Murder on a Honeymoon (RKO, 1935)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Later last night (Sunday, January 5) my husband Charles and I watched two more films on Turner Classic Movies. One was Murder on a Honeymoon (1935), third and last of RKO’s films based on Stuart Palmer’s “Hildegarde Withers” murder mysteries with Edna May Oliver as Withers. Palmer conceived of Hildegarde Withers as an old-maid New York schoolteacher and amateur sleuth who was forever crossing swords with irascible New York Police Inspector Oscar Piper (James Gleason) as she continually beat him to one solution after another. The first two Hildegarde Withers movies, The Penguin Pool Murder (1932) and Murder on the Blackboard (1934), with Oliver were directed by George Archainbaud and scripted by Willis Goldbeck, but for Murder on a Honeymoon – based on a Palmer novel called The Puzzle of the Pepper Tree – RKO’s bosses went for different help. They hired Lloyd Corrigan as director (he’d move on to Universal for similar vest-pocket “B” mysteries when he wasn’t playing character roles as an actor) and gave the writing chores to Seton I. Miller and the great New York humorist Robert Benchley. I presume it was Benchley who was responsible for some scintillating wisecracks that help raise this movie well above the standard level of “B” mysteries of the 1930’s. In one scene, Catalina Island police chief Britt (Spencer Charters), who’s so dim-witted he makes Inspector Piper seem like Sherlock Holmes by comparison, says, “We've never had a murder here on the island. In fact, people don't even die here very often.” Withers fires back, “Maybe they die, and you don't know it.” In another neat exchange, Inspector Piper (who shows up even though it’s 3,000 miles out of his jurisdiction; he wasn’t present in Palmer’s source novel) sneaks up behind Withers as she’s inspecting bushes in search of a clue. “Little moments from the lives of great detectives,” Piper sneers. “Hildegarde, ya get screwier every day.” Withers replies, “Come all the way from New York just to be stupid in new surroundings?”

The plot deals with a commuter seaplane flight from Los Angeles to the Catalina Island resort on which Withers is flying along with film director Joseph Tate (Alan Mowbray – who oddly isn’t listed in online sources for the credits, but he’s definitely in the movie and instantly recognizable), who’s on his way to Catalina to shoot on location for a film. (The real Catalina was used through most of classic-era Hollywood as an all-purpose substitute for Polynesia.) Also on board the plane are Phyllis LaFont (Lola Lane just before she and her sisters signed with Warner Bros.), a desperate actress who wants to be in Tate’s picture and isn’t above blackmailing him for a role; honeymooners Marvin (Harry Ellerbe) and Kay (Dorothy Libaire) Deving; a number of other miscellaneous people; and Roswell Forrest (Brooks Benedict), who was about to rat out his former gang and turn state’s evidence against him in New York when he was killed on the plane. Withers insists to the Catalina police chief and the island’s medical examiner, Dr. O’Rourke (Arthur Hoyt), that Forrest was murdered, killed by being given a poisoned cigarette, even though they insist it was merely heart failure. Withers makes a big to-do about O’Rourke showing up for their meeting in a preposterously unrevealing swimsuit with black striped top and black trunks, and she demands that he dress normally before she’ll speak to him. Ultimately Forrest turns out to be a member of a major street gang in New York who was indicted and agreed to turn state’s evidence in exchange for a lighter sentence for his own crimes. This marked him for death at the hands of his former associates, and they hired [spoiler alert!] a husband-and-wife hit team to pose as the honeymooning Devings so they could knock Forrest off. Unfortunately for them, Forrest had caught on to the plot against him and had his manservant, Tom Kelsey (George Meeker), dress up as him (I guess these people had seen Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni some time; in it, Don Giovanni and his servant Leporello trade clothes to facilitate one of the Don’s attempted seductions), and it was Kelsey rather than Forrest who was given the poisoned cigarette. Ultimately the husband is shot by one of the gang members and the wife seems genuinely broken up about it.

Murder on a Honeymoon is actually a relatively clever “B” mystery, with Oliver’s dry-wit performance as Withers and Benchley’s marvelous witticisms making this movie really special. By the way, the characters fly to Catalina on a twin-engined Douglas Dolphin seaplane, and it lands in an unusual manner: the plane touches down on the water, then taxis down to the beach and unloads its passengers on land via a gangplank. Most seaplane ports had a dedicated terminal dock on which the passengers got on and off the plane, but not this one!