(this blog was begun the night of August 15, 2019 and finished today)
Tonight I am writing once again from Pearl's. I had a nice week off but now I am back on the job for another month. I'm so used to my schedule by now, though, that it's second nature to jump right back in. I did watch a movie, of course : "Call It Murder" (1934), starring an early actress named Sidney Fox and an older gentleman named O.P. Heggie, whose IMDB shows that he was in some prominent films, though his name did not ring a bell. "Call It Murder" was originally titled "Midnight", which was the name of the play it was based upon. It was released as "Midnight" in 1934, but then re-released under it's new name in 1947, to cash in on Humphrey Bogart's fame. Bogie has limited screentime in the film, and his role is that of a secondary character, but because he had achieved major stardom by 1947, he is first billed in the re-edited title sequence.
The movie opens in a courtroom, where a woman is on trial for the murder of her husband. The prosecution is trying to prove premeditation, which will allow a conviction on First Degree Murder. In those days that was an automatic death sentence that was normally carried out in rapid fashion. As the jurors are listening to closing arguments, the jury foreman interjects to ask a question of the defendant : did she steal her husband's bank savings after the murder? The woman is scared. She answers truthfully. "Yes, I did steal the money". This answer seals her fate. What could have been a charge reduced to manslaughter is now a certain first degree conviction and a likely trip to the electric chair.
She is taken away to Death Row, to be executed on August 15th, which by weird coincidence was tonight! Except for 85 years in the past.....(man, spooky..)
Now the plot will shift to it's main focus, where the spotlight will be on the jury foreman, on whose last minute courtroom question the verdict seemed to hinge. He is holed up in his house, surrounded by his family as reporters crowd his front lawn. They pound on his door, demanding a statement. "Do you feel responsible for sending a woman to the electric chair"? His wife and children urge him to ignore the questions, but we can see that he is feeling some pangs of conscience. Finally he throws open his front door and shouts that "murder is murder! It makes no difference if it was committed by man or woman. Both are equal in the eyes of the law. The woman admitted her crime, the law stipulates the punishment"!
"I was only following the law", he declares.
No regard is made for whether the woman was a victim of abuse, which may be a possibility. The Press is interested in the moral aspect of sentencing a woman to death, versus a man, who in those days if found guilty was always considered a hardened criminal worthy of no sympathy whatsoever.
But here, the focus is on the jury foreman. Actor O.P. Heggie was 56 when he played this role (I looked it up), but he appears to be between 75 and 80, and it's not because of makeup. He may have been chosen for his frail and bewildered appearance, and while he is mesmerizing in the lead role, his performance is somewhat at odds with the rest of the cast. To me it looks as if Heggie was working from ingrained techniques that would have been holdovers from Silent films. His timing is markedly slower than the other actors in any given scene, and at times he seems somnambulistic, leaving long pauses in his phrases of dialogue. As awkward as his performance looks at times, it can be seen as a success because it stands out among the other characterizations in the movie. There is also a chance he was not well during the filming, as he passed away two years later in 1936. As I say, he was only in his late 50s but looked like Father Time.
Actors and actresses lived fast and hard in those days, smoking and drinking with abandon, and taking pills too, which is why so many of them only lived into their mid-fifties, if that long.
But back to the story. Several things are taking place on the night of August 15th, as the convicted murderess awaits execution at Midnight (hence the movie's original title). For one, a hotshot reporter (Henry Hull) has conspired with the jury foreman's son-in-law to bring a radio set into the house, ostensibly to pick up a live broadcast of the execution proceedings. The reporter's real motive, however, is to note the foreman's reaction to the execution, and then to write a heavy-handed story about his imagined guilt. In this regard, there is a thread of a capital punishment debate being played out, especially where it concerns women.
For another thing, the foreman's daughter is distraught about the verdict. She attended the trial and felt sorry for the convicted woman. Now, on the night her death sentence is to be carried out, she begs her father to make a phone call to the warden or governor, to explain why he asked his pivotal question at the trial, and to ask the officials for a postponement until the case can be re-examined.
But old Mr. Heggie will not budge. Then another character arrives at the house. It is Humphrey Bogart, looking very young and handsome, and already exuding the charisma that will make him a star. He was also a regular at the trial, and by the end, he and the daughter had developed a relationship. Tonight he wants to take her on a date, but he is something of a shady character, and her in-laws and siblings who are also at the house, don't want her to go with him. She is anxious to get away from the tension, though, and doesn't want to hear the radio broadcast, so she does leave with Bogie, against her father's wishes.
And there the plot will turn, because Bogie's pretense of taking her on a date is only that : an excuse to get her out of the house, alone with him.
That is all I shall tell you of the story, but the plot is quite involving all the way through. The only demerits I would give the film all have to do with the production itself, or perhaps the direction. Sometimes when I see an early sound film, I notice what I will call an "uneveness" in the way the actors play a scene. They can seem out of synch, or acting in varying degrees or styles of technique. Sometimes an actor will gesture in a way that indicates he has yet to evolve from Silent techniques. The camera work and editing will not always flow together and most of all, the sound quality may be poor, with no added music or soundtrack whatsoever, just the static voices of characters in a scene, which, if the actors are using non-homogenous vocal styles, as in "Call It Murder", serves to throw the film off balance. This film is one of those early sound efforts that suffers from these problems. Now, by 1934, the bigger studios had licked all of these problems that led to substandard productions, and were, by and large, making slick and glossy films by that time. But perhaps "Call It Murder" was a low budget affair, I don't know.
It's not really a major complaint, because I still give the film Two Higher Than Average Thumbs Up. It's got a great script and plot, and for the most part is well-acted, including by O.P. Heggie. It's just that the direction or timing or sound or something feels off, and for that reason a viewer will have to be patient if he or she is not used to this kind of early sound movie.
Still, "Call It Murder" is very much recommended (even just because of it's weirdness!), and should be sought out by Bogie fans like me, who are trying to see every movie he made. /////
That's all for now. Gotta try to finish my book : "Chaos : Manson, The CIA and The Secret History Of The Sixties". Then I'll tell you all about it! See you tonight at the Usual Time.
Tons of love. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxox :):)
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