'The Penguin Pool Murder' is a great start for Miss Withers

The Penguin Pool Murder (1932)
Starring: Edna May Oliver, James Gleason, Clarence Wilson, Mae Clarke, Robert Armstrong, Donald Cook, and Guy Usher
Director: George Archainbaud
Rating: Seven of Ten Stars

When a wife-beating, crooked stockbroker (Usher) is murdered, his wife (Clarke) and her one-time boyfriend (Cook) are the obvious suspects. Sharp-eyed and sharp-tongued school teacher Miss Hildegard Withers (Oliver), who found the body, thinks there's more to the situation, and she badgers Inspector Oscar Piper (Gleason) to keep digging into what seems like an open-and-shut case.

"The Penguin Pool Murders" is a breezy mystery with a cast so charismatic and likeable that one almost forgets the dark subject matter at its heart--spousal that may have led to murder. Because the cast is so likeable, I also find myself forgiving the film for, essentially, being a one-suspect mystery, and becoming evenmoreso when the character that I zero'ed in on as the murderer almost immediately starts becoming super-helpful with the investigation; the film is simply too much fun for that flaw to drag it down too much.

Another strength of the film is the interplay between the two main characters, Miss Withers and Inspector Piper. They start out with obvious disdain for each other, but when they realize that each is actually much smarter than they initially gave each other credit for, you can see the mutual respect develop between them... and by the end, a romantic relationship is under way. (And speaking of romance, the *obvious* one--the one we expect involving the young couple in the story--involves a couple nice twists that also make this film stand out.

"The Penguin Pool Murder" was the first of six films with Gleason as Inspector Piper, and of three with Oliver as Miss Withers. I hope every entry in the series is as strong as this one.

'Women's Prison' isn't very arresting, but still worth watching

Women's Prison (1955)
Starring: Ida Lupino, Jan Sterling, Audrey Totter, Phyllis Thaxter, Howard Duff, Barry Kelley, Warren Stevens, Mae Clarke, Gertrude Michael, and Cleo Moore
Director: Lewis Seiler
Rating: Six of Ten Stars

Amelia Van Zandt (Lupino) is the warden of a women's prison who runs her institution with an iron fist, dominating the lives of both prisoners and prison matrons. Her fiercely controlled world starts coming unraveled when her abuses of a delicate housewife incarcerated for involuntary manslaughter (Thaxter) and a prisoner who becomes pregnant (Totter) when her husband (Stevens)--who is incarcerated in the male side of the prison--breaks into the women's prison to an illicit rendezvous provokes both the anger of the prison doctor (Duff) and the prisoners.

Compared to the "women in prison" movies that followed in the 1970s, this is very, very tame stuff, even if the publicity campaign at the time if its release tried to position the film as if it wasn't. The still I chose to illustrate the film implies atmosphere and situations that are nowhere to be found in the film (while demonstrating that Cleo Moore was literally the poster-girl for Columbia Picture's marketing department when it came to "sexing things up"--her part in the film is very small, yet she is the subject of a publicity still). The prisoners here seem more like members of a professional association on a retreat than hardened criminals worthy of being locked away, the guards are all professional and appropriately concerned with the well-being of prisoners, the prison is neat and clean and well-lit. If not for the hell-beast of a warden, the prison in this film and the people in it are nicer than some places I've been on vacation at.

In fact, the prisoners are so nice that the over-the-top hysterics of the poor housewife who is sent up for killing a child with her car become very irritating after a while. While she doesn't deserve to be straight-jacketed or thrown in solitary for being frightened, it's a mystery where her over-reaction to normal prison procedures came from, since every prisoner she meets is nice and chatty and no different than the girls at the hair salon or in the grocery store checkout line. Hell, one prisoner could even find work as a tour guide, I'm certain, given how quickly she steps up to show the "new kid" ropes.

Although the strangely gentile nature of the inmates seemed a bit odd to me, I did appreciate the fact that the film didn't try to paint them as victims of the justice system like some other prison movies I've watched. Most of the inmates are exactly where they belong, and they make no bones about it. I also liked the fact that the matrons and guards were shown as decent human beings who were just doing their jobs.

I also liked the fact that the decency and professionalism of the prison's staff was contrasted with the indifference of the men's prison warden (Barry Kelley)--who may have worked his way up through the system, but who somewhere along the way forgot that the inmates and those working under him are human beings--and the calculated cruelty of women's prison warden, the aforementioned Ida Lupino. In fact, Lupino does such a great job at portraying a sociopathic cast-iron bitch that I almost wished her end had been a little less predictable and pathetic... I wanted her to get a "top o' the world, ma!" sort-of memorable exit, even if the way the film does dispatch her is adequate and dramatically fitting.

Well-acted, well-scripted, and effectively paced, "Women's Prison" is worth a look if you're a fan of Ida Lupino and have a high tolerance for melodrama. But this is not the place to look if you have a hankering for a Roger Corman or Jess Franco "birds in cages"-type sleaze.