BAD MOVIE REVIEW: THE MANCHU EAGLE MURDER CAPER MYSTERY (1973, 1975)

THE MANCHU EAGLE MURDER CAPER MYSTERY (1973, 1975) – This film was made in 1973 but not released until 1975. Where to begin with this bizarre detective “comedy” that starred Gabriel Dell long after his days with the Dead-End Kids/ Bowery Boys/ Little Tough Guys. For starters, fans of that series of films that ran from the 1930s onward will enjoy the fact that Dell gets to share a few scenes with his fellow veteran of those movies – Huntz Hall.

Sadly for such fans, Leo Gorcey and the rest are nowhere to be found in this flick. Making up for their absence is a cornucopia of cult stars and fringe figures that will simplify all your future games of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.

The Manchu Eagle Murder Caper Mystery was directed and co-written (with Dell) by Dean Hargrove, producer and director of countless television detective shows like Columbo, Perry Mason, Matlock, Jane Doe, McBride, Real McCoy, and many, many others. In fact, Columbo’s basset hound is said to be the dog playing Winston in this flick!

I’ve often stated that failed comedies are my least favorite kind of bad movies and The Manchu Eagle Murder Caper Mystery is a prime example why. The attempts at humor stay mostly in the lame territory of those old Bowery Boys films but too infrequently stray into wildly irreverent modern jokes about bestiality, incest and more.   

Want to see Grandpa Walton (Will Geer) calling various women “dykes” while constantly popping uppers into his mouth? This film’s got it! Want to see Irene Lorenzo’s husband (Vincent Gardenia) play a sleazy father who’s heavily into his own daughter? This film’s got it! 

Okay, I’ve put this off long enough. On to the storyline of the movie and its cast.

GABRIEL DELL stars as Malcolm. In a groaningly stupid premise that would have fit right into any pathetic Bowery Boys film, Malcolm raises chickens that he is trying to make lay eggs which are pre-colored in hopes of making a fortune off of them at Easter Time.

He has also just completed a correspondence course to become a private investigator. No, not a Junior G-Man like decades earlier, but a standard private investigator. Sorry to keep doing callbacks to Dell’s earlier film series, but the surprising number of fans of the Dead-End Kids, etc. movies are the only reason I can think of that this movie has a 5.8 rating at IMDb as of this writing.

NOTE: That fandom ranges from actual devotees of the decades-long franchise who enjoy the “boys'” antics unironically to people who watch them for the So Bad They’re Good appeal. Normally I’m into Golden Turkeys myself, but like I said, bad comedies just aren’t my thing.

          Many mainstays of the Bad Movie subculture are heavily into the Bowery Boys, etc. The boys get entire sections of some bad film guides devoted to them, and even books like the iconic Incredibly Strange Films examined them. Ray Dennis Steckler’s Lemon Grove Kids was an homage to the boys with Steckler himself doing his Huntz Hall impression. 

           The Texas 27 Film Vault riffed on them, and the later Mystery Science Theater 3000 made countless references to them over the years. Hell, I laugh hard at Trace Beaulieu and Frank Coniff’s Unearthly sketch sending up Leo Gorcey and Huntz Hall, but I’ve still never laughed at the real actors.

JOYCE VAN PATTEN portrays Malcolm’s wife Ida Mae. She lazily lies in bed all day over imagined injuries and frequently berates the devoted Malcolm for being such a loser.

SORRELL BOOKE, Boss Hogg himself, plays Dr. Melon, the scatter-brained narcoleptic who assists Malcolm at his “Poultry Engineering” business located across a desert highway from Malcolm and Ida Mae’s mobile home. Melon’s lapses into sleep are funny once or twice but we get too much recycling of that same joke.

DICK GAUTIER is Oscar Cornell, a milkman with a bizarre attraction to animals. Oscar gets murdered early on while trying to hire Malcolm to learn who’s stalking him. Our main character begins investigating the mystery, along the way uncovering the late Oscar’s obsession with an animal called the Manchu Eagle.

JACKIE COOGAN and HUNTZ HALL play the bumbling Sheriff Anderson and Deputy Roy respectively. The closest they get to comedy are a bit regarding a No Smoking sign, and the Sheriff’s lazy way of attributing any and all crimes – including murder – to “kids playing pranks.”

HOWARD STORM, the cult comedy figure, appears as Freddie Jessup, the violent, unhinged son of the richest man in the tiny southwestern town where our story takes place. Onscreen, Storm is as broad and groan-inducing as everyone else, but I often speculate that, behind the scenes, his particular comic sensibilities may have helped guide this film to the few scenes where it’s closer to Airplane or The Naked Gun than it is to outdated Bowery Boys dreck.

Dell and Hargrove should have turned the whole script over to Storm, and I’m basing that on Howard’s work outside of this bomb.   

VINCENT GARDENIA plays Freddie’s father, Big Daddy Jessup. Big Daddy is the richest man in town by virtue of the fact that HIS mobile home is a double-wide. (Are you laughing yet?) Big Daddy is so perversely protective of his only daughter Arlevia that he has had her confined to the barn all her life. He and Freddie resented the late Oscar for paying clandestine visits to Arlevia.

NITA TALBOT is in the role of Jasmine Cornell, Oscar’s widow. She wants Malcolm to find her late husband’s killer despite the fact that they have never consummated their twelve-year marriage because of Oscar’s thing for animals. Her first scene is one of the very few half-funny moments. 

ANJANETTE COMER, whom regular readers may remember from my review of the howlingly bad horror film The Baby back in 2011, is Arlevia Jessup. Comer is her usual creepy self as she teeters between arrested development and assured seductiveness. The character’s relationship with her short-tempered father (and possibly brother Freddie – it’s hard to tell) goes beyond familial love.  

WILL GEER portrays Dr. Simpson. As mentioned above, the doctor constantly pops uppers and declares women “dykes” if they reject his sexual advances. He also breaks doctor-patient confidentiality almost constantly in his conversations with Malcolm.

BARBARA HARRIS appears as Miss Helen Fredericks, the small town’s schoolteacher and bus driver. Oscar was visiting her on the side, but never slept with her because of his love of the animal kingdom.

Her despair over her loneliness has made her incredibly suicidal and her attempts to end her own life are played for the kind of dark humor that would work in the aforementioned Airplane or Naked Gun but are jarringly out of place in this flick mired mostly in broad 1930s-1950s film comedy.   

NICHOLAS COLOSANTO, the Coach from Cheers, plays Bert the bartender here, long before his similar role in that 1980s sitcom. Credit where it’s due, the scenes with Bert are actually funny because he expresses himself in literally nothing but cliches. No matter how irrelevant those cliches are to the questions that Malcolm asks him, our detective acts like they are genuine pearls of wisdom.  

SPOILERS AHEAD! 

After Malcolm visits with each of the above-mentioned suspects he solves the case. Freddie Jessup killed Oscar and our hero goes to arrest him at the Jessup farm. Big Daddy Jessup tries to interfere, resulting in an actually humorous gunfight between Malcolm on one side and the two Jessup men on the other.

The scene is a bit derivative of the Black Knight segment of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, with all three characters remaining alive despite the bloody gunshot wounds they keep inflicting on each other. Even inanimate objects start to spurt blood when penetrated by bullets in this bit of business. 

At any rate, Malcolm sends Freddie to jail and then goes home to Ida Mae. This is really the only scene which brings to mind The Maltese Falcon despite some claims that the entire movie is a Maltese Falcon parody. Malcolm reveals that Ida Mae helped Freddie kill Oscar and turns her over to the authorities while doing a variation of Humphrey Bogart’s speech to Mary Astor at the end of Falcon. 

If you care, and there’s no reason why you should, the Manchu Eagle turns out to be nonexistent.

The Manchu Eagle Murder Caper Mystery is a waste of time except for fans of bizarre, failed comedies. The shifting extremes of the humor from long outdated schtick to then-daring Woody Allen/ Mel Brooks bits leave most viewers with too little of the comedy style they prefer.

But, as I mentioned above, the huge cult following boasted by the Dead-End Kids, etc will probably ensure that this flick lives on after similar disasters are long forgotten.   

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