5 Movies | Tuesday, October 4th
As true crime aficionados know, there’s no such thing as a perfect murder. However, for centuries poison proved a weapon of choice for killers, from Roman political figures to cult leaders and everyone in between, due, in part, to its untraceable nature. That all changed in the 19th century, though, when advances in science and medicine enabled experts to detect poison in the human body.
That said, fast acting cyanide, arsenic and other poisonous substances have turned up as cinematic murder methods since the early days of the medium, from “The Poisoner” episode of Les Vampires (1915) to Suspicion (1941) and beyond. As forensic psychologist Joni Johnston told A&E TV, poison gives the perpetrator “a sense of psychological distance” from the killing. In films, this relative physical detachment opens the door for a wide array of culprits and unique storylines, as the movies programmed for TCM’s Pick Your Poison theme evening demonstrate. But please, proceed with caution – spoilers abound.
Audiences were treated to a brief, and somewhat confusing, introduction to the chemistry of poison in The Casino Murder Case (1935), starring future Oscar winner Paul Lukas as fictional detective Philo Vance. Based upon the wildly popular S.S. Van Dine series, the seventh movie entry finds the cultivated sleuth attempting to crack two slayings and several attempted murders within a wealthy family where everyone seems to harbor some combination of afflictions, resentments, motives, secrets and lies.
Solicited with an unsigned warning that tragedy would befall Lynn Llewellyn (Donald Cook) at a casino, Philo attempts to keep a watchful eye on him along with Mrs. Llewellyn’s secretary/companion Doris (Rosalind Russell), to no avail; Lynn collapses and is carted off to the hospital at the same time his wife Virginia (Louise Henry) is found dead at home. The culprit for both: poison.
From there, Philo navigates an intricate plot that involves red herrings, frame-ups and various dramatics and comedic hijinks from the Llewellyns’s inner circle. Luckily, it turns out that the detective possesses far more knowledge than the average person when it comes to poisons, even offering a theory to Dr. Kane (Leslie Fenton): heavy water. The jury’s still out on whether that enigmatic liquid is poisonous or not, but sure enough, Philo and Doris stumble upon a lab producing the stuff!
Lukas, playing Philo for the first – and only – time here, was the fourth actor to portray the famous detective on screen, following William Powell, Basil Rathbone and Warren William. Speaking of firsts, the picture stands as Russell’s earliest leading role at MGM, a stepping stone she looked remorsefully upon in later years. “Bad or not, after Casino Murder Case, I played only leads,” she wrote in her autobiography “Life Is a Banquet.”
Traveling west, the poison that leads to the death of two people in The Falcon Out West (1944) gets dispensed the natural way, from a rattlesnake bite – or does it? That’s one question another debonair detective, Tom Lawrence (Tom Conway), alias the Falcon, contends with in the eighth entry in RKO’s lighthearted Falcon series.
As in The Casino Murder Case, the lead in The Falcon Out West is drawn into the fray by a third party. In this case, Mrs. Irwin (Joan Barclay) invites Tom to a Manhattan nightclub – but not for reasons he’s comfortable with; she implores him to help prevent her ex, Tex (Lyle Talbot), from remarrying. “I’d be glad to help if it were a simple matter, say, a murder maniac,” Tom replies, “but marital troubles – frankly, I haven’t the courage.” Then, as if on cue, Tex drops dead from what appears to be a rattlesnake bite. Sensing something is off, Tom rushes to Tex’s ranch to do some more digging alongside the police, Tex’s fiancée, his business associates and various other parties, which inevitably brings about more questions and attempted murders. At the ranch, another person succumbs to a venomous snake bite, which now casts suspicion upon both deaths.
Based on the character created in 1940 by Michael Arlen, the Falcon films first starred the suave George Sanders, who took on the franchise after playing The Saint in five movies. After appearing in four pictures, Sanders bowed out, handing the lead over to his on-screen brother Tom, played by his real-life sibling Conway. Conway appreciated the series’ levity, telling Hollywood magazine in 1943 that the urbane detective provided a “breather” from some of the bleaker roles he was used to taking on.
Poison turns into a family affair, a darkly comedic one at that, in Arsenic and Old Lace (1944). Frank Capra’s classic finds Mortimer Brewster (Cary Grant) stumbling upon a plot his sweet old aunts, Abby (Josephine Hull) and Martha (Jean Adair), blithely indulge in: murdering old men with their signature elderberry wine. Dumbfounded, and very animatedly so, Mortimer tries to get to the bottom of his aunts’ “very bad habit” while keeping a laundry list of people – the cops, his brand-new bride Elaine (Priscilla Lane), brother ‘Teddy Roosevelt’ (John Alexander), long-lost deranged sibling Jonathan (Raymond Massey) and his screwy sidekick Dr. Einstein (Peter Lorre) – at bay.
It’s been reported in the modern day that playwright Joseph Kesselring may have drawn inspiration from the case of Amy Archer-Gilligan, who ran a boarding house/nursing home where 66 people died between 1908-1916. That exorbitantly large number of deaths prompted an investigation, revealing that many victims succumbed to poison. According to History.com, Kesselring consulted with the prosecuting attorney on the case and traveled to Connecticut to view court documents.
Speaking of poison, one of the many subjects the Production Code Administration took issue with was detailing murder methods. That included the aunts’ recipe for their deadly wine, though it doesn’t seem to have been a huge sticking point, since the formula remains intact in the picture.
Turning mass murder into a laugh riot was certainly a gamble, but it paid off in Arsenic and Old Lace. Kesselring’s play ran on Broadway from January 1941 through June 1944, and three cast members, Jean Adair, Josephine Hull and John Alexander, made the leap from stage to screen. One notable actor who didn’t? Boris Karloff. Producers refused to release him from the show, because he served as the star attraction. (All those allusions to Karloff and the uncanny similarity in Massey’s appearance in the film were certainly no accident.) Capra’s adaptation actually filmed at the end of 1941, but due to a contractual obligation, the picture couldn’t be released until the hit play closed, which meant the movie sat on the shelf for almost three years, arriving in theaters in September 1944.
Another movie that was shelved for a few years was The Two Mrs. Carrolls (1947), though for circumstances that are hard to pin down. “It may have been reasons of commerce which prompted the Warners to withhold ‘The Two Mrs. Carrolls’ from circulation for almost two years after it was made,” Bosley Crowther blasted in “The New York Times”. More contemporary critiques cite the film’s similarity to Gaslight (1944) or Warner Brothers’ expectation that Humphrey Bogart’s star would rise high enough for the public to overlook his miscasting as potential reasonings. Whatever the real motivation, The Two Mrs. Carrolls still failed to make an impact when it ultimately opened, a rather unfortunate outcome for the only film pairing of Bogart and Barbara Stanwyck.
The Gothic mystery finds Bogart playing against type as an overexaggerated, moody artist named Geoffrey Carroll who meets and falls in love with Sally (Stanwyck) on a fishing trip. There’s just one problem: He’s already married. Geoffrey takes care of that hitch promptly upon his return home; after painting his wife as the Angel of Death, he slowly but lethally poisons her via her nightly milk. Geoffrey and Sally tie the knot and enjoy a brief period of marital bliss until Cecily (Alexis Smith) enters the picture. With his sights set on a new plaything, Geoffrey reverts back to his old ways, dropping red flag after red flag as Sally finally starts to grasp the danger she’s in.
According to Axel Madsen’s biography “Stanwyck,” Peter Godfrey’s screen adaptation of The Two Mrs. Carrolls left out a key moment from the Broadway play written by Marguerite Vale Veiller under her pseudonym Martin Vale: a scene in which Geoffrey’s first wife – she’s not dead! – telephones Sally to raise the alarm about her husband’s propensity to poison milk. The reveal apparently delivered a jolt to theatergoers.
As opposed to some of the faster acting toxins portrayed in other films screening this evening, the liquid perpetrator in Rudolph Maté’s noir classic D.O.A. (1950) takes days to take its victim down – and not without a fight.
D.O.A. knocks viewers for a loop from the start: Frank Bigelow (Edmond O’Brien) stumbles into a police station to report a murder – his own. Staring death in the face, Frank embarks on a tortuous flashback piecing together his last days. Who wanted to kill him? When did it happen? How was it done? Frank turns the shock and fear of hearing a second doctor confirm the fatal luminous poison in his body (“I don’t think you understand, Bigelow. You’ve been murdered.”) into a tenacious, unhinged probe to track down his killer as the toxin takes its toll.
Turns out, all Frank did was notarize a document, but how that directly led to his death – well, you’ll have to untangle the plot to find out. Though Frank’s fate is sealed from the first few minutes, D.O.A. packs an incredibly gripping punch. The film’s atypical plot, sans poison, is said to have been influenced by Robert Siodmak’s 1931 German comedy Der Mann, Der Seinen Morder Sucht, which translates pointedly as The Man Who Seeks His Murderer.
In his book “Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir,” Eddie Muller likens D.O.A. to a “live-action cartoon” in which O’Brien was given the green light to “push things to a fever pitch.” For as chaotic a plot as D.O.A. delivers, it’s interesting to point out the short epilogue that closes the movie, which reads: "The medical facts in this motion picture are authentic. Luminous toxin is a descriptive term for an actual poison." As if that’s the most implausible element about the whole film! In any case, "luminous toxins" is an apt way to describe this evening of poison pictures on TCM.
