Last night we were back with Bonita Granville in "Nancy Drew, Detective"(1938), the first film in the series. This time, as the movie opens, Nancy is hosting a meeting at her finishing school, to announce the charitable donation of a quarter of a million dollars from "Mary Eldredge" (Helena Phillips Evans), an eccentric old lady alumni. Miss Eldredge suggests some things the money could be used for: "A library, a new science wing, a scholarship endowment". The girls want to use it to build a swimming pool.
The next day, it's announced that Miss Eldredge in the hospital with a dislocated shoulder. Nancy and her Dad (John Litel) find that very strange. Did she fall? If not, how else could it have happened? When they try to locate her they come up empty. Her business manager tells them she's in St. Louis. But how and why would she have been transferred out of town? Nancy isn't buying it, and when "Police Captain Tweedy" (Frank Orn) won't investigate ("'it's an old lady wit a broken shoulda!"), she takes it on herself. On her way home from school the next day, she sees "Ted Nickerson" (Frankie Thomas) and two of his younger friends practicing tackling drills in her yard. Ted, as always, is getting ready for football season and he's set up a tacking dummy in Nancy's flower garden. Needless to say, her flowers get trampled. She's furious, and Ted's signed on for another investigation as penance. While they are talking about the disappearance of Miss Eldredge, another neighborhood kid shows up holding a pigeon with a broken wing. Nancy and Ted take it in to care for it, and notice the little tube on it's leg. It's a carrier pigeon, and the tube has a message inside: "Bluebell".
After nursing it back to health, they look up the number on it's leg tag. Ted checks that number with the local carrier pigeon society and they turn it loose and decide to follow it in her car, on the off chance it might have something to do with the case. Of course, it does. The pigeon flies to the house of Miss Eldredge's business manager, out in the countryside. He makes an excuse that he's renting the house and the owner keeps pigeons. "I know nothing about it, sorry". But then Ted surmises that, because carrier pigeons are two-way, it must have a return destination from which it originated before it broke it's wing. Ted tells Nancy that pigeons fly in a straight line, and with a map, they select the general area from which it must have come. Then they rent an airplane (with pilot) and photograph an aerial map that shows a lone, large estate, set near a lake. Driving out there, they find an old, gated mansion. It's a sanitarium. Nancy and Ted get past the guard by using the message from the pigeon, "Bluebell", which they correctly assumed was a password. Looking in the front windows, they see that Miss Eldredge is indeed there, being held against her will. Her broken shoulder was the result of an escape attempt. It turns out that her business manager owed money to the sanitarium owner, who has a scam running where he tricks wealthy old ladies into moving into his "care home" (i.e. his nuthouse), then he drugs them and forces them to sign all their money over to him. When the business manager learned of Miss Eldredge's plans for the donation to Nancy's school, he made his own plan to have her kidnapped and taken to the asylum, so he could clear his debt. Then the asylum owner tried to take all her money and have her committed. Nancy and Ted come to her rescue and, as always, end up in more trouble than they bargained for. This time, they're held at gunpoint by the owner's henchman, who wants to shoot them "because they can rat us out". Nancy, thinking quickly as always, looks for and finds a way out of the situation (these always involve Ted getting clobbered). Another part of the formula is that Dad always arrives in the immediate aftermath, as a reinforcement along with Police Captain Tweedy, who Nancy has proved wrong once again. He always has to eat a plateful of crow while taking the bad guys off to jail. This entry has a very quick-witted script, even more so than usual, with many references to the number 2380. it keeps tuning up in lines like "I'll betcha 23.80 that...". I had to look it up and discovered that $23.80 was the weekly salary paid to WPA workers during the Depression. I also discovered that they made four Nancy Drew movies in all, which is disappointing because they should've made at least ten. But the good news is that we still have one more to watch. Two Huge Thumbs Up for "Nancy Drew, Detective". It's very highly recommended, though the picture is quite soft. Hopefully there will one day be a restoration of all four films. ////
The previous night's movie was "The Devil's Party"(1938), a top-notch crime flick set in Hell's Kitchen. Five street urchins have a gang called The Death Avenue Club, named for the end-of-the line environs of 11th Avenue. The club is led by adolescent Marty Malone, who organises thefts from fruit warehouses - strictly big time stuff, donchaknow. Hey, street kids gotta eat. The other members of the club are younger, ranging from about 7 to 10. Little Helen McCoy wants to join them. She's about 6. They tell her "no girls allowed" but she stands them all down. Now she's an official member of the club. Their next big fruit robbery is set up by Marty, but it goes down wrong. A night watchman is on the premises. Marty accidentally sets a fire that causes major damage. The other four kids escape, but the watchman hauls Marty in. A kindly police captain tries to get him to name his conspirators but Marty won't snitch. Thus, he is sent to a children's reformatory and, without their leader, the Death Avenue Club breaks up.
Now we jump ahead twenty five years. The adult "Marty Malone" (Victor McLaglen) has made something of himself. He owns a snazzy nightclub. But he hasn't entirely changed his ways. He runs a gambling racket out of his upstairs office, and he sells bootleg liquor to other club owners. On the night we meet him as an adult, he's about to host a reunion at his club for all his old friends from the kid's gang. "Helen McCoy" (Beatrice Roberts), all grown up and beautiful, is now the singer at Marty's club. The "O'Mara" brothers (John Gallaudet and William Gargan) are both cops now, and "Jerry Donovan" (Paul Kelly) has become a priest. Hey, what'd ya expect from an Irish Hell's Kitchen movie? Anyhow, the old gang are all successful in their respective professions, and - to the others - Marty is still their leader at their reunions, and he's the biggest success story of them all, the reform school kid who owns a nightclub. They don't know about his dealings on the side, and in truth, he's not a major criminal, certainly not part of organised crime. But on the night of the gang's reunion, he gets a phone call from a liquor client who bounced a check for 13 Gees. That's a lotta semolians. Marty asks the guy to please pay up, and when he tells Marty to shove it ("that booze you sold me was rancid"), Marty sends two henchmen to "persuade" the guy to pay. "But no real rough stuff," he asserts. "You fellas know how to do it." Marty is insinuating intimidation techniques (arm-twisting, maybe a broken knuckle or two), but the thugs wind up killing the guy.
Now Marty's in a jam, because the NYPD Emergency Squad is assigned to the case, and guess who's on that squad? The O'Mara brothers, Mike and Joe, and when they get to the crime scene, signs point back to Marty's nightclub. Marty chews out the two hoods who killed the welcher, but one of them is a sociopath. He isn't afraid of Marty and turns the tables on him, making demands to cover up the murder: "If I go down, so do you." Marty now knows this guy's a stone cold killer, which Marty is not. He never should've hired him for the check-bounce "persuasion" job. And now, Joe O'Mara the emergency squad cop, has evidence that could nail the unknown killers, which - if it happens - will lead back to his childhood friend Marty.
Even as adults, the gang has held onto their vows of lifetime blood brothership. It's one for all and all for one, but their loyalties are severely tested when policeman Joe O'Mara is tossed off a hotel roof by the psycho. The more his brother Mike investigates, the more he thinks Marty is hiding something, and the more Marty covers up his involvement, the guiltier he feels. Finally, he confesses to Jerry the priest, who wants to clear the air for his old gang once and for all. But when they find themselves cornered, the thugs that caused the problem in the first place kidnap Helen McCoy, to pressure Marty into denying everything. The onion skin plot ends up with a major robbery pulled off by the thugs, who force Marty to participate in order to blacken him. The robbery harkens back to a "play for keeps" version of the fruit robberies the kids' gang used to pull, only now it's deadly. The psycho is gonna rob a chemical factory and set off ammonia gas as a diversion. He's gonna use a gas mask to make his escape, but at the last minute he doesn't provide one for Marty, who never bargained for any of this. He should've just eaten the liquor debt.
Expert filmmaking all around, writing, acting and directing. John Ford favorite McLaglen gives humanity to the street kid delinquent turned financial success gone wrong. It doesn't get any more NYC Irish than this. Two Huge Thumbs Up for "The Devil's Party", and we've been having a fair amount of Two Huges lately. The picture is razor sharp. ////
That's all for tonight. I hope your week is off to a good start. I was severely under the weather this weekend with what was either one of the worst flu bugs I've ever had, or medium-level Covid partially ameliorated by the original vaccine (I didn't have the boosters). I didn't have myself tested (couldn't get out of bed!), but whatever it was, it was no fun. And it's still going but slowly tapering off. It wasn't life threatening, so no worries, and the fact that I'm even able to sit up and write this is fortunate, because, since Saturday morning, it's been hard just to focus on anything but getting better, which I hope to continue to do, tomorrow and as the week wears on. Sigh. I guess I'll start wearing a mask again, in public, at least through the winter. Getting sick sucks! And with these new bugs that're being cooked up, or escaping, or both, man do they ever work a doozy on ya. I can't even imagine what the hard-core Covid victims go through. God Bless 'em, and let's beat this dadburned thing.
My blogging music was "Scriabin Recital" by Vladimir Sofronitsky (One of the three Gods of the Piano, the other two being Dinu Lipatti and Wilhelm Kempff). No late night music this time, but it'll return soon, I trust. I send you Tons of Love as always. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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