One might not realize how important ambient sound is to a movie until you see a picture without it. In the earliest days of the talkie era, pictures often had little more audio than voices. It’s as if they should have labeled them “only talkies”. The resulting effect is worse than a silent movie, as it will have the beats of a picture in the sound era, but every scene feels like it takes an abnormally long time to play out. The long takes, usually with a locked-down camera, become interminable.
Such is the case with 1929’s The Canary Murder Case, which was made only two years after The Jazz Singer was deemed the first talking motion picture, though that is up for debate. Even the opening titles of this look like something from before the sound era and would have looked out-of-place just a couple of years later. It is little things like this which illustrate the shocking rate of change at the time.
I was also surprised to see Louise Brooks in this, as I always think of her as an icon of the silent age, forgetting her best work would be the films she would make in Europe and all after the advent of sound. Here, she is the title character, a singer billed as “The Canary”. She has a name as well, but everybody keeps calling her by this stage name long after she’s dead, which seems disrespectful.
In the brief time she’s alive, we will see some of her stage performance, which seems to consist largely of swinging on a trapeze out over the audience. Seems like kind of a lame act to me, though this sequence is the most visually impressive. A fairly lavish set on the multi-story stage turns this into quite the spectacle.
Watching from a balcony box are Charles Lane and William Powell. Powell is younger than I have ever seen him before, which doesn’t mean he’s exactly young. He tells Lane about the various suitors pursuing Brooks, one of which is Lane’s son (James Hall). Lane says he is determined to head off at the pass any impending nuptials between Hall and Brooks, and says he will be going to her apartment that night to put his foot down.
The other men orbiting her are family man Louis John Bartels and a doctor played by Gustav von Seyffertitz. It is no surprise gold-digging Brooks is willing to blackmail the former. Of the latter, she dismisses this cash cow once she thinks she has her hooks into Hall. Both men will be lurking outside her apartment building later. It was already a busy night around her place, and then ex-husband Ned Sparks arrives. This gangster is freshly escaped from prison, and he wants some of that blackmail money Brooks intends to get from Bartels.
Then there’s Lane, who shows up to confront her. Brooks looks a bit intimidating, as she is wear some peculiar black outfit with many large feathers around the shoulders, making her look like one of the Skeksis. She laughs off his demands, saying that, if he tries to block their marriage, she will tell the papers his son has been embezzling money from Lane’s firm. It doesn’t matter that isn’t true—she knows this will ruin his reputation and he’ll never be employed anywhere again. I say that, given how seemingly all transgressions of white collar crime are conveniently forgotten today, maybe Hall just needed to wait nearly 100 years. Maybe he’d even be given a cabinet position.
Also in the mix is Jean Arthur as Hall’s current flame, and who conveniently lives right next to Brooks. I can’t help but think that was awkward.
The next day, Lane stops by Brook’s apartment and she doesn’t answer the door. A woman’s voice does come through the door, telling him to return later, but it didn’t sound to me like her voice. Shortly after that, there’s a scream from the apartment and it is discovered she is dead. Powell will reenter the picture as the private detective who investigates alongside the police.
I was surprised the first cop on the scene is careful not to leave any fingerprints, given fingerprints had only been a recent development. I should clarify—the fingerprinting technique was relatively new. People didn’t have perfectly smooth skin at the end of their fingers before then, though it would amuse me if I could convince anybody of that.
There’s all kinds of minor weirdness, some of which may have been elements common to the time but which seem peculiar today. Seyffertitz ‘s monogrammed cigar bands seem like a pointlessly excessive extravagance, but the wealthy do seem to like most things that are expensive and unnecessary. I wondered if the guy had anything else like this, like maybe embroidered toilet paper.
The performances are all lackluster, but it may have been the combination of a mediocre script and the filmmakers still trying to get a grasp on that newfangled sound technology. Especially odd are awkward pauses after many of the lines, similar to what the Marx Brothers did to allow time for laughs to subside. Only problem is, there aren’t any funny lines here. Eugene Pallette, as a detective, definitely could have done wonders with some, so his presence here is a wasted opportunity.
Very little happens in the runtime, cramming 60 minutes of material into a little over an hour and a half. One of the weirdest moments is something that happens unexpectedly and isn’t even necessary to the plot. I won’t spoil that, but I am going to say a poker game takes an insane amount of the runtime and is just as exciting as they are in any other movie not directed by David Mamet. Which is to say, it isn’t interesting at all. It feels like that game takes twice as long because of all the lulls in the dialogue.
The Canary Murder Case is interesting only as an example of the odd period when the studios desperately wanted to adjust to a new technology but had yet to figure out how to best utilize it. The great many moments of silence make one fully realize what is meant by “dead air”.
Dir: Malcolm St. Clair
Starring William Powell, James Hall, Louise Brooks, Jean Arthur
Watched as part of Kino Lorber’s blu-ray set Philo Vance Collection