by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2014 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Our “feature” last night was an archive.org download of a
moderately interesting 1934 mystery from Chesterfield called Green Eyes, based on a 1931 novel called The Murder
of Steven Kester by one Harriette Ashbrook
and directed by Richard Thorpe (a journeyman director who served out his
apprenticeship at Chesterfield, then landed a berth with MGM and stayed there
for decades, long enough to do Jailhouse Rock — which puts everyone in this cast one degree of
separation from Elvis!). It begins at a costume party at the home of Steven Kester
(Claude Gillingwater), who’s been the guardian of his granddaughter Jean
(Shirley Grey) since the deaths of her parents, and who is in the middle of a
major financial feud with her grandfather, who’s cut off all her income because
he doesn’t approve of the man she’s dating, Cliff Miller (William Bakewell,
already working his way down the Hollywood food chain after having been billed
ahead of Clark Gable in the 1931 MGM Joan Crawford vehicle Dance,
Fools, Dance). Miller and Jean had left the
party early on their way to elope, but they were caught by the police and
brought back after Steven Kester was found dead in a closet, wearing a
green-eyed Chinese mask as part of his costume for the party. It seems that everyone’s car had been sabotaged, though Jean’s car only had
its distributor wires pulled — everyone else’s had had its ignition wires cut,
too — and in addition to the usual incompetent police led by Inspector Crofton
(John Wray, who’d played Lon Chaney, Sr.’s old role in the 1932 Paramount remake
of The Miracle Man), among the
hangers-on at the party is mystery writer Bill Tracy (Charles Starrett, whom we
get to see shirtless in one sequence — he’s not that sexy but he’s certainly easy on the eyes), who of
course gets in the way and offers to solve the crime.
It seems that the murder
had something to do with an old mine in Mexico which Kester had an interest in
until he abruptly sold it a couple of days before he died as part of an
elaborate scheme to disinherit his granddaughter (which included a new will
drawn up by an attorney who tries to probate it anyway even though Kester never
actually signed it), but the real villains are the Pritchards (Aiden Chase and
the marvelous Dorothy Revier — I should have known she would be in on it since Revier usually played
these sorts of reluctant villainesses). He was Steven Kester’s accountant and
had been embezzling for years, altering Kester’s books to cover up his thefts,
and she had apparently put him up to it — though just how or why was a mystery Ashbrook
and screenwriter Andrew Moses kept to themselves. I’ll give director Thorpe
credit for trying to keep this excessively talky film moving — his camera is in
almost constant motion (Chesterfield had a distribution deal with Universal
that allowed them the run of Universal’s studio, and the opening credits even
let audiences know that it was “Filmed at Universal City” so they’d be aware it
wouldn’t suffer from the cheap-jack production and inferior equipment of a lot
of indies, and this probably meant Thorpe had access to Universal’s elaborate
camera cranes as well as their sets) — but the dull script defeats him
big-time. Indeed, it was odd to watch this shortly after the latest Father
Brown episode from BBC Manchester in 2013
because it showed just how firmly set in stone this particular set of mystery
conventions was: a parent or guardian killed after a big set-to with a daughter
or granddaughter who wants to marry “down,” an intimation of financial
skullduggery and a revelation towards the end that the rich family around whom
the action centered wasn’t so rich after all — though Green Eyes ends rather surprisingly with the Pritchards
committing suicide instead of either being shot while resisting arrest or taken
into custody and legally convicted of their crimes.
