WHY, IT’S ELEMENTARY

Look, I've found something! I bet this advances the plot!

Here’s another nice panel length poster for the 1937 mystery comedy Super-Sleuth. The term “door panel,” which is a commonly used designation, is a bit deceptive. These are nowhere near the size of a door. The dimensions are twenty by sixty, or sometimes fourteen by thirty-six—in any case around three times taller than wide. The dimensions of this one aren’t actually quite there. It’s closer to two-point-five-to one. Close enough, as far as we’re concerned. Anyway, we’ve been unearthing a lot of this style of promo lately, and we like them because the arrangement of visual elements and text are pleasing to our amateur eyes.

In the movie, an egotistical actor played by Jack Oakie, whose signature character is a sleuth, criticizes the LAPD and ends up in a press feud with them. He’s been critical because he and other Hollywood stars have been receiving threatening letters from “the Poison Pen,” but the cops have no idea who’s sending them. Oakie gets his chance to prove whether he can be a real life sleuth when there’s a shooting on his movie set. While Super-Sleuth is billed as slapstick mystery, the mystery part is not delivered. There’s only ever one true suspect. We suppose it’s difficult to write in red herrings and twists when a film is 75 minutes long. Still, having the sinister and secretive weirdo be the murderer is a little too elementary.

Though many of the characters, including Oakie, are buffoons, there’s also, it must be noted, a ridiculous black stereotype played by Willie Best, who sometimes acted under the moniker Sleep ‘n’ Eat. He’s often reviled for his portrayals now, but in a 1934 interview he said, “What’s an actor going to do? Either you do it or get out.” It’s the dilemma of all actors—do your level best with what you’re given or end up on the do-not-hire list. Super-Sleuth doesn’t give its actors a lot to work with, but Oakie, Best, the beautiful Ann Sothern and the rest put their all into it and the result is a passable slapstick (non) mystery with a handful of genuine laughs. It premiered in the U.S. today in 1937.

Super-Sleuth, Jack Oakie, Ann Sothern, Eduardo Ciannelli, Alan Bruce, Joan Woodbury, Willie Best, poster art, cinema, movie review

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

February 13

1935—Jury Finds Hauptmann Guilty

A jury in Flemington, New Jersey finds Bruno Hauptmann guilty of the 1932 kidnapping and murder of the Lindbergh baby, the son of Charles Lindbergh. Hauptmann is sentenced to death and executed in 1936. For decades, his widow Anna, fights to have his named cleared, claiming that Hauptmann did not commit the crime, and was instead a victim of prosecutorial misconduct, but her claims are ultimately dismissed in 1984 after the U.S. Supreme Court refuses to address the case.

February 12

1961—Soviets Launch Venus Probe

The U.S.S.R. launches the spacecraft Venera 1, equipped with scientific instruments to measure solar wind, micrometeorites, and cosmic radiation, towards planet Venus. The craft is the first modern planetary probe. Among its many achievements, it confirms the presence of solar wind in deep space, but overheats due to the failure of a sensor before its Venus mission is completed.

February 12

1994—Thieves Steal Munch Masterpiece

In Oslo, Norway, a pair of art thieves steal one of the world’s best-known paintings, Edvard Munch’s “The Scream,” from a gallery in the Norwegian capital. The two men take less than a minute to climb a ladder, smash through a window of the National Art Museum, and remove the painting from the wall with wire cutters. After a ransom demand the museum refuses to pay, police manage to locate the panting in May, and the two thieves, as well as two accomplices, are arrested.

February 11

1938—BBC Airs First Sci-Fi Program

BBC Television produces the first ever science fiction television program, an adaptation of a section of Czech writer Karel Capek’s dark play R.U.R., aka, Rossum’s Universal Robots. The robots in the play are not robots in the modern sense of machines, but rather are biological entities that can be mistaken for humans. Nevertheless, R.U.R. featured the first known usage of the term “robot”.

February 10

1962—Powers Is Traded for Abel

Captured American spy pilot Gary Powers, who had been shot down over the Soviet Union in May 1960 while flying a U-2 high-altitude jet, is exchanged for captured Soviet spy Rudolf Abel, who had been arrested in New York City in 1957.