The Greene Murder Case (Paramount, 1929)

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

Afterwards I got on YouTube and showed my husband Charles and I an early talkie from six years before An Inn in Tokyo: The Greene Murder Case, second of the four films William Powell made as fictional detective Philo Vance. Philo Vance was the creation of Willard Huntington Wright, who signed the Vance novels “S.S. Van Dine” because he was hoping to make so much money off them he could do more of two things he liked to do: eat (“Dine”) and travel (“S.S."). All the Vance books were called The ______ Murder Case, where the blank was filled with a word of exactly six letters. (The only exception was one in which he wrote in George Burns and Gracie Allen as characters; which he originally called The Gracie Murder Case but later added her full name, The Gracie Allen Murder Case. Oddly, when Paramount filmed that in 1939, they deleted George Burns from the story.)

The Greene Murder Case takes place on New Year’s Eve, 1929 and deals with a family named Greene who lived together in a Manhattan mansion even though they can’t stand each other. Dad Greene is dead when the story begins but he left behind a widow, Tobias Greene (Gertrude Norman), who’s bedridden, and four kids: daughters Sibelia (Florence Eldridge, Mrs. Fredric March and a highly accomplished actor in her own right even though after this film and another 1929 title, The Divorcée, she rarely appeared in films unless they also starred her husband) and Ada (the young and still dark-haired Jean Arthur) and sons Chester (Lowell Drew) and Rex (Morgan Farley). There’s also the usual sinister butler, Sproot (Brandon Hurst), and a cook named Gertrude Manheim (Augusta Burmeister) who’s also a widow. A passing reference to Ada as being “not of our blood” leads to a revelation late in the movie that Ada is actually the daughter of Manheim and her late husband, who died in an asylum for the criminally insane. The various Greenes are forced into this ongoing proximity because of a clause in daddy’s will that required them to live together for 10 years, of which five have already elapsed, and it’s not until the end of 1934 that the estate will be distributed among the surviving Greenes and they can go their separate ways at last.

Sibelia Greene would like to be out of the house because she has a boyfriend, Dr. Arthur Von Blon (Ullrich Haupt, the villain in John Barrymore’s 1928 film Tempest, written by an uncredited Erich von Stroheim), and for much of the film I’d have assumed he’d be the killer except that William K. Everson’s book The Detective in Film had given away the ending as making someone else the guilty party. Philo Vance gets involved in the case at the behest of his friends in official law enforcement, District Attorney John F. X. Markham (E. E. Calvert) and police sergeant Ernest Heath (Eugene Pallette, acting with an unusual degree of authority for him; he’s actually more than the usual comic-relief cop common in this era of mystery filmmaking). The case heats up when Chester Greene gets shot and killed at the stroke of midnight, and three minutes later Ada Greene is also shot, though she survives. At first Heath is convinced that the two interrupted a burglary in progress and the mystery burglar shot both of them, but Vance is convinced by the three-minute gap between shots that the killer was someone the victim knew. (There were plenty of other reasons to reject the idea that the shootings were the result of a burglary attempt gone wrong, including the fact that none of the Greenes’ property is missing, including the silver flatware the putative burglar was after, and there’s no sign of a forcible break-in.) Later Rex gets shot and killed with his own gun, the result of a booby-trap set for him by the actual killer, who stole Rex’s gun in order to set the trap and rigged it so it would fire automatically as soon as a particular closet door was opened.

The Greene Murder Case was directed by Frank Tuttle, an occasionally stylish filmmaker who begins this movie with a powerful tracking shot of a river with ice floes on its surface (this is late December and early January, after all) in which you expect to see either Eliza running for her freedom or Lillian Gish in danger of a watery grave in D. W. Griffith’s Way Down East, and this “plants”: a scene towards the end in which Ada Greene, true name Ada Markham, turns out to be the killer. Her motive was to knock off the blood Greenes so she could inherit the fortune – apparently Daddy Greene had adopted her, though it isn’t spelled out in the screenplay by Louise Long (scenario) and Bartlett Cormack (dialogue) based on the “Van Dine” novel – and we’re even asked to believe that she’s inherited her father’s criminal insanity. In the end she tries to push her sister Sibella off the roof of the mansion into the ice-filled river, but she slips, loses her balance and falls herself. The Greene Murder Case is sloppily directed – one wouldn’t think that within two years of this Frank Tuttle would make a highly stylish film, This Is the Night (notable as Cary Grant’s first feature) – and the director wouldn’t be the only one associated with this film who would go on to biggers and betters.

William Powell would be lured from Paramount to Warner Bros. in 1932, along with Ruth Chatterton and Kay Francis, though he wouldn’t be successful there and it took MGM to salvage his career with the 1934 detective hit The Thin Man. In 1935 MGM actually bought a Philo Vance novel for Powell and Myrna Loy to co-star in as a follow-up to The Thin Man, but Powell turned it down on the ground that having played a great detective character, Nick Charles, he didn’t want to go back to being the annoying Philo Vance again. (Instead MGM made the film, The Casino Murder Case, with Paul Lukas and Rosalind Russell in the parts intended for Powell and Loy – and Lukas was hopelessly miscast as Vance.) Jean Arthur went on to play hard-bitten but ultimately attractive leading ladies in socially-aware romantic comedies for Frank Capra and George Stevens. The Greene Murder Case is an all-too-typical example of the deadly-dull mystery films that got churned out by the yard at the dawn of the sound era – and though Charles noted tnat at least this one didn’t feature … all the … damnable … pauses between the actors hearing their cue line and delivering their own, the dialogue wasn’t particularly compelling and didn’t flow trippingly out of the actors’ mouths either (despite Bartlett Cormack having already written a hit stage play, The Racket; in 1936 he’d collaborate with Fritz Lang on the magnificent script for Lang’s first U.S. film, Fury). The film also suffers from the lack of background music – the convention in the early days was you could have either music or dialogue on your soundtrack, but not both at the same time – and the absence of the musical underscoring we’re used to makes a lot of early talkies seem almost interminably dull.