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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 9, No. 18 |
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BOOK AND FILM A Comparison of the Book with the Film Made From It |
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S.S. Van Dine's "THE GRACIE ALLEN MURDER CASE" The 1938 Novel The 1939 Film |
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Gracie Allen, Philo Vance
mix like oil and water
of TheColumnists.com
Certainly one of the oddest match-ups in mystery history came in 1938 when best-selling mystery novelist S.S. Van Dine decided to put two of his real-life celebrity friends--comedienne Gracie Allen and her husband, George Burns--into a mystery as characters involved with his celebrated fictional sleuth Philo Vance.
The result was "The Gracie Allen Murder Case." If the book sounded like a movie deal in the making, that suspicion was confirmed a year later when Paramount released the movie version, starring Warren William as Philo Vance and--what a surprise!--Gracie Allen as herself. The script came first and then the book, which may account for why they're so remarkably different.
In my view, both Philo Vance and Gracie Allen are "acquired tastes" that I've been trying, in vain, to acquire for more than half a century.
After reading quite a few of the original Philo Vance novels and seeing the films made from them, I've concluded Vance was a pompous ass and more or less the American version of Dorothy L. Sayers' titled English sleuth Lord Peter Wimsey. As for Gracie Allen, her oddball brand of numb-brain daffiness is best taken in very small quantities.
Putting these two characters together may have seemed like an inspired idea in 1938, but it now looks like something Van Dine dreamed up on a dare, possibly after having too many sloe gin fizzes.
Author Van Dine, a make believe person concocted by Willard Hutington Wright, an art critic and editor when he wasn't writing mystery novels, usually appeared in the Philo Vance stories as the Dr. Watson-like narrator and sidekick to the wealthy and overwhelmingly erudite Vance. He's there in the book version of "The Gracie Allen Murder Case," but he doesn't show up in the movie.
In fact, the screenplay by Nat Perrin is superior to the novel, so it's too bad Van Dine didn't just adapt Perrin's script as a book instead of writing his own much weaker version of the story. For my taste, "The Gracie Allen Murder Case" is by far the worst of the Philo Vance novels and would have been an even crummier movie than it became with Perrin's script.
In the novel, Vance meets Gracie Allen by accident and is rather smitten by her. He often refers to her as a "child" and clearly finds her awfully attractive. When we meet her in the book, she's still single and is working at a perfume factory where her boyfriend, George Burns, is an expert "scentologist" who mixes up new perfumes for the marketplace.
If you're familiar with Gracie's comedy, you'll know that she constantly told improbable stories about her brother. Or did she have several brothers? Frankly, I can't remember. In the Van Dine novel, her brother, Philip, becomes a major character and so does her mother. Both are left out of the movie.
In fact, so is George Burns. That may seem quite strange since Burns & Allen were big stars of radio in 1939, had made quite a few movies together already and always worked as a team. Maybe George read the script and realized his part didn't amount to much, so he opted out. Or, more likely, Gracie wanted to see what she could do on her own, as she did again two years later, playing Mrs. North in MGM's movie version of the radio mystery show "Mr. and Mrs. North," also without Burns.
In the book, George becomes a murder suspect and goes to jail. In the movie, this happens to a young man named Bill Brown, who fills in for the Burns character, but never gets very romantic with Gracie. (His on-screen romantic object is a very young Ellen Drew)
In the book, an escaped prison convict is trying to wreak vengeance by killing New York District Attorney John F-X Markham, who sent him to prison. The convict is connected to a crime ring in which night club owner Dan Mirche is a key figure. Gracie helps Philo Vance solve the murders that take place, usually quite by accident. In one case, she finds a cigarette butt thrown from a passing car that had struck her and burned a hole in her new dress. It turns out to be laced with poison and plays a key role in Vance's solution of the crimes that complicate the mystery.
The movie retains that plotline, but scrambles it up quite a bit, having the gown-burning accident happen at a family picnic sponsored by the perfume company run by a relative of Gracie's. Perrin's script also kills off one character--sexy dancer Dixie Del Marr--who's alive and kicking when the book ends.
One great improvement the movie makes over the book comes in the comic banter assigned to Gracie. Van Dine couldn't write comedy lines very well because her routines in the book aren't at all funny and just underscore the dumbness of the Gracie character.
Perrin does a much better job with Gracie's lines, especially in one scene where Vance comes up with a major clue and Gracie tells him he has "the nose of a greyhound." Warren William, who's playing Vance, had a fairly prominent nose and he seems somewhat taken aback by her "compliment" until she adds, "But don't worry. The rest of your face is pretty."
William, who had played Philo Vance before in "The Dragon Murder Case" (1934), seems old and burnt out in "The Gracie Allen Murder Case," even though he was only 44 when he made it. Gracie, who was 37, looked about the way she always looked. Maybe Warren William looked burnt out after too much exposure to Gracie's daffiness She really needed George Burns to keep her properly stifled and Williams' Philo Vance just isn't up to the job.
If I've left the impression that Perrin's lines for Gracie were always on target, I should correct that by pointing out an example when he missed pretty badly. In one sequence, Vance reminds Gracie, "We're here for clues," and she tells him she has a lot of them. So, naturally he asks her where and Gracie blithely answers, "In my clues closet." Ouch!
However, the movie succumbs to one temptation it should have resisted: A screwball slapstick sequence at the film's climax with Gracie riding on the back of a motorcycle driven by a cop through heavy Manhattan traffic, desperately trying to get to Vance in time to stop him from smoking a poisoned cigarette.
I guess, in conclusion, I'm suggesting you skip reading the book because it's a turkey by any standard. Watch the movie if you like, but only if you're addicted to Gracie Allen's humor. The film isn't available on DVD and isn't shown very often on television, but you can get a VHS videotape copy online for a reasonable price from either Nostalgia Family Video or its other online outlet called Hollywood's Attic.
©2008 by Ron Miller. The illustration is courtesy of Paramount Pictures and Hollywood's Attic home video. This column first posted April 21, 2008.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
writes about television mysteries for MYSTERY SCENE magazine.
You can comment on this column online. Please address your message to either "The Editors" or Ron Miller. To send an email, click here and don't forget to mention Ron's name: talkback@thecolumnists.com
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