VividSimon
Simply Perfect
ShangLuda
Admirable film.
Fleur
Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.
utgard14
Second entry in the Hildegarde Withers series sees teacher Withers (Edna May Oliver) discovering the body of a murdered fellow teacher in her school. After the police arrive, led by her beau Inspector Piper (James Gleason), they find the body has disappeared. So they investigate and eventually find the body in a particularly gruesome place for a 1934 movie. Now it's up to Hildegarde to ferret out the murderer.As with the last Withers film, the real treat in watching is not with the mystery itself as much as Oliver's enjoyable performance and her banter with Gleason's Piper. Oliver's actually even funnier in this one than in the first movie. I think this is my favorite of the series. It's got a quick pace and lots of funny lines. The murder mystery part is pretty good too. Love the part where Withers explains the school's fire escape to Piper. Little stuff like that fascinates me when I watch older movies. There's even a diagram with directions!
csteidler
Gossip, intrigue, jealousy—and murder? It's all happening in the dark old elementary school where Hildegarde Withers instructs the children by day and keeps an eye on her colleagues after school. But the murder mystery is secondary in this film; the real fun here is watching Miss Withers and Inspector Oscar Piper team up for another round of professional discourtesy and friendly insults—with, just by the way, a murder investigation thrown in.Hildegarde and Oscar (as they have grown close enough to call each other) are of course played by the great Edna May Oliver and James Gleason. The verbal interaction between the two is delightful (Oscar: "Well, we caught him quicker than I thought." Hildegarde: "Almost anything could be done quicker than you think, Oscar."). The physical interplay between the two is just as much fun to watch—sometimes subtle, sometime broad, consistently mischievous. (The scene where they search classroom closets—Oscar opens a door and peers in, Hildegarde noses and squirms her way in around him, he pretends to shut the door on her—is just hilarious.) The rest of the cast is fine; it's your basic array of suspects, more or less. Edgar Kennedy does lend notable support as an assistant detective. Poor Officer Kennedy—he gets conked on the head early in the picture and winds up in the hospital, then later in the movie is set up as bait! And of course no one listens to his protests….My favorite Gleason line (to Oliver, of course): "Just because you found the body, you think you're Mrs. Sherlock Holmes!" Good fun for fans of great character actors.
theowinthrop
In this, the second of the three Hildegard Withers - Oscar Piper comedy murder stories (based on Stuart Palmer's novels), Edna Mae Oliver is in her natural milieu. Hildegard is a teacher, and the murder (of a pretty music teacher in her school) means that the killer is possibly connected to the school. Is it one of the teachers (Tully Marshall, Gertrude Michaels, Bruce Cabot), or the janitor? And what was the reason for the murder? Stuart Palmer's novels are pretty well set in their own time. One of the selling points of the third Hildegard Withers film with Oliver and Gleason (MURDER ON THE HONEYMOON) was the early passenger plane that is the scene of that killing: few people flew in 1933-36. It was a sign of the future for the audience. Here the plot is restricted to the school's staff. Today (unlike the Depression) with our knowledge of juvenile delinquents one of the suspects would have been a gang member. Not so in it's day.The dialog is good, if not up to the first's film. My favorite moment in it deals with dumb cop Edgar Kennedy. In the first film he was just a policeman, but somehow he has been promoted to detective. He gets knocked out while searching the school's basement. For most of the film his character is as physically unconscious as his character is mentally unconscious. But at the conclusion, Kennedy regains consciousness, and starts revealing the moment he was attacked. He, melodramatically acts out the attack and screams the name of the perpetrator. Unfortunately for Kennedy, the killer has already confessed after being confronted by Oliver and Gleason. An irritated Oliver looks at Kennedy and asks, "Now that you have identified the killer here, please tell us who shot Lincoln!" Kennedy's slow burn ends the film.
Neil Doyle
MURDER ON THE BLACKBOARD is good old-fashioned fun with Edna May Oliver, my favorite character actress of the '30s, sleuthing in Nancy Drew manner with James Gleason at her side as a crusty detective. This time the amateur sleuth helps solve a case involving a murdered music teacher and gets herself into deep trouble with the killer who means business when he tries to throw an axe at her in a dark basement cellar. Edna May's brisk, no nonsense manner fits the character of Hildegarde Withers to perfection and she's never at a loss for a quick retort when Gleason becomes a bit overbearing. Their game of one-up-man-ship is what keeps the story moving briskly to a satisfying conclusion.The fact that it's terribly dated in dialogue and situations is what gives this little mystery a quaint sort of charm. One of the better in a series of Hildegarde Withers murder mysteries.
