Beautiful, moving film.

As Good As It Gets

I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

I have always liked the screwball characterizations portrayed by Charles Ruggles. My first true exposure of the acting skills displayed by Ruggles is when he appeared in "Bringing Up Baby."Given the age of this 'film' / when it was made, it is one that the whole family can enjoy. I won't tell you the plot. Just watch it and chuckle.

"Murder in the Private Car" is from 1934, right at the beginning of the production code.A pretty switchboard operator, Ruth (Mary Carlisle) is told by detectives that she is the long-lost daughter of a wealthy man. Her coworker (Una Merkel) accompanies her in a private train car ordered for her to take her to her father. But somebody -- a disembodied voice, in fact - wants her dead -- and tells her she has only hours to live.A man on the train, Godfrey Scott (Charles Ruggles) is on the train. He is a "deflector," one who stops crimes before they start. Ruth's long- time boyfriend is also on the train. Soon people start being murdered, and it's obvious Ruth is in great danger.This is an odd movie in that the story - for me, anyway, wasn't very clear. There is a circus train wreck thrown in, giving Ruggles the opportunity to interact with several animals.The highlight of the film is a train chase, and the process shots were very well done - normally you can tell the background is a movie screen, but here it wasn't always apparent, and the chase was very exciting.I was confused because it looks in the beginning of the film as if the detectives faked the evidence in order to say that Ruth was the long- lost daughter, but I don't think it was followed up. I guess whether she was or not, she thought she was and the father believed it. The other thing that threw me was the disembodied voice which I thought I recognized - I won't say who I thought it was, but I spent some time thinking the murderer was someone who wasn't. In fact I'm not sure if the murderer was revealed. I was probably distracted. It reminded me of an old episode of Inspector Morse that was so confusing, I called my friend and asked whodunit. He returned my call and said, "I not only don't know whodunit, I don't know who was killed."Georgia (Merkel) and Godfrey have a cute relationship that grows during the film. Definitely worth seeing - Walter Brennan is one of the men at the train switch, obviously a very early role. Sterling Holloway, so familiar to Baby Boomers from TV and the voice of Winnie the Pooh, is also in the film. MGM supposedly remade this film about ten years later - but to be honest, the description of "Grand Central Murder" doesn't sound the same, except for the train sequence. This movie is also reminiscent of a film with Lana Turner minus the train - so who knows.I thought this B movie ended before certain things were cleared up. According to IMDb, Mary Carlisle is still alive at 101. Wow.

One thing you can say for sure, it certainly is not a rip-off of "The Thin Man" or any other big budget murder mystery of its time.The scene opens on two switchboard operators busy at work at an investment firm - Ruth Raymond and Georgia Latham (Mary Carlisle and Una Merkel). One day an investigator informs Ruth that she is the long lost daughter of a wealthy man. She is to be whisked away via a private car to New York to meet her father. She asks her friend and coworker, Georgia, to come along too, and thus the adventure begins.Onboard the train the bodies start piling up, there is a mysterious invisible voice telling Ruth she has only hours to live, and there are doubts raised as to whether or not she is the long lost daughter of the wealthy man in the first place. Along for the ride is the long-time boyfriend of Ruth, as well as a goofy fellow, Godfrey Scott (Charles Ruggles), who has taken a shine to Georgia before all of this mystery began and appointed himself investigator of the case. There are escaped primates in assorted sizes and also a plot device that reminds me of the "Wild Wild West" TV show.Ruggles' act can get tiresome depending on how big a dose is injected into a particular movie, but there is so much going on here that I really didn't think him more of a hindrance than a help, plus the building relationship between himself and Merkel's character is adorable. I'd recommend it if you're in the mood for a rather offbeat film that is certainly very atypical output for MGM of the period.

Seldom will the words "what were they thinking?!" come to mind while enjoying a film as often as while watching this pseudo-mystery from the early days of sound at MGM - though not as early as the haphazard writing would suggest.Enjoy it you will, however, as the odds and ends the entertainment are assembled from are largely quality remainders, borrowed from all kinds of other films than the mystery the title leads one to expect. Who knows what the original mystery play ("The Rear Car") the film is based on was really like? It lacked sufficient merit to make it to Broadway (neither did "Everybody Comes To Rick's," but that didn't seem to hurt CASABLANCA much), but the stagy "thriller" aspects of the center part of the film suggest that the tossed in ingredients didn't hurt it any.Chief among the "tossed in" ingredients is Charlie Ruggles' Godfrey Scott, a supposed "detective" occupied far more with the kind of bumbling burlesque comedy Ruggles had been perfecting since his movie debut back in 1914 (and would continue to mine right up until his death in 1970). By the 1930's Ruggles was a well recognized Hollywood commodity in such hits as Brandon Thomas' CHARLEY'S AUNT, THE SMILING LIEUTENANT, LOVE ME TONIGHT and ALICE IN WONDERLAND. MURDER IN THE PRIVATE CAR must have seemed a decidedly second tier assignment to the comedian, but he gave it his all . . . though the biggest laugh in the script may come in the credits - "Edgar Allan Woolf," one of the co-writers was clearly named after Edgar Allan POE, the founder of the modern mystery format with his "C. Auguste Dupin stories in the 1840's! So much for legitimate mystery credentials in this film.The silly plot (a lost heiress found and at risk) had already been the subject of too many musicals and farces to be taken entirely seriously, and the film makers don't spend to much time seriously laying out the clues and red herrings even though the golden age of the murder mystery was near its peak. Instead, they pull out the stops with cinema-friendly special effects like runaway trains and (never explained) secret panels.It starts and remains a supremely silly hodge podge, but fun nonetheless for all but the serious mystery fan the title seems to want to attract. Watch for Ruggles and Una Merkle, and don't worry so much about the title murder(s) and a good time is to be had.