The Case Of The Curious Bride

Making It Legal

The Case Of The
Curious Bride
USA 1935
Directed by Michael Curtiz
Warner Archive DVD Region 1

The Case Of The Curious Bride, the second of the Warner Brothers movies based (lightly enough for th original author to actually hate them) on the famous Perry Mason novels by Erle Stanley Gardner, once again stars Warren William as the famous legal hotshot. But already, by the second film in the series, it’s a very different kind of movie from the first one. It also has a very famous director in the form of Michael Curtiz, who would direct many popular (too numerous to mention them all) Hollywood classics in his career such as Yankee Doodle Dandy, The Commancheros and, of course, Casablanca. I’ll name a couple more of this director’s movies in a little while when they become very relevant to one of the minor actors here, just a step up from an extra, in this movie towards the end of this review.

Okay, so I said this was a very different kind of Perry Mason and I certainly mean it. The film pretty much transforms the story and characters into a very frothy, funny romp, starting off with a scene where Mason practically takes over a restaurant in order to prepare a meal. And it’s almost as if the scriptwriters are trying too hard to make it witty and funny and... they don’t let up all the way through. It’s not quite like watching The Marx Brothers at work but it is a little inappropriately handled for a Perry Mason adventure, I would say. It even has a scene where Mason’s detective assistant ‘Spudsy’ Drake accidentally subjects Mason and himself to tear gas and the two have a touching scene where they are crying for comic effect. This movie really is skating on thin ice but... yeah... it just about gets away with it, I think.

And talking of ‘Spudsy’... he’s played by Allen Jenkins, who played the disgruntled police detective in the previous movie (eagle eyed veterans might also remember him as the original version of Goldie Locke in at least one of the early Falcon films). We also have a new Della Street already, this time in the form of actress Claire Dodd. She does alright here though, at least as good as the last person and ably assists Perry when she can, as he gets involved with an old flame who is now married to one person and who was married to another who was legally dead for four years except... now he’s turned up again. However, he doesn’t turn up for very long as he’s soon bumped off for real and she is now the prime suspect. The corpse in question is played by an actor who would soon be even more famous than the director and, okay, I’ll get to that in a minute.

What’s really interesting here is the amount of crude but persistent camera movement in this movie, which seems a little out of place for its time, this close to the transition from silent films into talkies... maybe this was when the equipment started getting quieter to move about again. Anyway, there seems to be a lot of dollying up to characters like a kind of ‘do it yourself’ zoom shot and, also, there’s some very nice footage of a low key car chase where the car behind is shot from the back of another car with a very dynamic set of sweeping camera movements. This really does seem ahead of its time for 1935.

The shots seem to get more elabourate as the film wears on, too. There’s a really odd shot where Della is looking into the camera longingly after Perry has left and the shot just holds for way too long before she suddenly freezes altogether and the frame seems to push in like a zoom into the camera. Not long after this, the director starts using something similar to transition from scene to scene. So, for instance, he’ll dolly out of a shot at the end of a scene and then it will blur and dissolve into him dollying into the exterior of a building, acting as an establishing shot, which will in turn dissolve out as he dollies into the next scene within that location. So, yeah, a very specific visual language is being established by Curtiz as the film progresses. It’s distracting but interesting and I wonder if he was just experimenting with what he could get away with here.

Okay, so I’ve mentioned the comedy and I’ve mentioned the convoluted camera moves... let’s talk about the corpse of the murdered ‘former’ husband. Well, we see him for a few seconds with a sheet over him without getting a look at his face. Luckily, a flashback revealing how he died takes place in the last five minutes or so of the film where the character gets into a fight and then gets accidentally pushed back onto a broken glasss before we see the life fade out of his eyes. He has no lines and he’s on screen for maybe not much more than a minute but this is the fourth little part for an up and coming Tasmanian actor the world would soon know more of, namely, Errol Flynn. I can only assume the director met him while working on this movie and he would, that same year, direct him starring in what would be his break out role from extra to star, Captain Blood. The two would work on many more movies together such as The Charge Of The Light Brigade, The Adventures Of Robin Hood and Dodge City. So, yeah, this movie is worth watching just to see the start of this famous director/actor working relationship.

One last curious thing which I should possibly mention is that, this being a Perry Mason story, there is no courtroom scene in this one at all. Instead, Perry throws a party for a number of guests at short notice (why the heck they all came is anyone’s guess) and unmasks the real culprit (who he will go on to defend after the film is finished, we are told) at the party. So, hmm, don’t know if this was the case in Gardner’s original novel but, I’m guessing not and it seems strange to me to have a film about a famous lawyer and not have any time in court. Still, even for all it’s faults, The Case Of The Curious Bride was certainly an interesting movie and I had a good time with it. I’m looking forward to watching the next one to see if they decided to carry the tone over from this one or not. As always, I’ll let you know.