Lady Detective Holiday - ADVENTURES OF KITTY O'DAY

Adventures of Kitty O'Day (1944) stars the mildly attractive, yet strangely forgettable, Jean Parker as the hotel switchboard operator who reads detective magazines and listens in on people's calls, so she naturally overhears a murder.  She is not so much a detective as a nosy meddler, and this is not so much a mystery as it is a farce of the vanishing corpse variety.  The story is so unimportant to the film that it is left to a brief unintelligible explanatory monologue at the end, but nobody in it or watching it gives a damn who did what to who and why.  Directed by world champion hack William Beaudine, this is a formulaic stand-in for a detective story, just as the characters are formulaic stand-ins for real people.  They are types - the nosy meddler, her frustrated boyfriend, the vamp, the overdressed older woman, the angry police detective and his absurd sidekick.  The types are played by actors who fit the role and who can get the job done as quickly as possible.  I knew when I saw Parker that I had seen her before a bunch of times but couldn't remember where or when.  I am still having trouble remembering her name.  Here she is with ever-present Byron Foulger, doing his bit as desk clerk.

Parker had a career of over 30 years with numerous starring roles, almost entirely in B movies.  She was in a few notable films, such as Little Women (1933) and Laurel and Hardy's Flying Deuces (1939), but mostly appeared in anything that needed someone to be The Girl opposite a handsome action man; adequately entertaining minor productions like No Hands on the Clock (1941) and Wrecking Crew (1942) with Chester Morris and Alaska Highway (1943) with Richard Arlen.

The only contact this movie has with the outside world is a couple of references to the "manpower shortage," which pops up a lot in movies from this period of the war.  Even its brief "outdoor" scenes consist of one tiny set with two park benches and some shrubbery. A cultural note of minor interest is one of the few film appearances of  Shelton Brooks, seen here as Jeff the Custodian along with what's his name who did something or other in the movie.  Brooks was an old time minstrel and vaudevillean, who composed the standard Dark Town Strutters' Ball, and Sophie Tucker's signature tune Some of These Days.

I think I have made it pretty clear that there is not much to this - the second half devolves into a lot of chasing around and everyone eventually goes down the laundry chute, but in the part that relies on dialogue between a few people standing in an unnatural arc roughly facing the camera, it has some laughs.  It is mostly inoffensive, and that is sometimes enough.