Miss Withers at her sharp-tongued best.

Read/Watch 'em in Order #47

In his excellent book Mystery Movie Series of the 1930s, Ron Backer calls Murder on a Honeymoon "the most entertaining of the Hildegarde Withers movies."  And, by golly, he's right.

First of all, no one played Miss Withers with sharp-tongued perfection quite like Edna May Oliver. And, since this is the last film in which Oliver plays the role (her contract with RKO was up and she signed with MGM), the best one has to be one of the first three. Here, she is definitely at her best, snapping out one witty line after another as she looks into yet another murder.

Miss Withers is on vacation--but the work of amateur detectives is never done, since they tend to stumble over corpses with odd frequency. (Have you ever heard the fan theory that Jessica Fletcher from the Murder She Wrote TV series is actually a mad serial killer who has framed hundreds of people for her crimes? Explains a lot, doesn't it?)

Miss Withers is on a seaplane, taking a short flight to Catalina Island, when one of the other passengers keels over dead. The local police think its a natural death, but Miss Withers has reason to suspect otherwise. She cables Inspector Piper for more information, learning that the dead man was set to testify against mobsters. Piper immediately flies out to Catalina to help with the case and watch out for his friend.

This brings James Gleason as Piper into the story. Interestingly, Piper was not a major character in the novel this film was based on (The Puzzle of the Pepper Tree), but the screenwriters--including humorist Robert Benchley--were wise enough to know that the interplay between Oliver and Gleason were 93.7% of the fun

inherent in the series.

From there, the mystery flows along swiftly. The body of the murder victim is stolen from the morgue, so a full autopsy to show the cause of death can't be performed. The other passengers on the plane all seemed to have opportunity to poison the victim, but there's no way to conclusively pin the crime on any of them. (By the way, two of the passengers are newlyweds--hence the film's title.) One of the mobsters against whom the victim would have testified is in Catalina, but arrived after the murder was committed.

Miss Withers and Piper investigate while trading verbal barbs, eventually finding the body and a few other clues. Then there's another murder. Then Miss Withers is held at gunpoint by the mobster. Then there's a third murder. But by now, Miss Withers knows who the killer is--and she has an idea on how to prove it.

This movie is fun. The mystery element is solid--Ron Backer points out that it is structured as a step-by-step police procedural seeded with a number of red herrings. And the Oliver/Gleason combination as the two leads continues to be pure gold. They really are at their best this time around.

Sadly, Oliver does move on to MGM, leaving Miss Withers behind. Though the other three films in the series are quite good, I won't be covering them as part of the In Order series, because things will never be quite the same without Edna May. (I may write about them on an individual basis some time in the future.)

So we'll have to jump to another movie series for the "watch 'em" part of the In Order series. As of the date I'm writing this (about 5 weeks before it posts), I haven't made up my mind which films to do next. I'll be in Turkey on a mission trip for part of that time, so it's possible I still won't have decided when this post goes public. I'm open to suggestions.

Musical Notes and a Dead Ant

Read/Watch 'em In Order #45

Once you become an amateur detective, it becomes traditional for you to pretty much stumble over murder victims on a regular basis.

That's what happens to acerbic school teacher in 1934's Murder on the Blackboard. (This,by the way, is the second movie in the series, but is based on the third novel.)

Hildegarde is keeping a student after school for punishment when she discovers the music teacher dead--someone applied a blunt instrument to her head. The equally acerbic Inspector Oscar Piper is once again called to investigate.

But the body has disappeared. It's actually an important bit of character interaction that, though Piper is at first annoyed to find there is no body, he doesn't really doubt Hildegarde at all. The two might still trade some pretty sharp barbs, but after the events of The Penguin Pool Murder,  they know they can trust each other.

(In fact, at the end of the first movie, they were rushing off to get married. Blackboard doesn't explain why they aren't married now--though the original novel does: Piper was called away on another case before they got hitched, giving Hildegarde time to change her mind.)

From there, the movie adopts an interesting structure. Hildegarde is certain the murderer hasn't had a chance to leave the school building, so the first half-hour of this 71-minute film involving searching the school for both a corpse and a killer. They find the corpse in the school's furnace, but the killer manages to slug a cop and give them the slip.

From there, it's a traditional mystery--questioning suspects and searching for clues. There's a wonderful scene in which Piper and Hildegarde return to the school and search the cellar, only to have a mysterious assailant throw a hatchet at Hildegarde's head.

hatchet at Hildegarde's head.

Several small clues--including musical notes written on a blackboard and a dead ant in a glass beaker--point Hildegard to the killer. But to get real proof, she and Piper will have to set a trap.

Like the early film, Murder on the Blackboard is a reasonable mystery turned into a delightful time by Edna May Oliver as Hildegard and James Gleason as Piper. The two continue to play off each other perfectly, getting on each others nerves but still working in tandem to solve a crime. Hildegarde Withers is a part Edna May Oliver was born to play, while Gleason was her perfect foil.

There's an interesting bit of trivia concerning the supporting casts of these first two films, by the way. This series was produced by RKO, which also made King Kong in 1933. The Penguin Pool Murder was made in 1932 with Robert Armstrong in the cast. A year later, Armstrong and Bruce Cabot were running around Skull Island avoiding dinosaurs and giant apes. Then, a year after that, Bruce Cabot had his turn playing a role in a Hildegard Withers movie--he's a science teacher in Murder on the Blackboard.

Edna May Oliver will play Hildegarde Withers one more time, so that will be the next film we look at in this series. There were several more Hildegarde films starring other actresses. These are quite good, but in the end Edna May is the only true Hildegarde Withers.

And She Can Cook Too!

Read/Watch 'em In Order #42

As far as I know, Agatha Christie's Miss Marple is the first elderly spinster who turned out to have a talent for solving crimes. But Miss Marple's success opened the floodgates for a lot of imitators.

The best of these might very well be a sharp-tongued school teacher named Hildegarde Withers. We first meet her in the 1931 novel The Penguin Pool Murder, written by Stuart Palmer. It would be the first of 18 novels and short story anthologies featuring Miss Withers. Acerbic she might be, but Miss Withers is (as mystery historian Otto Penzler states) "...a romantic at heart and will extend herself to help young lovers."

This brings us to Edna May Oliver, a well-known character actor who specialized in playing shart-tongued spinsters. So when RKO adapted The Penguin Pool Murder into a film in 1932, Edna was the perfect actress to drop into the role. 

We first meet Miss Withers when she brings her students to an aquarium on a field trip. She casually trips a fleeing purse snatcher and lectures her students to "never try to evade the law with an umbrella between your legs."  

Like most amateur detectives, Miss Withers is pretty much a magnet for crime. A few minutes after foiling the purse snatching, she witnesses a body being dumped into the penguin pool.

Well, you can't expect Miss Withers to witness a crime and NOT voice her own opinions about it--especially after its discovered that a hatpin taken from her is the murder weapon. Soon, she and the equally acerbic Inspector Piper are defacto partners in solving the crime. And it will take some solving--there's at least three suspects with means, motive and opportunity. Miss Withers, though, might just have an idea for trapping the killer into giving himself/herself away.

It's a fun film, balancing the comedy with a good mystery plot. Oliver really was tailor-made for the role and James Gleason (as Inspector Piper) plays off her perfectly.

But this won't be the last time Miss Withers will be called upon to solve a murder--which is a good thing as the world really doesn't have a sufficient supply of elderly women who solve crimes. Oliver will appear in two more films in the series (leaving the role when her contract with RKO expired). We'll take a look at those other two films soon.