90 years ago: jazz and murder and William Haines

That subject line sounds like the title of a post about a scandal (even more so when you know that William Haines was a more-or-less closeted movie star of the silent era), but it's really just another post of movies playing in 1930.

Wild Company may not be a lost movie, but there is no current commentary about it out there--though it sounds like a Reefer Madness movie about the jazz lifestyle. Fox has not been the best caretaker of its early films, so it might exist somewhere. Years later, Frank Albertson and H.B.Warner were both in It's a Wonderful Life, Albertson as Sam "Hee-Haw" Wainwright and Warner as Old Man Gower, the druggist.

Midnight Mystery sounds good--a man living in an island castle in Maine tries to teach his mystery-writing girlfriend a lesson but winds up with a real murder on his hands that she has to solve--but it also appears to be lost. However, the author of the Mystery File blog reviewed it based on a tape he had made from a TV showing some years ago, so it may still be floating around out there in the cinema ether.

August of 1930 was apparently "RKO Month" in Cincinnati, as in the theater chain, because neither of these movies came from RKO Radio Pictures. Both movies are still in existence. All Quiet is a classic, and Way Out West was near end of Haines's career. He retired in 1934, reportedly pushed out of his MGM contract because of his sexuality, but he was getting a bit too long in the tooth for the cocky juvenile parts MGM kept putting him in. This came from an August 1930 Cincy paper, so I can't explain the "Midwinter" wording in the ad.