This Month

"Radio's Sensational Chill Show...Now on the Screen" was the tagline for I Love a Mystery (1945), based on the highly successful radio show written by Carlton E. Morse, which ran from 1939 to 1944 and again from 1949 to 1953. It starred Jim Bannon as Jack Packard and Barton Yarborough as Doc Long, detectives at the A-1 Detective Agency who keep getting pulled into mysteries that involve the supernatural. For the film version, Bannon and Yarborough reprised their roles, which were first created by Morse for the radio show Adventures by Morse.

Radio shows like The Whistler had been adapted to film and so in 1945, I Love a Mystery was brought to the screen as a series. The first film starred Nina Foch, George Macready, and former Earl Carroll's Follies dancer Carole Mathews. Directed by Henry Levin, with a screenplay by Morse and Charles O'Neal, the film has the subtitle The Decapitation of Jefferson Monk. Told in flashback, as was done on the radio show, the story revolves around Jefferson Monk (Macready), a socialite who receives strange messages from an Asian secret society, threatening his life. He comes to believe that he will be decapitated in three days and Packard and Long have to scramble to prevent his death.

Jim Bannon wrote letters to his parents during the production of I Love a Mystery, which were later self-published as the autobiographical The Son That Rose in the West. In these letters, he talks about his disappointment over how the film was coming along. "[A]fter all the conversation about it and all of the waiting for the script to be finished so we could get the series started, it was not really a very outstanding production at all. It will do business, I'm sure, simply because of the title and the number of people who have listened to the show on radio for so long. As a truly good movie, however, it limps a little [. . .] One of the things we objected to was the way they had us just sort of stumble into the situation. In most of the detective series - Boston Blackie, The Lone Wolf, The Thin Man, etc. - the story is set up to revolve around the main characters. That wasn't the case with us, and I felt that the result was a weakened product. Carlton Morse, the author of the radio series, was on the set much of the time and since he didn't make too much of a howl about the way it was being done, Bart [Yarborough] and I kept quiet. It's sort of sad because they could very well kill off what has a chance of turning into a good continuing thing."

Unfortunately, Bannon's instincts were right and the series only lasted for two more films, The Devil's Mask and The Unknown, both in 1946. Part of the problem was the acting, as noted by film critic Milton Sosin for The Miami News "The moviegoer who is an inveterate 'whodunnit' fan (and this reviewer definitely falls into that category) usually isn't too critical of acting or direction just so long as the plot is slightly plausible and the raveling of the mystery is accomplished with the proper use of what Hercule Poirot calls 'the little gray cells'. From that viewpoint I Love a Mystery [...] is eminently satisfactory even though the acting of some of the principals is unconvincing at time and the direction could be stronger."

Producer: Wallace MacDonald
Director: Henry Levin
Screenplay: Charles O'Neal; Carlton E. Morse (radio series)
Cinematography: Burnett Guffey
Art Direction: George Brooks
Music: Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco (uncredited)
Film Editing: Aaron Stell
Cast: Jim Bannon (Jack Packard), Nina Foch (Ellen Monk), George Macready (Jefferson Monk), Barton Yarborough (Doc Long), Carole Mathews (Jean Anderson), Lester Matthews (Justin Reeves/Mr. G).
BW-69m. Closed Captioning.

by Lorraine LoBianco

SOURCES:
Bannon, Jim The Son That Rose in the West
"'Between Two Weeks' Held Over at the Capital" The Montreal Gazette 14 Apr 45
http://noiroftheweek.com
Sosin, Milton "'Whodunnit' Fans Like Columbia's Series Opener" The Miami News 11 Apr 45