The Crime Doctor's Courage (1945)

... might be a better title than the vague "Crime Doctor's Courage".The film starts by showing a young couple on their honeymoon. The new bride insists on going to the edge of a rocky cliff. Her husband (Stephen Crane as Gordon Carson) wants her to move away from the edge because his first wife died in an accident during the first week of their marriage just a year ago. She hit her head while swimming, it was ruled an accident, but the deceased bride's brother still thought it was murder.The couple argue. During the argument, Gordon's new wife pulls away from him, loses her footing and falls off of the cliff to her death. The sheriff calls it an accident, but the brother of the first wife believes that now Gordon is some kind of maniac that enjoys marrying women and then killing them in ways that look like accidents. His parting words to the sheriff are "Who will it be next year?".The answer to that question is Hillary Brooke as Kathleen Carson. She interrupts Dr. Robert Ordway (Warner Baxter) the psychiatrist on a vacation to sunny California that he is taking on doctor's orders. Kathleen has only been married one day and believes her husband could be insane. She asks Ordway to dinner to observe her husband. There are quite a few people at the dinner besides Ordway and the Carsons, and one of the servants is actually the first bride's brother who apparently has been popping up all over the place for the last year urging Gordon to either commit himself to an asylum or commit suicide before he kills someone else. Gordon is obviously troubled, retires to his study alone, and a shot rings out. Ordway and crime novelist Jeff Jerome (Jerome Cowan) burst in and find a gun near the body of Gordon, but the gun is cold. Somebody has tried to cover the murder of Gordon Carson with a fake suicide. But who could murder Gordon when he is locked inside his study and there are bars on the only window?Ordway finds his help unwanted by the local police, but he can't help coming across clue after clue. For one, the newly widowed Kathleen disappears right after the murder, hiding at the castle like home of the mysterious Braggas. A new will leaving everything of Gordon's to Kathleen was made out the day before Gordon's death. As for the mysterious Braggas, nobody has ever seen them out after dark, there is a portrait of them that is apparently 300 years old, they keep coffins in their basement, and they perform a dancing act at a local club in which one family member disappears and then just as mysteriously reappears. Did I mention that Miguel Bragga is in love with Kathleen? Could a vampire that can disappear and reappear at will possibly be the murderer? Watch and find out in this atmospheric entry to the crime doctor series. There are more suspects than I mention here, so it is not so cut and dried as you might think and remember, this is the crime doctor we're talking about, a man of science and reason, not Kolchak the night stalker! Highly recommended.

In "The Crime Doctor's Courage," Dr. Ordway investigates the death of a man thought of as a black widower - both his wives plunged to their deaths on their honeymoons. The investigation leads to brother and sister Spanish dancers who might be vampires - no mirrors, one of them disappears during their dance number, and no one sees them during the day. The third wife of the black widower becomes engaged to the male dancer, and the plot thickens.The plot is all over the place, but it's quite entertaining nonetheless. The other mysteries I've seen in this series have been pretty good. This one features, besides Warner Baxter as Dr. Ordway, Jerome Cowan and Hillary Brooke.Baxter, who at one point made more money than any other star of his era, suffered a nervous breakdown, and these films offered him a chance to work without killing himself. He's so laid back and casual with his speech - it almost seems like he's ad-libbing. He lived for another six years after this film was made and after a lobotomy, developed pneumonia and died.These films were made very quickly, so little details were often missed. These Spanish dancers supposedly have this amazing act where the female disappears in the midst of it and then reappears - yet they're doing it in this little club. They receive polite applause, and afterward, the host gets up and says that the audience may be wondering about the disappearance mid-dance, but it's no trick. The dancers have the ability to make themselves invisible. Tepid applause. A statement like that deserved a little more!

As Doctor Robert Ordway, the Crime Doctor, Warner Baxter gets involved in all kinds of mysteries. But one usually doesn't get invitations to dinner like this even from beautiful women like Hillary Brooke.Brooke married Stephen Crane whose two previous brides both had accidental deaths. For some odd reason, she's beginning to have second thoughts about the marriage. So the famous Crime Doctor is invited for dinner and a consultation to observe the behavior of her husband.In true murder mystery style the husband is shot to death last night in a locked room with the house still full of guests. Baxter calls the police and Captaine Emory Parnell arrives on the scene. Of course Baxter is no small help in eventually arriving at the identity of the culprit though another murder takes place.We've even got the supernatural involved because one of the suspects is half of a mysterious Spanish dancing team of Anthony Caruso and Lupita Tovar. They're suspected of being vampires.The Crime Doctor's Courage I'm sure didn't people running for the exits when it played the bottom half of double bills in the Forties. One thing I will say though, the behavior of one of the suspects during a scene that didn't involve Baxter kind of gave away the identity of the murderer. Still it's a passable enough murder mystery.

Of the original Oscar winning actors (prior to Lionel Barrymore, Fredric March and Charles Laughton), an unfair curtain of neglect has descended on them. In one case, Emil Jannings (the first Best Actor winner), he only had himself to blame because he insisted on not only working for Germany in the Nazi period, but he was a full throated supporter of Nazi policies. Despite doing some first rate work after 1927 (including Profesor Emanuel Rath in Von Sternberg's THE BLUE ANGEL), most of his film work is ignored as Nazi propaganda. The second winner - well more about him in a moment. The third was the splendid George Arliss, the first British actor to win Best Actor (for DISRAELI) and who really gave pretty entertaining performances in his talkies that hold up pretty well. But too many modern critics decry his many "biographical" films, claiming he made Dizzy, Alexander Hamilton, Cardinal Richelieu, Nathan Rothschild, Voltaire, and the Duke of Wellington all look alike and all seem to have two traits: reorganizing or saving society, and uniting young lovers. Actually, Disraeli, Richelieu, and Voltaire do look something alike from their paintings and pictures, but Hamilton, Rothschild, and Wellington don't look alike.As for the second winner (and first American born actor to win the Best Actor Oscar), Warner Baxter is a peculiar case indeed. From 1928 through 1933 he was turned into a cog in the Hollywood dream factory, turning out one picture after another in rapid succession. Most of these (including his Oscar Winner, In OLD ARIZONA) are rarely shown. Yet some of them (SUCH MEN ARE DANGEROUS, DADDY LONGLEGS, TWELVE HOURS TO LIVE) are pretty good performances. Later films he made showed he was not a performer to brush aside: THE ROAD TO GLORY about the hopeless trench warfare of World War I, THE PRISONER OF SHARK ISLAND about Dr. Samuel Mudd, and KIDNAPPED based on the Stevenson novel, were all worthy films. Yet most people, when asked for his typical film role, recall only one (maybe they'll recall SHARK ISLAND too): Julian Marsh in 42ND STREET. His fate was to be broken by overwork. His last major performance in a leading production was as "Kendall Nesbit" the wealthy publisher and suitor in Mitchell Leisin's LADY IN THE DARK (1941) with Ginger Rogers, Ray Milland, and Jon Hall. He also played the title role in ADAM HAD FOUR SONS which helped introduce Ingrid Bergman and Susan Hayward (as "good" girl and "bad" girl respectively) to American audiences. But he suffered a nervous breakdown due to overwork in the early 1940s. So his output decreased afterward. And his appearances were somewhat easier to take - his intensity was removed, for better or worse.It was Baxter's luck that he got a detective series' role to play with. In 1943 he first appeared as psychiatrist, Dr. Robert Ordway. Ordway gets the moniker of "the Crime Doctor"* in his series, and solves murders like Nick Charles or Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe. Yet the films about those three sleuths (and Charlie Chan and Mr. Moto) are still remembered quite fondly, whereas "The Crime Doctor" series was as forgotten as Chester Morris' "Boston Blackie" or George Sanders / Tom Conway "The Falcon". (*Interestingly enough, in the unrelated Sherlock Holmes spoof, WITHOUT A CLUE, Ben Kingsley as Dr. Watson offers his services to a skeptical Scotland Yard as a replacement detective to Holmes, to be called "the Crime Doctor"!)The series did have a good number of character actors supporting Baxter. In THE CRIME DOCTOR'S COURAGE the cast included Jerome Cowan, Lloyd Corrigan, Hillary Brooke, and Emory Parnell. The production values may not match MGM's values for THE THIN MAN series or Warner's for THE MALTESE FALCON, but they aren't to be sneezed at. Look at the sets for the nightclub scenes in this film, where the Bragas (a brother and sister dance and magic act) perform an illusion in which the sister vanishes in front of the audience. It does look like a realistic theater setting. Dr. Ordway is on a vacation trip to California, and gets drawn into the murder of a fortune hunter. The man apparently committed suicide in a locked room. Ordway is certain the victim was murdered. Gradually methods of entry are turned up (one by Corrigan, who notices a trap door's frame under the carpet - oddly the police did not notice it). The plot soon bogs down into motives and theories of guilt. The Bragas are odd - they never appear out of their home before sundown. They have no mirrors in their home or in their make-up room in the nightclub. And at least one seems able to be invisible. Could they be vampires?Baxter does solve the case later, and finds a more prosaic explanation. But the film lacks any sense of reality - it gets so bogged down in details about the supernatural that one suspects it should have stayed in that area for it's solution. Also, Baxter is workmanlike in his detective work, but he's too relaxed (even in his final battle with the villain). One gets the impression that the production staff decided to go easy on him due to the recent breakdown.My favorite character in this is Emory Parnell as Lt. Birch. Typically impatient and ham-handed (like Donald MacBride or Nat Pendleton in similar films), he admits (at one point) to Baxter that his father wanted him to have a career as a real estate broker. As the film ends, we realize that Parnell would have been an excellent real estate broker!