Knives out: remembering Murder in the Family, a forgotten drama from the golden age of detective fiction

On the evening of 11 March 1927, director Albert Parker was at the newly opened Roxy Cinema in New York for the premiere of his lavish Hollywood feature The Love of Sunya, produced by and starring Gloria Swanson. Swanson held Parker in the highest regard, hence her insistence that he should direct her first production, for which he had negotiated a two-picture contract worth $100,000. Among the audience of 6,000 at the Roxy were US senators and generals, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Irving Berlin and a host of other celebrities.

Fast forward 10 years and Parker found himself in the distinctly less glamorous surroundings of the Fox-British studio in Wembley directing quota films for the company. On 6 October 1937, he went on the floor to shoot his last: Murder in the Family. Fox’s former leading man, James Mason, who had been discovered by Parker in 1935, maintained that the director wasn’t bitter about this reversal of fortune, observing: “Once he had settled down in England he had no intention of facing the Hollywood jungle again.”

Parker had fallen out of favour in Hollywood, a victim of “factionalism” according to Mason, and came to England in 1932, devoting his considerable filmmaking experience to advancing the British industry. He helped Fox Film Company set up its UK operation, and, although he was only producing low-budget programme fillers, he was determined to make them “little masterpieces”.

Years later, in conversation with Kevin Brownlow, Parker recalled that British crews weren’t always on board with his desire to turn out these masterpieces. “American technicians would work to achieve a result. Even if they had to work until 3am or 4am. But over here I found that they just couldn’t care less about the final result.” His working practices sound quite chaotic but his eye for talent was infallible, having brought both Rudolph Valentino and William Powell to the screen, and, without doubt, the cast and crew he assembled for Murder in the Family was the best of his quota career.

Based on a 1936 novel by British crime writer James Ronald, the film is a neat drama that is less a whodunnit than an effective exploration of the effect of a murder. When the Osborne family’s skinflint Aunt Octavia comes to stay, she announces that she plans to disinherit them and shortly after is found dead. The police can’t solve the crime and tension builds.

To bring the story to the screen, Parker had a top-notch crew. Mason recalled that Parker tended to direct “off the cuff”, adding and changing things as he went along, so having people around him who could adapt quickly and efficiently would have been vital.

On camera he had Ronald Neame, who was soon poached by Ealing and later – after an Oscar nomination for the photographic effects in One of Aircraft Is Missing (1942) and two more for co-writing David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945) and Great Expectations (1946) – enjoyed a long career as director and producer. Neame’s assistant was Ossie Morris, who was to win an Oscar for his cinematography on Fiddler on the Roof (1971). The art director at Fox was a woman, which was, as Kine Weekly observed, “rather unusual for this country”; Carmen Dillon went on to win an Oscar for Olivier’s 1948 Hamlet.

The editor was Peter Tanner, who followed Neame to Ealing, editing Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949), The Blue Lamp (1950) and The Cruel Sea (1953). He carried on working well into his eighties, and, in fact his final film, Something to Believe In (1998), brought him full circle, reuniting him with Roddy McDowell, whose first credited role, aged 10, was Peter Osborne in Murder in the Family.

McDowall is one of the highlights of the excellent cast assembled by Parker, which also features Glynis Johns as Peter’s older sister and another Parker discovery, Donald Gray, before he lost an arm during military action in Normandy in 1944. McDowall was on the verge of Stateside stardom, as were the film’s two lead actresses, who went on to have very different careers in America.

Jessica Tandy plays the studious daughter Ann, in one of only two British films she made. She was already a West End and Broadway stage star and had played Ophelia to John Gielgud’s Hamlet. She had married Jack Hawkins in 1932 (“marvellous actor, bad husband”, she later said) but when they separated at the end of the decade she headed to America where she got together with actor Hume Cronyn. She created the role of Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire on stage and became one of America’s most highly regarded theatrical stars. Later in life, the movies rediscovered her and she won an Oscar and a BAFTA at the age of 80 for Driving Miss Daisy (1989).

Ann’s wilful sister Dorothy is played by Chilean-born Evelyn Ankers, who had been contracted to London Films before signing up with Fox. In September 1939, having had her contract terminated due to the war, she left England and eventually landed the role of the maid in the Broadway production of Ladies in Retirement. Legend has it that the scream she let out on discovery of the body led to her being snapped up by Universal where, for a few years, she was ‘Queen of the Bs’.

With an excellent script and this wealth of talent in cast and crew, Parker managed to make this modest B-movie into a well-constructed, taut psychological study of what happens to a family when a murder is committed among them. Ronald portrays how the strain of the press attention, the rumours and suspicion bring them to breaking point. It showed round the country through the summer and autumn of 1938 in support of various main features, including The General Died at Dawn and The Divorce of Lady X, garnering effusive write-ups. One critic deemed it “a virile presentation that… portrays in thrilling true-to-life fashion, the brain-searing vicissitudes through which the members of a typical English family pass following the apparently motiveless rifling… of a wealthy relation.”

Parker gave up directing after this film but remained a popular figure in the industry, becoming a successful agent. James Mason was one of his first clients, joined by Glynis Johns, Robert Newton, Trevor Howard and, in the 1960s, Helen Mirren.

Murder in the Family came to the BFI National Archive in 1971 when Fox donated the original negatives, though these unfortunately turned out to be incomplete. In 1998, another nitrate element was donated by George Eastman Museum which was used to create a viewing print in 1999. This print has screened publicly twice in the archive strands at BFI Southbank and is available for hire or to view by researchers on our premises.