What I want to know is how did Philo Vance get a model of the house and apartment to show how the murder occurred in such short time? Did they just happen to have one sitting around?
I also wanted to know who killed the Scottie.
I watched the movie on DVD last night and thought the same thing....
Where did they get such large models of the 2 buildings....
I watched that scene twice so amazed that they existed....
Odd....
Oh and Who Killed the Doggie?
We were laughing about that, too. Amazing there is no explantion of perfect models of crime scene buildings.
I also thought it was odd there was no mention of who killed the dog.
Models were fairly common in law enforcement and court cases before computers, as were maps with pins representing events.
shareI don't think it's clear who killed the Scottie. It would be reasonable to blame Wrede, as one poster on these boards does, but he was pretty busy that evening. Archer Coe was certainly mean enough, but he seemed to want to win the ribbon against Sir Thomas, not do something rash where a lot of people in the kennel club would think it was his work. After all, when he confronted Miss Delafield and then Signor Grassi he used words and threats, not physical force.
That's just one of the strange things about the movie -- did anyone notice that Philo Vance concludes, after the attack on Sir Thomas, that the killer had come from that apartment building? But it's clear that Wrede lives in the Coe house; the morning that Archer Coe's body is discovered, he's coming out of his bedroom after the butler drops the tray with Archer Coe's breakfast. So, why would he be coming and going to the building next door?
I think this is one of the places where the screenwriter didn't make a successful transition from the book, because in the book Wrede does not live in the Coe house, he lives in the apartment house where Miss Delafield lives; and Grassi is visiting in the Coe house [and becoming flirtatious with Hilda]. There is no "Sir Thomas MacDonald". The Scottie dog lives in the adjacent apartment house with Miss Delafield, and the dog is injured by Wrede (and rescued by Philo Vance). There is a Doberman -- whom Wrede had abused -- who takes his revenge on Wrede at the end of the book.
So the screenwriter reversed the dogs, put Wrede in the Coe house and Grassi elsewhere, and dropped in Sir Thomas MacDonald; but didn't do a good job of tying up the loose ends that his plot changes had created, IMHO.
annie-293 says > one of the strange things about the movie -- did anyone notice that Philo Vance concludes, after the attack on Sir Thomas, that the killer had come from that apartment building? But it's clear that Wrede lives in the Coe house; the morning that Archer Coe's body is discovered, he's coming out of his bedroom after the butler drops the tray with Archer Coe's breakfast. So, why would he be coming and going to the building next door?Vance came up with a lot of theories trying to explain what happened but he raised as many or more questions than he answered. He may have been wrong but it's still possible he was right. Wrede may have gone to Sir Tom's apartment to kill him next. Not finding him home maybe he was going to lie in wait when he notices Coe at the window or he saw that the window that had just been open was now closed. There was no one else supposed to be in the house at the time. In his haste, he leaves the door open, the doberman follows him in soon after. He encounters Brisbane and kills him. Even if Wrede was not in the building, he could have been in the courtyard and seen Coe or the window; or he was in the house and heard him stumbling around.
The shop kids at the local high school.
shareI wondered about that too. I think they were made for the convenience of explaining Vance's theories and thus moving the plot along. As a fan of older films I notice that little details like this were often left unexplained because there was no real explanation. I think they thought the general audience wasn't bright enough to notice things like this and there wasn't an IMDb where people who did could point it out and discuss it.
shareIt was a good way to reuse the miniature set that showed the shooting at the beginning of the picture.
share