THE GARDEN MURDER CASE

US, 1936, 61 minutes, Black and white.
Edmund Lowe, Virginia Bruce, Bernita Hume, Douglas Walton, Nat Pendleton, Gene Lockhart, H.B.Warner, Kent Smith, Grant Mitchell, Frieda Inescort, Henry B.Walthall, Jessie Ralph, Charles Trowbridge, Etienne Girardot.
Directed by Edwin L. Marin.


This is a Philo Vance murder investigation, based on the popular novels by S.S.Van Dine. There were several films with William Powell and Warren William as Vance. In the 1940s, Vance was played by Alan Curtis.

This is an MGM production, from the back lot, with a reference to Garbo in the screenplay, reminding audiences that this was the year of Camille, San Francisco, The Great Ziegfeld. However, along with Edmund Lowe as Vance, a genial presence, there is a very strong supporting cast of character actors, quite surprising in its extent. The film offers the opportunity for audiences to see H.B.Warner in a very different role from King of Kings, as a charlatan, posing as an aristocrat, trying to hypnotise Philo Vance. Frieda Inicort plays his wife.

The main action takes place at a racecourse, introducing most of the characters, Gene Lockhart as an obnoxious millionaire, critical of his niece, Virginia Bruce and her boyfriend, Kent Smith. The jockey, Douglas Walton, behaves strangely, indicating that he has to fall from his horse and break his neck. That happens. Later, at the millionaire’s mansion, everybody is gathered for the investigation. Nat Pendleton does his usual comic shtick as a policeman. Henry B Walthall is the father of the jockey while Jessie Ralph, overacting in her way, is the mother of the millionaire.

There are a number of emerging clues while the audience has seen the effect of hypnosis. There is another murder from a city bus, somebody faking a phone call to an immigration official to get rid of the nurse who is in a relationship with the millionaire.

When Philo Vance is explaining the effect of a python to the niece, he realises the basis of hypnosis and goes back for a long sequence where Warner tries to hypnotise him so that he will fall to his death.

The director made several of the Maisie films and, at the end of his career, a number of westerns with Randolph Scott.