Murder Mysteries In May: The Kennel Murder Case (1933)

I’m certainly not the only person who loves murder mysteries. Go to any bookstore and you will find shelves lined with them. Turn on the television to nearly any station and you’ll likely find one. Countless movies have been made in the genre. As I noted in my keynote it is an extremely malleable genre. It can be fitted to suit any audience’s needs.

As one might know from my yearly participation in Noirvember I am a huge fan of film noirs and the hard-boiled way of writing. It was actually the Coen Brothers who turned me on to such things. I’d heard their movie Miller’s Crossing was inspired by a couple of books from Dashiell Hammett so I went to the library and started reading him. That led me to Raymond Chandler and James M. Cain which led me to their movie adaptations and the rest is history.

But I’m getting away from myself. The Kennell Murder Case is based on a book by the same name by S.S. Van Dine. He was a conetemporary of Hammett, but his books have greatly fallen out of favor. They were getting that way by the time Chandler started writing a decade or so later. Chandler directly called Dine out in his essay on mystery writing The Simple Art of Murder in 1944.

Philo Vance was the name of Van Dine’s detective. Here he’s played by William Powell (who would find great success a year later in The Thin Man, written by Hammett). In the books, apparently, Vance is a bit of a dandy, an intellectual and aesthete who solves murders by picking up clues the police miss.

Powell (who had previous played Vance in three other films) plays the character like a prototype for Nick Charles in The Thin Man movies. He’s intelligent and upper class but not distinctly so. He’s witty at times but the script isn’t all that sharp.

The plot is basically a locked room mystery. A man is found dead inside his room. The door is locked from the inside, as are the windows. He was shot in the head and the pistol is laying by his side. Suicide is the obvious answer, but Philo Vance doesn’t think so. He just saw the man the day before at a dog race and he seemed perfectly upbeat. When the coroner realizes the cause of death was a blow to the head by a blunt object, and not the gunshot the case is on.

There are more murders and more mysteries that arise, but honestly I was bored from the begining. The pacing is sluggish. The dialogue comes with these odd pauses between lines and the scenes don’t cut out for several beats after everything that needed to be done is done. And as the dialogue isn’t all that clever, and the action not all that well done all of that slowness just makes the film seem like its longer than it actually is.

I always like William Powell, and he’s fine here, but the character is underwritten and the story so underwhelming, that I can only recommend this to die hard fans.