The Phantom of 42nd Street (PRC, 1945)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Friday, September 6) my husband Charles and I managed to watch a rather interesting 1945 “B” movie from PRC, courtesy of a YouTube post: The Phantom of 42nd Street, a title which sounds like a mashup of The Phantom of the Opera and 42nd Street but which turned out to be the name of a decently accomplished vest-pocket mystery. It’s basically the old chestnut about the “jinxed” theatre and a number of murders taking place among people who used to work for it and/or produced plays there. The first murder victim is Jonathan Moore, a wealthy businessman who used to be financial manager for a repertoire (which the hero, played by Dave O’Brien, insists annoyingly on pronouncing “reper-twah”) company owned by his brother Cecil Moore (Alan Mowbray, turning in the kind of old-pro performance similar to Lionel Atwill’s in one of PRC’s best films, Lady in the Death House). Jonathan’s daughter Claudia (Kay Aldridge) has just made her theatrical debut in a play which is proclaimed as awful by just about all the New York critics, including the male lead, Tony Woolrich (Dave O’Brien) – did writers Milton Raison and Jack Harvey (the script was based on a novel they’d published jointly but Raison alone wrote the screenplay) deliberately name him after Alexander Woollcott? At least Tony had nice things to say about Claudia’s acting even though he wished she could have made her New York stage debut in a better play. It soon becomes apparent that he has a crush on her even though she’s more or less engaged to one of the other actors in her troupe, John Carraby (John Crawford). Two other people, including a watchman who used to be a sound tech for Cecil and Jonathan Moore, get murdered, and in all cases the killer leaves behind an insulting note referencing a part they played in one of the plays the Moore reper-twah company put on.

Jonathan Moore is murdered during the intermission of Claudia’s play and Tony’s typically irascible editor Peters (Milton Kibbee) chews him out for not having stayed there to report the crime so his paper, the New York Record, could have got the scoop. Tony teams up with his comic-relief sidekick, cabdriver Romeo (Frank Jenks) – whose real name was “Egbert” – and police lieutenant Walsh (Jack Mulhall, who’d come close to making the “A” list during the late silent era but whose career had nosedived with the advent of sound). Eventually they trace the murder back to Janis Buchanan (Edythe Elliott), who used to play female leads with the Moore reper-twah company and briefly was married to Cecil Moore, but they broke up and she ended up marrying someone else. Janis is actually Claudia Moore’s mother, though Claudia is ignorant of that fact (in most movies with this plot device, the ingénue knows who her mother is but the mystery is over who her father is!), and the killer turns out to be Janis’s estranged husband, though we never see him full face and neither imdb.com nor Wikipedia list the actor who plays him. (We only see him in long-shot with the typical black hooded costume, which was as de rigueur in 1930’s and early-1940’s mysteries as hoodies are in Lifetime films today!) The gimmick is that he went through plastic surgery so no one would recognize him (and presumably he spoke with a disguised voice as well and did such a good job of it no one recalled him aurally as well as visually!) and started knocking off the members of the cast and crew of Moore’s reper-twah company for reasons Raison and Harvey don’t make too clear.

Though the plot is pretty creaky – Charles was sure when I gave him the title that we’d seen it together before, though I suspect he was mixing it up with the 1929 film The Last Warning and its 1939 remake, The House of Fear (both considerably better movies about murders taking place in connection with the production of a play – The Phantom of 42nd Street is actually a quite appealing movie, mainly because of a good cast. Dave O’Brien is personable, reasonably attractive and a far better personality than most of the PRC leading men (remember that this was towards the end of World War II and PRC had to compete both with the major studios and the U.S. military for the services of decent-looking young men!); Kay Aldridge is solidly professional and we can easily believe the nice things O’Brien’s character has to say about her acting; and Alan Mowbray provides a neat bit of solid old-pro professionalism to the cast. The director is Al Herman, whom “B”-movie historian Don Miller ridiculed – he particularly objected to the way he had characters break down a door: instead of moving on its hinges it fell forward – but The Phantom of 42nd Street doesn’t have any scenes in which characters break down doors and Herman therefore didn’t have any occasion to use his signature shot. Herman actually turns in a capable job of directing, getting the most out of a reasonably talented if hardly great cast (though Edythe Elliott brings more true pathos to her grande dame turned boarding-house keeper character than it needed), and Janis’s living space features some of the hideous wallpaper that was virtually a PRC trademark. Though The Phantom of 42nd Street is hardly one of PRC’s truly great films (there are only five, ironically all made by foreign-born directors: Edgar G. Ulmer’s Bluebeard, Out of the Night and Detour, Frank Wisbar’s Strangler of the Swamp and Steve Sekely’s Lady in the Death House), it’s a pleasant enough time-filler and quite accomplished professionally.