The Canary Murder Case (Paramount, 1929)

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

The movie my husband Charles and I watched last night was The Canaryt Murder Case, the first time one of Willard Huntington Wright’s Philo Vance novels was filmed (though since the dialogue references the second, The Greene Murder Case, I assume that Wright, who concocted the pseudonym “S.S. Van Dine” for the Vance novels because he was hoping to make enough money off them to indulge his passions for eating, “Dine,” and travel, “S.S.,” had written The Greene Murder Case before The Canary Murder Case). Actually, according to the Wikipedia page on Philo Vance, the original sequence of the 12 novels “Van Dine” lived to write before his death in 1939 was:

The Benson Murder Case (1926)
The Canary Murder Case (1927)
The Greene Murder Case (1928)
The Bishop Murder Case (1929)
The Scarab Murder Case (1930)
The Kennel Murder Case (1933)
The Dragon Murder Case (1933)
The Casino Murder Case (1934)
The Garden Murder Case (1935)
The Kidnap Murder Case (1936)
The Gracie Allen Murder Case (1938)
The Winter Murder Case (1939)

The first three novels were actually published together as a trilogy of Vance novellas before “Van Dine” reworked and lengthened them for republication as separate books (which would explain the otherwise confusing cross-references). Paramount seems to have bought the film rights as a group, which they filmed between 1928 and 1930 with William Powell as Vance, Powell certainly fit the physical description of Vance “Van Dine” had written: “He was unusually good-looking, although his mouth was ascetic and cruel … there was a slightly derisive hauteur in the lift of his eyebrows. … His forehead was full and sloping — it was the artist's, rather than the scholar's, brow. His cold grey eyes were widely spaced. His nose was straight and slender, and his chin narrow but prominent, with an unusually deep cleft. … Vance was slightly under six feet, graceful, and giving the impression of sinewy strength and nervous endurance.” He was also the right screen “type” to play a debonair detective – though once he played Nick Charles in MGM’s 1934 adaptation of Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man he never wanted to play Philo Vance again. (During his marriage to Carole Lombard, she called him “Philo” because she knew how much he detested the part; it was her way of needling him the way Lauren Bacall would needle Humphrey Bogart a decade later.)

I first heard of these movies in William K. Everson’s Citadel Press book The Detective in Film (1972), and his comments on the Powell Vance films in general and The Canary Murder Case in particular. He mentioned that the movie, a whodunit about the murder of blackmailing nightclub entertainer Louise Brooks (whose character is billed as just “The Canary” – in quotes – in the opening credits even though she has a name, Anne O’Dell, in the actual film), was originally done as a silent film by director Malcolm St. Clair, who’s got a bad reputation because his most famous films were the last four of Laurel and Hardy’s six films for 20th Century-Fox in the early 1940’s (the movies Laurel and Hardy buffs, including Stan Laurel himself, love to hate), but he was reportedly a genuinely talented director with a sophisticated sensibility. The silent version was ready for release in 1928 when Paramount’s executives decided that with the rapid takeover of sound films, a silent movie – especially a detective mystery, a genre built on talk – was no longer a commercially viable proposition. So they hired Frank Tuttle to reshoot virtually all of the movie,though ST. Clair received sole credit. The only silent sequences left were Louise Brooks’ opening number, in which she dances and swings in a trapeze, the second murder scene, and a sequence towards the end representing an auto accident (more on that later), and in the meantime Louise Brooks had gone off to Germany to film Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl for director G. W. Pabst.

So they hired Margaret Livingston to dub Brooks’ voice over the silent footage of her, and though Everson criticjzed the choice, calling Livingston “a good actress whose voice, however, was hard and brittle, just the opposite of the musical voice that one knew had to go with that exquisite Brooks face,” I thought the fusion of Brooks’ face and Livingston’s hard-edged voice worked rather well. Both women had made their most famous films as “bad girls” – Brooks as Lulu in Pandora’s Box and Livingston in Friedrich Murnau’s Sunrise as the city woman who seduces George O’Brien away from “good girl” Janet Gaynor and nearly gets him to kill her – and the combination of Brooks’ enigmatic face and Livingston’s raspy snarl works well as she makes a series of telephone calls to her various sugar daddies, threatening to expose their secrets if they don’t come up with major amounts of cash to pay her off. Among her “pigeons” are Dr. Ambrose Lindquist (the marvelous silent-era villain Gustav von Seyffertitz), moralist John Cleaver (Lawrence Grant) – a character obviously based on the Reverend Davidson in W. Somerset Maugham’s Rain – Louis Mannix (Louis John Bartels) – who is so scared of his wife finding out what he’s been up to with Alice he freaks out when she calls him at home – and Anne’s slimeball ex-husband Tony Skeel (Ned Sparks – a surprising actor to encounter in a part like this).

Anne is demanding money in order to fund her upcoming marriage to Jimmie Spottswoode (James Hall), who embezzled money from his father Charles Spottswoode’s (Charles Lane) bank to lavish on Anne. Dad is determined to break up the relationship and histead get his son to marry “good girl” Alice LaFosse (Jean Arthur, who would turn up in the next Vance film, The Greene Murder Case, as a murderess). Alas, Brooks’ character is murdered 20 minutes into this 75-minute movie and the rest of it consists of Philo Vance’s increasingly preposterous schemes to figure out who killed her. He sets up a poker game in the police station, telling the disbelieving representatives of official law enforcement – police sergeant Ernest Heath (Eugene Pallette) and district attorney John F. X. Markham (E. H. Calvert) – that he can tell which man committed the crime by how they play poker. Along the way Tony Skeel calls the police and says he knows who killed Anne – he was hiding in her closet when the murder took place – but like the heroine’s Black best friend in a Lifetime movie, he gets killed himself befure he can reveal the secret. (There are actually two Black people in The Canary Murder Case, both working the desk at tne hotel where “The Canary” lives, but one of them has a really bad stutter and both are examples of the racist stereotypes typical of the time.)

From the poker game Vance has concluded that [spoiler alert!] Charles Spottswoode is the killer of both “The Canary” and keel, and in order to conceal that fact and make Vance himself his alibi, he worked out a bizarre scheme in which he actually made it seem like “The Canary” was still alive even after he killed her. He made a phonograph record of a high-pitched falsetto scream to make it seem as if “The Canary” were in the process of being murdered when in fact she was already dead, and lit a cigarette and put it in the corpse’s hand to make it look lilke she was alive, well and smoking. This reminded Charles of the similarly elaborate steps taken by the killers on the TV series Columbo to conceal their crimes – which in turn remind me of Raymond Chandler’s remark that any actual homicide detective would tell you that the easiest murders to solve were the ones in which the killer got fancy with the cover-up, and the hardest were the ones in which the killer and victim were best buddies until seconds before one murdered the other. There’s what on iimdb.com would call a “revealing mistake” in the sequence where Spottswoode, Sr.’s elaborate plot is demonstrated – after Spottswoode, Sr. was already killed in a car accident on his way back to New York City and Vance has to figure out howdunit even though he already knows whodunit, because Jimmie Spottswoode has already confessed to the murders to shield his dad and Vance has to prove Spottswoode, Sr. committed the killings in order to exonerate Spottswoode, Jr. The “revealing mistake” is that the record is supposed to have been custom-made but it has an ordinarily Victrola record label.

The Canary Murder Case is actually a much better movie than The Greene Murder Case – at least it takes place in more than one location, and I suspect that though almost none of Malcolm St. Clair’s footage was used (one scene that was almost certainly taken from the silent version, along with Louise Brooks’ opening number and the car accident, was the murder of Tony Skeel, shot by cinematographer Harry Fischbeck in the sort of half-lit chiaroscuro that in the 1920’s would have been called “the German style” and two decades later would be known as film noir), enough of the spirit of his sensibility survived that the film is a quite remarkable movie with almost none of the longueurs common to early talkies.