GRAND CENTRAL MURDER

New Zealand Listener, Volume 8, Issue 203, 14 May 1943, Page 13

GRAND CENTRAL MURDER

(M-G-M)

DON’T want to sound petulant, but oh, I would like to see just a few nice simple films with a beginning, a middle and an end so that I could sit

back in my ceat and feel that I had the threads of the story in my hands. But when I’m thrust from flash one (a list of the players but. not a . word of the parts they are going to — play), to flash two and three (elaborate © lists -of Messrs." Wurzel-Murzel and ~ Mungel-Wungel and their multitudinous tripod shifting gown designing hairdoing jobs) and thence to flash four,

five etc. of a bewildering succession of escapes by Someone from Something or Somebody all among the trains in Crand Central Station, well, I do begin to wonder when one of the characters will sit still for a moment and explain just how Grand Central Murder begins. But here is this dcesperately>.caping man busy burrowing a dime from a workman ("I’ll do as much for you one day"), to make a call to a mighty sulky-looking vaudeville actress. Oh, she screams, it’s Turk; he’s out He'll kill me. All right. He’s Turk, She’s Mida King. So where do we go from here? First we see Mida rushing very fur-coated from the theatre; she says she’s going to David’s private car at Grand Central, Turk’ll never find her there. And then we see-Oh, Mr. Van Heflin, why are you hiding in that dark corner, and who is the dame with you? All right, she’s to meet you in half-an-hour, so we’ll find out in good time, (We do. It’s his wife. She’s helping him, He’s a private detective trying to clear Turk. Though we never find out what Turk hasn’t done). So then we see Turk rushing about Grand Central with all sorts of G-men and so on on his trail. And then we see everybody plus a whole lot of people we’ve neyer even heard of before, but they’re all suspects, including Mr. Van Heflin, for the murder of Mida King, whose body has been found ("A Beautiful Job, Inspector, not a mark or a bruise on her"), in the locked private car in which she and Wealthy Young David were Going South that night to be married. So then they all go back to the theatre and rehearse everything very retrospectively, and then they all so to the Grand Central Station where, after a great deal of Clever Deduction, "fr. Van Heflin solves the nasty crime. Well, what’s the matter with me? Vhere’s the story; at least there are the bones of the story, and rattling good bones, too. Yes, and some jolly fine bodies they hung on those bonesPatricia Dane, Cecilia Parker and Virginia Grey. But you know, if it hadn’t been for Mr. Van Heflin, just where would that film have been? My guess is that its component parts would have been scattered, by anti-centrifugal action, to the 12 winds of the sky. But Mr. Van Heflin, with his Cagney-like casualness, his hard-working, very effective hands, and his friendly look of never having been a film star and of never having won an Academy Award; well, Mr. Van Heflin is the works again, as he was in Johnny Eager. |