A Lady Detective Holiday: MURDER ON A BRIDLE PATH

Lady Detectives seem to be standard fare in these enlightened times, but they were few and amateur back in olden days.  Single girls or spinsters, schoolmarms or nurses, they found themselves fortuitously on the scene of a murder presided over by their old acquaintance, the blustering boob of a cop.  Spotting with their female eye for detail the vital clue, they consistently save the ass of their grudgingly grateful foil and step back into obscurity when the flashbulbs start popping, as a lady ought to do.

Murder on a Bridle Path (1936) is the middle "gem" in the diadem of films featuring Stuart Palmer's accidental sleuth Miss Hildegarde Withers. Played here by acerbic Helen Broderick, it bodes ill from the start with two directors named in the credits.  With a ten day cheapie like this, that probably means somebody quit or got bumped to another project and the other guy finished up.  Neither of them, and they shall be nameless here, had much to show for themselves as directors and they spent most of their time as assistant directors and editors.  It shows.  I have seen the first two Withers movies in which she is well-represented by the immaculately spinsterish Edna May Oliver, and while they are never more than standard fare, the chemistry between Oliver and her foil, Police Inspector Oscar Piper played by irascible James Gleason, provides most of the viewing value.  Here, not so much.

When an unpleasant young socialite is struck down in Central Park, clearly an accident,  up pops Hildegarde to complicate matters by pointing out the evidence that is right in front of them all.  Then a bunch of stuff happens and they go places and talk to people, Willie Best does his chagrin-inducing schtick, Dewey Robinson pops in with his giant eyebrows for one scene, and suddenly you find out who did it and it is over.  I don't often say this, but this movie stinks.  I like Helen Broderick, but all she does is pop off shots at Gleason and pick up scraps of paper that turn out to be valuable clues.  Most of these cheapies try to build mystery by having everybody talk about everything, but in this one nobody talks about anything and it is all suddenly pulled out of a hat and the killer suddenly goes through a railing at the top of the stairwell and you're done.  I lured the wife into watching this and she nodded off after ten minutes, finally bailing out one minute before the killer was revealed and she didn't even care who it was.  I didn't even care who it was.

Broderick meanders through her undemanding role without contributing much to it, although in the right circumstances she can be a real asset to a film.  Not here.  After this tiresome thing, Withers was played in two more movies by ZaSu Pitts who I fear may be even less appropriate for the role than Broderick.  The character vanished from the screen, to appear once more in a 1970s TV movie played by Eve Arden whose years as Our Miss Brooks must have prepared her adequately for the spinster schoolmarm duties.  All I know right now is that of the three I have seen, this one is the worst.  If it ever comes on TV, get some cleaning done instead.