A Slight Case of Murder is a 1938 crime-comedy film directed by Lloyd Bacon, adapted from a stage play of the same name cowritten by Damon Runyon.
Edward G. Robinson stars as Remy Macro, a reformed bootlegger who discovers several dead bodies in his vacation house prior to an important dinner party, and scrambles to preserve the evening, his freedom, and his livelihood.
Tropes:
- Asshole Victim: Little Dutch and his cronies are hardened gangsters plotting to murder Marco. They decide to kill their partner Innocence for voicing doubts about their scheme (and so they can split his share of a recent robbery). Innocence overhears their conversation and promptly guns them all down.
- Bratty Half-Pint: When Marco visits the orphanage where he grew up, he volunteers to spend a month fostering the brattiest kid at the orphanage to try and "mold" him into a productive member of society. The kid is fairly surly and annoying throughout the film.
- Dating What Daddy Hates: Marco is a Reformed Criminal who hates cops, and his daughter Mary becomes engaged to State Trooper Dick Whitewood. Unusually for the trope, this is a complete accident, as 1) Mary doesn't know about her father's criminal past and 2) Dick only recently became a policeman, without Mary's knowledge.
- Disposing of a Body: When Remy Marco and his servants find four dead robbers in their vacation home, they decide to move them elsewhere to avoid any hassle with the police. They decide to dump the bodies on the doorsteps of various neighborhoods residents whom they hate (The Stool Pigeon, a man who insulted Marco's beer, a jockey who threw a race they bet on, and an anti-gambling crusader) to inconvenience them. Then, immediately after they finish, Marco's men read a newspaper and discover there's a $10,000 reward for each robber, dead or alive. They scramble to retrieve the bodies (hoping to use the reward to save Marco's struggling brewery), then hide them in a closet as Marco's dinner guests arrive. When the bodies fall out at one of the guests, he thinks they're alive and attacking him. Marco then tricks a police officer into getting into a shootout with the gangsters and acts like they died then.
- Framed for Heroism: When a guest finds the four dead gangsters in Marco's closet and thinks that they're still alive and dangerous, Marco sends his future-son-in-law Dick to to arrest them, then encourages him to shoot through the closet door when the four men don't reply. Dick does so, and everyone assumes that he killed them in a heroic shootout. Interestingly, Dick also gets to be an Accidental Hero in the same scene, when one of his stray shots wounds the fifth gang member nearby and causes him to literally fall into the arms of several policemen who've just arrived.
- Lovable Coward: Dick is an honest police officer and a loving fiancee to Mary, but the final scene shows he's not very brave. When he's Framed for Heroism by being sent after four criminals hiding upstairs (who are already dead), Dick initially wants to just stand guard at the stairs until more cops arrive. This makes some sense, as reinforcements are only about two minutes away and he's badly outnumbered and woefully inexperienced. When everyone persuades him to shoot it out with them, Dick can't even look in the direction where he's firing, and Marco has to hold his arm steady for him. Then, once he's emptied his gun, Dick faints.
- One Crazy Night: Remy is planning a formal dinner party for his friends and a business meeting with his bankers when he ends up finding murder victims in his house at the same time that his new son-in-law (a cop) arrives to introduce himself, and some stolen money ends up passing through various hands at the party.
- Reformed Criminal: Remy Marco is a bootlegger who is happy to start a legitimate brewery and leave the rackets behind. His goons also go straight to work as his servants and salespeople. Unfortunately, the beer from Marco's brewery tastes terrible, and he's on the verge of bankruptcy for most of the film.
- Upper-Class Equestrian: One of Remy's more hated neighboring estate owners is a "gentleman jockey" who threw a race.
