Death from a Distance (Invincible, 1935)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The film I finally ended up running for my husband Charles and I last night (March 3) was Death from a Distance, a 1935 production from Invincible Pictures, a short-lived indie outfit whose output was considerably better technically than most indie cheapies because they had a distribution deal with Universal. As a result they were allowed to shoot on the Universal lot and have access to state-of-the-art equipment as well as standing sets. Invincible and its sister company Chesterfield had different studio heads (George Batcheller ran Chesterfield and Maury Cohen ran Invincible), but they relied on many of the same behind-the-camera personnel, including director Frank L. Strayer and cinematographer M. A. Andersen, both of whom are credited here. Strayer had one of the most frustrating careers for movie buffs because, after doing surprisingly compelling work in various genres in the early 1930’s for independent studios – including two of the finest indie horror films of the period, The Vampire Bat (1933) and Condemned to Live (1935) – upon the demise of Chesterfield and Invincible in 1935 Strauer signed with Columbia and accepted steady work as director of the Blondie series of films based on Chic Young’s domestic sitcom comic strip. Alas, whatever hopes I may have had for this film based on Sstrayer’s reputation and the handful of truly great films he made – including Fugitive Road, a Wor4ld War I drama starring Erich von Stroheim (and it’s clear from the film that Stroheim taught Strayer a few things about how to direct) – were pretty quickly dashed.

The most interesting aspect of Death from a Distance was its setting, the Griffith Park observatory and in particular its planetarium (which we’re told was one of only three extant in the U.S. – was that true?) and a giant reflecting telescope that features prominently in the climax. Otherwise, Death from a Distance is a whodunit that offers one object lesson after another in how not to do that particular genre. The story begins at a nighttime lecture at the planetarium that features Professor Ernst Einfeld (Lee Kohlmar), affecting one of the worst attempts at a Swedish accent on film (though the worst ever in my experience was George F. Marion’s as Greta Garbo’s father in Anna Christie, where it sounded even worse because he was up against Garbo’s real one, and ironically Marion is in this film, too). Admission is by invitation only, so when one of the audience members, Dr. Stone, is shot and killed during the lecture, the organizers close and lock the doors until the police arrive. Leading the investigation is police detective lieutenant Ted Mallory (Russell Hopton), and his love-hate relationship with Post-Telegraph reporter Kay Palmer (Lola Lane, three years before she got to play the same sort of role at a major studio, Warner Bros., in Torchy Blane in Panama) is by far the best and most entertaining aspect of the film. When he’s not locking her out of the lecture hall and planetarium where the killing took place, he’s asking her to go to dinner with him. Needless to say, she had an irascible editor who demands scoop after scoop from her and a steady stream of stories even when she has nothing to report.

Other than that, Death from a Distance is one of those movies that seems to last a lot longer than its 68-minute running time, with way too many suspects, all too little information about them, and a final revelation that seems to have come from the star Arcturus, which the lecture Professor Einfeld was delivering is about. For much of the film I thought Dr. Stone was an astronomer, or at least a Ph.D., but it turns out he was actually a medical doctor. After feeding us a couple of red herrings – Ahmat Haidru (John Davidson), an undocumented immigrant from India (He’s referred to as a “Hindu” even though his first name suggests he’s a Muslim); and Langsdale (Wheeler Oakman), who just got out of prison two years earleir for assult with intent to kill and had changed his name from Fremont to avoid being tainted by his ex-con past – writer John W. Krafft (who lost one of the “f”’s from his name in his credit) finally reveals that the real killer is [spoiler alert!] Jim Gray (George F. Marion). His motive is as obscure as the rest of it: it seems that Dr. Stone was a surgeon whose bungled operation on Jim’s son left the son dead and Jim bereft, grieving and seeking revenge. Ho hum.A least Krafft gave him an interesting final exit: just as he's holding a gun on the rest of the cast trying to take them all hostage, he's shot and killed by the gun he'd inserted in the telescope and set to go off at exactly 9:30 because that's when Professor Einfeld was using it to look at Arcturus.

Death from a Distance is a ponderous bore, and in order to make a good movie out of it we’d have had to learn more about the various suspects and their potential motives. We’d have also had to learn more about Dr. Stone than we do; in the film as it stands he’s just an anoymous attendee at a lecture until he gets himself killed, and like so much else in this maddening movie his motive seems to come out of left field – or maybe I should say outer space. Charles said he thought a musical score could have helped, but I’m inclined to disagree; given the quality (or lack thereof) of the sorts of music available to filmmakers on a Chesterfield-Invincible budget, I’m inclined to think a background score wou9ld have just ,ade the film seem cheesier. The film’s imdb.com page lists Sudney Cutler as the film’s composer, t hough all the music occurs in the opening and closing credits, and there’s the dreaded listing of Abe Meyer and his notorious Meyer Synchronizing Service, which marketed stock music to various indie producers who couldn’t afford to record music on their own. Some filmmakers – notably Ray Taylor in the Bela Lugosi serial The Return of Chandu (1934) – managed to find real musico-cinematic nuggets in Meyer’s rent-a-scores, but for the most part Meyer’s music boxes just made the films even more clichéd and insufferable.