I wonder how many other puns I missed.
If you desire to watch Discarded Lovers (1932), you may need to sit down and really concentrate on the first fifteen minutes of this whodunit, because it comes off a little flat. Irma Gladden, beautiful movie star, has been leaving a trail of men behind her: husbands, ex-husbands, lovers, wannabe lovers. She’s the sort who inspires the most devoted family man to lust more than a little in his heart. Supposedly. The quality of the print, and Irma’s manner, did little to nothing for me. And the chauffeur’s in the mix for stealing and pawning one of her jewels, just to satisfy that diversity requirement.
So when Irma is found dead in her car, a lot of people go into shock: former husband, current husband, current secretary, random reporter who’s been hanging around the set to chat with the scriptwriter. Heck, even the scriptwriter’s a little woozy, working on the movie she’s just wrapped up, had to write her dialog just moments before she’d say it – perhaps he wrote it badly in the first place so he could be on set with her, no?
I’ll be dead soon enough. That’s what happens in the movie, at least. Gotta talk to that scriptwriter about that.
Once Irma’s dead, though, the movie accelerates, even if it does have the unfortunate burden of the classic over-confident, incompetent cop hanging around its neck for far too long. The murderer is clever, hiding behind curtains, attempting to silence the secretary, and even knocking off one of the other suspects who claims he knows the identity of the killer, but -ahem- won’t say it over the phone. Sheesh.
In the big windup, we get to see the climactic seen of the movie Irma was making, and it has the classic effect – it turns the killer into a big ol’ blabbermouth. Which is not entirely unbelievable, since this was a crime of passion, not of business, and someone was just bursting to boast about having put her out of his misery.
Throw in a romantic subplot and a useless police chief, and this is a mediocre specimen of the genre. Less than an hour long, you won’t feel like you’ve gone through two or three of your own lives watching it. But you may wish the print could be cleaned up.
