The Preview Murder Mystery (Paramount, 1936)

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

Last night (Thursday, July 20) I did a marathon on Turner Classic Movies and watched six, count ‘em, six movies in a row, five as part of their month-long salute to “B” films plus a “ringer,” Woody Allen’s Bananas. The first film in the sequence, The Preview Murder Mystery, was actually quite good; it was made at Paramount in 1936 and directed by Robert Florey, a French émigré who found a niche in “B” movies almost immediately and rarely got to do anything else (the same fate that befell German expat Edgar G. Ulmer in Hollywood). The Preview Murder Mystery takes place mostly on the Paramount lot – though the studio is called “World Attractions” here (albeit there’s a brief giveaway when we see the back of an arc light with the Paramount, not the “World Attractions,” logo) – and deals with World Attractions’ sound remake of one of the studio’s biggest silent hits, Song of the Toreador. The original silent film featured actor Edwin Strange (though the photo representing him on the office wall of the studio head is actually Rudolph Valentino), while the remake stars Neil DuBeck (Rod LaRocque, real-life silent star who played the villain in the modern portions of Cecil B. DeMille’s 1923 version of The Ten Commandments) and Claire Woodward Smith (Gail Patrick), real-life wife of director E. Gordon Smith (Ian Keith), who helmed both silent and sound versions. The good guys are studio publicity head Johnny Morgan (Reginald Denny, usually a comic-relief supporting actor but here quite good in a lead) and his secretary/girlfriend, Peggy Madison (Frances Drake), a heavy-duty devotée of astrology who keeps giving Johnny warnings of his impending demise based on what the charts she’s casting for him tell her.

Neil DuBeck is receiving a series of threatening notes announcing that he won’t live to see Song of the Toreador previewed, and though he actually makes it to the preview he dies during it from a poison someone slipped into his bicarbonate of soda. (There’s a bit of byplay, surprising from a film made during the period of strict enforcement of the Production Code, indicating that DuBeck is addicted to some sort of drug and his “bicarbonate of soda” is the vehicle through which he takes it. Ordinarily the Production Code forbade drug addiction or any mention of it.) Later on Claire is shot at by a supposedly blank-loaded gun that actually contained real bullets – though she survives because the actor who was supposed to shoot her missed and hit a mirror instead – and director Smith becomes the second victim. The police, led by Detective McKane (Thomas E. Jackson, who made a lifelong specialty playing tough cops), immediately seal off the studio, allowing no one in or out. Johnny Morgan and Peggy Madison investigate the case themselves, and after they get a report that someone who strikingly resembles the late Edwin Strange has been seen around the studio, they deduce the truth: Edwin Strange did not die in an accident years before, as everyone assumed. Instead he was disfigured (courtesy of an earlier shoot in which director Smith had insisted he walk through a big blaze, only he caught fire and was so badly burned he could never act again) and found the corpse of a homeless person whom he could pass off as his own body. When “World Attractions” decided to remake his big silent-era hit, Song of the Toreador, the still-living Strange (Conway Tearle) decided to sabotage the film so it would never be released and therefore make people forget about the silent version in which Strange had starred. The Preview Murder Mystery was written by Brian Marlow and Robert Yost from an original story by Garnett Weston, and it’s a neat enough story, but it’s Florey’s direction and the expert cinematography by Karl Struss (a far more prestigious name than one expects to see on the credits of a “B”) that make this one really special.