GREEN EYES
US, 1934, 68 minutes, Black-and-white.
Shirley Gray, Charles Starrett, Claude Gillingwater, John Wray, William Bakewell, Dorothy Rivier, Stephen Chase, Arthur Clayton.
Directed by Richard Thorpe.
Green Eyes is a typical enough murder mystery, small-budget supporting feature of the early 1930s. It is modelled on theatrical plays rather than on opened up screenplays, practically all of the action taking place within a house, upstairs and downstairs.
There is a murder very early in the film, an entrepreneur killed in his room, wearing Chinese clothes and mask on the occasion of a fancy dress party. There are quite a lot of suspects. One of the suspicious aspects is that the granddaughter of the murdered man drives away with her boyfriend, having cut the cables in all the other cars, but then pulled up by the police and brought back for the interrogation.
The police investigators are routine enough. However, at the party is a writer of detective stories. He is played by one of the popular actors of this time and into the 40s, Charles Starrett. He wanders around the house, looking smart, if not smug, dropping hints, collecting material for the novel. Of course, it is he who works out what happened and confronts the murderer.
Amongst the suspects, apart from the granddaughter and her boyfriend, the granddaughter having been seen going into the grandfather’s room, are the loyal maid, a tough type, a visiting miner from Mexico who had dealings with the dead man in the past, the dead man’s accountant and his wife.
Most of the action consists of the suspects being interrogated, the variety of stories, lies told – with a couple of flashbacks especially concerning the grandfather reprimanding his granddaughter and her wanting to marry whomever she liked and putting $12,000 in a box for when she came to her senses!
Then the tycoon from Mexico is also murdered.
The novelist does more checking on things than do the police and comes up with the solution, confronting the accountant, vast discrepancies in the accounts, a rather luxury lifestyle for himself and his wife – and his attempt to murder the novelist but tables being turned.
In a different kind of ending, rather than the culprits being arrested, the accountant shoots his wife and then himself. And the novelist put the finishing touches on his novel.
Directed by Richard Thorpe who made a number of standard films like this in the 1930s, had bigger budgets in the 1940s, moving to MGM and in the 1950s directing such action adventures as The Knights of the Round Table and Quentin Durward.
