Kino Lorber has released a three-film Blu-ray of Paramount’s historically significant Philo Vance Collection, the first of the three being the first murder mystery of the talkie era.

There were twelve Philo Vance detective novels written by author William Huntington Wright under the pseudonym of S.S. Van Dine published between 1926 and 1939 when the author died. There have been fifteen Philo Vance films released between 1929 and 1949, the last three based on the character but not one of the novels, several of which were filmed several times.

The highly popular Philo Vance novels were so popular that there was a bidding war between Hollywood studios for the film rights to each one. Paramount won the rights to the first three, The Benson Murder Case, The Canary Murder Case, and The Green Murder Case. They would film the second one, which was based on a real-life 1923 murder, first.

Filmed as a silent in 1928, Paramount executives foresaw financial disaster if they released The Canary Murder Case as a silent film, so they re-shot much of it as a talkie before its January 1929 release. It became the first talkie mystery, beating Alfred Hitchcock’s better known Blackmail, another silent film re-shot as a talkie, into theaters by nine months.

William Powell, under contract to Paramount at the time, did not like playing the detective, finding him and all detectives, for that matter, boring characters. Nevertheless, he soldiered on playing the part in all three of the Paramount films. Basil Rathbone played him in the fourth, 1930’a The Bishop Murder Case, for MGM, while the still protesting Powell played him for a fourth time while under contract to Warner Bros. in 1933’s The Kennel Murder Case. Ironically, it was as another detective, Nick Charles in MGM’s The Thin Man series opposite Myrna Loy from 1934-1947, that would give Powell his lasting fame.

Powell was not the only one unhappy with starring in The Canary Murder Case. Rising star Louise Brooks (A Girl in Every Port, Beggars of Life) had gone to Germany to make Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl when she was summoned back to Hollywood to re-shoot the film as a talkie. She refused, sabotaging her Paramount contract and her burgeoning Hollywood career.

Brooks, who played the blackmailing murder victim, was dubbed by Margaret Livingston (Sunrise) who stood in for her in several shots as well. James Hall (Four Sons, Hell’s Angels) played the young man falsely accused of her murder while newcomer Jean Arthur played his loyal girlfriend. Making a bigger impression than all of the stars, however, was character actor Eugene Pallette (The Adventures of Robin Hood) making his talkie debut as the bungling detective assigned to the case that private detective Vance solves.

The mystery in The Canary Murder Case is not that difficult to solve for modern audiences who are used to the least likely suspect turning out to be the killer, but that phenomenon was something new for audiences then who made it a hit.

The second film, The Greene Murder Case, filmed after the release of The Canary Murder Case and released in late 1929, benefits from the advances in film techniques and more cogent storytelling in just that short period of time.

Powell and Pallette are back and so is rising star Arthur playing a different character this time. She and Florence Eldredge (Mrs. Fredric March) are sisters whose family members are being killed off one by one.

The Benson Murder Case made it to the screen in 1930 with Powell and Pallette again starring along with William (Stage) Boyd, Paul Lukas (Watch on the Rhine), and Mischa Auer (You Can’t Take It with You) among the suspects. Six years later, Powell, Pallette, and Auer would be together again in the classic screwball comedy, My Man Godfrey, for which Powell, Auer, and female co-stars Carole Lombard and Alice Brady, would become the first players to sweep all four acting category nominations in the same film. Pallette, who was certainly their equal, was oddly ignored.

The fourth actor to play Philo Vance on screen was Warren William who replaced Powell, now at MGM, in Warner Bros. 1934 film, The Dragon Murder Case. Unlike Powell and Rathbone, who had legendary detectives Nick Charles and Sherlock Holmes in their future, William had already made his first Perry Mason film before playing Vance. He would play Mason several more times and also play a third detective, the Lone Wolf, in a series of films into the 1940s.

Warner Oland, who was also a 1930s favorite as Charlie Chan, never played Philo Vance, but he did play Fu Manchu in a vignette in 1930’s Paramount on Parade opposite Powell as Vance.

There of course have been many film mysteries through the years that remain popular today. One of the most recent is the 2023 Oscar winner for Best Original Screenplay, Anatomy of a Fall, which the Criterion Collection has just released on Blu-ray.

Justine Triet’s film was also nominated for Best Picture, Directing, Actress (Sandra Hüller), and Film Editing.

Hüller, who also won kudos for her completely different role in last year’s The Zone of Interest, is sensational in a tour-de-force performance as a successful German author accused of murdering her struggling writer French husband by pushing him out of an attic window in their French Alps chalet.

Did she murder him or was it an accident or suicide? It’s the couple’s near-blind son (Milo Machado-Graner), the only witness, and his dog who finally solve the crime, or do they?

The film, in which Hüller, whose character prefers to speak English rather than French, deservedly won many international awards including many U.S. awards for Best Foreign Language film, but not the Oscar as the film was not submitted by France. That Oscar went to the United Kingdom for Hüller’s other film, The Zone of Interest, in which she plays the Auschwitz commandant’s wife.

Happy viewing.