was a much better movie than this one, with characterizations that actually made sense, a vividly realized noir atmosphere and an actress playing the skating star, Belita, who could actually act. It helped that Belita was originally a British woman (her full name was Maria Belita Jepson-Turner) and therefore English was her native language. Suspense was directed by Frank Tuttle, whose best-known credit was probably the 1942 version of The Glass Key which cemented Alan Ladd’s rise to stardom, and it was written by Philip Yordan – bearing in mind my general-field theory of cinema that the quality of a movie is inversely proportional to its number of writers. Suspense has its flaws – notably the acting of Barry Sullilvan in the male lead (he presents the character as just a thug and, while the story works that way, it would have been a lot better and more insightful with an actor like Bogart, Garfield, Mitchum or Ladd who could have make him more sympathetic and given him more dimension), Suspense is a much better movie than Murder in the Music Hall (for my comments on Suspense view my moviemagg blog at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2020/11/suspense-king-brothers.html).