Angry stockbroker confronts his wife (Mae Clarke) and her former boyfriend (Donald Cook) at an aquarium. Also at the aquarium is teacher Hildegarde Withers (Edna May Oliver) with her class on a field trip. As Withers is looking into a penguin pool, the stockbroker's corpse comes floating by. Soon, police Inspector Oscar Piper (James Gleason) is on the case. Throughout the movie Withers helps Piper with his case and the two banter back and forth. Oliver and Gleason are delightful to watch. They have great comedic chemistry. Fun start to a brief detective series featuring the character of Hildegarde Withers and her beau Inspector Piper. There were only six films in the series, with Oliver playing the part of Withers in the first three films. Gleason would play Piper in all six. They were all generally fun films with doses of comedy mixed in with the murder mysteries. But the Oliver ones were the best.

The Penguin Pool Murder is directed by George Archainbaud and collectively written by Stuart Palmer, Lowell Brentano and Willis Goldbeck. It stars Edna May Oliver, James Gleason, Robert Armstrong and Mae Clarke. Music is by Max Steiner and cinematography by Henry W. Gerrard.The first of three outings for Oliver as schoolteacher sleuth Hildegarde Withers, finds her linking up with Inspector Oscar Piper (Gleason) to try and crack the murder of a man found floating in a fish tank at the local aquarium.The three Hildegarde Withers films that starred Oliver and Gleason had one defining characteristic, that of the films being at their best when the two actors were on screen jousting each other. The Penguin Pool Murder is the start of their wonderful union, and although the mystery element is weak on this one, the all round quality of the production (sets and photography) and the spirited work of cast and director ensures a great time can be had here. The writing lets the lady Withers be her own person, which is very nice to see, she's not merely a female towing the party line, while her aged years are rightly irrelevant and made a mockery of by Oliver's splendid gusto. Short, sharp and a whole bunch of fun. 7.5/10

When Edna May Oliver took her class on a field trip to the aquarium she and the kids did not realize that they would wind up in the middle of a murder mystery. When young Sidney Miller and Oliver both notice a body in the penguin pool, the game's afoot.The body is that of the late Guy Usher and as in the case of most murder mysteries a lot of people who would like him dead happen to be in the aquarium. Edna has the presence of mind to call the cops and lock the doors so we also have a closed set of suspects.Usher was a stockbroker who lost the money that aquarium director Clarence Wilson took from the budget to play the market with. Usher's wife Mae Clarke and her boyfriend Donald Cook are also there as well as a smooth lawyer in Robert Armstrong and a notorious pickpocket Joe Hannon who is a deaf mute. That does not stop Hannon from making a lucrative living as a dip.The Penguin Pool Murder's biggest asset is the chemistry between polar opposites aristocratic Edna May Oliver and the plebeian police inspector James Gleason who investigates the homicide. As this is the first time these two met, Edna's a suspect briefly as well because her hat pin was part of the crime. But we know it couldn't be here.In fact with the Penguin Pool Murder the guilty party is a rather obvious one. That party is like Clifton Webb in Laura busy trying to pin the crime on Vincent Price. That kind of let's out all the suspense.Still fans of Oliver and Gleason and I do love both will be pleased with Penguin Pool Murder.

Edna Mae Oliver and James Gleason were two of the best character actors in Hollywood in the "golden age" of film making. Oliver always had a precise, aristocratic hauteur (she was Lady Catherine De Burgh in the 1940 PRIDE AND PREJUDICE), but it usually masked an intense intelligence (see how she tears apart Basil Rathbone's Murdstone in David COPPERFIELD), and a decent morality. Gleason is not a university or book based intelligent gent. But he is a street smart type, who knows precisely what's what. And in THE PENGUIN POOL MURDERS they joined together as Hildegarde Withers and Inspector Piper of the New York Police Department. And from rubbing each other the wrong way they become friends, allies in solving the case, and possibly more (the movie suggest at the end).Hildegard is a schoolteacher, who takes her class (a remarkably mixed racial class for 1932) on a field trip to the New York Acquarium, then in lower Manhattan in what is still Castle Clinton National Monument (it was also, in the 1850s, Castle Gardens, where Jenny Lind sang to the public). The visit is interrupted when Isidore (the Jewish kid in the class) points out (as in the summary line) that there is a man inside what he calls the "duck" pool. Actually it is the tank for the penguins.The film follows how Hildegard and Piper pursue their investigations into the murder and gradually find that helping each other makes more sense. The humor builds as both our intrepid detectives confront various types, like humorless, dyspeptic Clarence Wilson as the aquarium director, and relatively stupid policeman Edgar Kennedy to find out what is the truth. It all comes down to a courtroom showdown, where the killer trips himself up in an unexpected manner.A first rate comedy and who-done-it, that led to MURDER AT THE BLACKBOARD and MURDER ON THE HONEYMOON before the two stars went their separate ways.