good back-story, and good acting

Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

As somebody who had not heard any of this before, it became a curious phenomenon to sit and watch a film and slowly have the realities begin to click into place.

The movie turns out to be a little better than the average. Starting from a romantic formula often seen in the cinema, it ends in the most predictable (and somewhat bland) way.

When you screen an old movie, there are a few obvious signs as to its quality. Take the Monogram logo, for example. You know that the script will be a rough draft, that production will take only a week or so and that the acting will range between passable and clunky. On the other hand, it might even be entertaining. Which "The Mystery Man" actually is, even when it staggers along. Robert Armstrong stars as an intrepid newspaperman who winds up, after a drunken spree, in St. Louis where he's determined to restart his career by catching the mysterious criminal known as "The Eel." Somewhere along the way, he gets mixed up with a plucky, dead-broke brunette who masquerades as his wife for reasons that make no sense. But why worry about reality? It's...drum roll, please...a Monogram Picture. And that's almost as good as a PRC release.

The Mystery Man (1935) ** 1/2 (out of 4) Decent mystery from Monogram has Robert Armstrong playing newspaper reporter Larry Doyle who after a big story gets a revolver as a gift. Later in the picture he's in need of money so he pawns the gun and is later arrested for a murder that was done using the same gun. Now Doyle must prove that he actually pawned the gun and that the killer known as The Eel was the real murderer. THE MYSTERY MAN is a fairly entertaining movie, although the story I've just given really doesn't tell everything. This thing clocks in at just 61-minutes and the murder doesn't take place until around the 37-minute mark, which should tell you a couple things. For starters, there's a lot of early filler in the film that probably could have been left and and in all honesty it probably should have been left out. The only problem then is that you wouldn't be left with a movie. The second problem is that the solving of the case happens in the final twenty minutes and in many ways this was simply way too fast for the crime to be solved. With that said, fans of Armstrong as well as the genre should find the material good enough to keep you entertained through the short running time. As you'd expect, Armstrong has no problems playing the smart aleck reporter who is constantly rubbing people the wrong way until he's finally the one being pushed around. Maxine Doyle is also very good as the woman who ends up helping the reporter on his mission. The two stars have some nice chemistry together and their work certainly helps keep the film moving. The biggest problem with the picture is that there's a bit too much comedy and sadly the majority of it never works. Still, the majority of the people remains entertaining as long as you're not expecting THE MALTESE FALCOLN or some sort of classic.

This really seems to be two movies in one. The first is a sweet romantic comedy that takes up the first 40 minutes of the film. Reporter Larry Doyle from Chicago gets $50 for breaking an important story and does too much celebrating. He ends up broke in St. Louis. He sits down at a lunch counter with beautiful Anne Oglivie (Maxine Doyle). She finds that she only has 10 cents to pay for her 20 cent coffee and donut. Larry secretly pays for her. Realizing that a young girl broke in the city could end up in trouble, Larry follows her around to help her out. Having no place to stay, he gets a hotel room for the two of them. Anne is reluctant, thinking he wants sex in return, but Larry reassures her that he's a square kind of guy. He orders an expensive $35 a day hotel suite which has two bedrooms with separate keys. He explains that Anne is as safe with him as she would be anywhere in the city.This part of the movie seems to inspired by Frank Capra's "It Happened One Night" which came out also in 1935. Suddenly with about 25 minutes left the movie turns into a more typical Monogram murder mystery. Larry, remembering that he's an investigative reporter, goes after a slippery gangster called "the Eel." As all Monogram murder mysteries are, its silly, cheap and quite a lot of fun.Robert Armstrong (King Kong, Son of Kong, Mighty Joe Young) gives a really strong performance. He's a sweet tough guy with a heart of gold. Maxine Doyle is excellent as the broke virgin in the city. Twenty years old at the time, this was one of her first starring movies. Over the next two years, in 1936 and 1937, she starred in about a dozen low budget movies and that was pretty much the end of her career. She did do some bit parts in the 1940's.Monogram generally made "C" or "D" movies. This one is actually a solid "B" movie.

This uneasy cross between a "Front Page" style newspaper yarn and a cops and robbers movie was entertaining at times but never really dramatically engaging. It was made less than a decade after the stage version, and only a few years after the Menjou/O'Brien version of Front Page. The comedic elements in the first part of the movie, as well as some funny ironic dialog come out of the interactions between news hound Larry Doyle, his editor, and his fellow reporters, come from that style of film. Halfway through, we leave that movie and enter into a crime flick, with a decent ingénue mistaken for Mrs. Doyle (played by an actress who was really named Doyle, by the way) and a case of mistaken identity leaving the reporter holding the bag. The resolution is not very clever, and the light tone of the first part of the movie means we're never really worried something bad will happen in the second. I mean, if it had been made in the 1970's, that may have happened, but in 1935, no way.There's a really neat moment at the end, though, that illustrates how in the 1930's everyone knew that newspapers could make or break elected officials, and how the publishers could influence what was published. I don't know when we lost that breezy cynicism about money and media, but I prefer it to the sacred cow of editorial independence that characterized the movies about the media I watched growing up. Doesn't really save the movie, but it is an interesting difference from things 75 years ago.