Murder on a Honeymoon (1935)

(On Cable TV, June 2021) It may not be much of a film, but Murder on a Honeymoon does bring together two of my favourite things of 1930s Hollywood — the amateur-sleuth genre, and Edna Mae Oliver. I have a lot of sympathy for those numerous B-movies that featured an ordinary person suddenly asked to investigate a murder. There were frequently short (as in: 60 to 75 minutes), witty, fiercely plot-driven, surprisingly reflective of their time and still often a pure joy to watch. Meanwhile, Oliver wasn’t a beauty by any means — but her tall, thin and severe appearance belied a sharp talent for comedy and an incredibly distinctive screen appearance even decades later. Murder on a Honeymoon was the third “Hildegarde Withers” mystery — Oliver’s third and last in a six-film series churned in five years. Withers is a school teacher who, thanks to her origin in a series of novels, often finds herself sleuthing around murders happening in her vicinity. Here, a holiday in Santa Carolina gives her another opportunity to investigate a case in which organized crime is involved and bodies keep hitting the floor. The tone is comic but the whodunit is authentic — she gathers the clues and ultimately confronts the suspect. Oliver is thoroughly enjoyable here, adding quite a bit of likability to a film that would have been more than adequate merely by itself. Such 1930s amateur-sleuth films keep scratching a persistent itch for no-nonsense murder mysteries: I don’t need to tell you that such films have almost completely disappeared from the cinematic landscape, and that’s too bad.