Another mystery solved

Glad I didn’t go to my grave wondering about this one, which has been driving me crazy (on an every-now-and-then basis) for nigh onto 30 years. A long, long time ago, back in the dark ages when the only way to see movies was to go to a theater, our university had some great film series. Among them was a series of old black and white film from the ’30s and ’40s, not all of them classics by any means, often shown with cartoons and a Flash Gordon or Dick Tracy serial, as they were intended to be shown. And at one of these showings my already long-suffering wife-to-be and I saw an odd little film that, as memory served, featured some occultish elements, a sort of mystical little shop, and an eerie performance by Edward G. Robinson, often talking into a mirror. And for years and years I waited to see this movie somewhere again, if only to remember its title and what it was all about, but to no avail. Then, as IMDB became available, I would periodically scrounge through Robinson’s credits, but not find anything that quite fit the bill. I knew it wasn’t “Brother Orchid,” which we saw in that series as well, and the description of “Larceny Inc.” didn’t quite fit, though it did have a non-mystical luggage shop and a non-eerie Robinson performance, as we recently learned. But I still couldn’t uncover it.

Then a couple of weeks ago, as I was going through boxes of nonsense that should have been purged decades ago, I came across an odd piece of ephemera, the University Union Cinemas schedule for Spring, 1979. And on it was a title I didn’t recognize (and which these days would suggest a different kind of film entirely): “Flesh and Fantasy.” Another trip to IMDB, and sure enough – Found it! It turns out to have been a trio of loosely connected stories in a single film, and I had conflated the Edward G. Robinson part, a man who is told by a palmreader that he will commit a murder, with a segment that actually featured Bob Cummings (almost the anti-Robinson) and the shop of a mysterious mask maker.

With that, I’ve solved two major movie mysteries in 2008 (the other being the matter of the morocco endpapers), which ought to be some kind of good sign.