TV REVIEW : ‘Lady’: Murder-Mystery Has More Pop, Less Plot

“Lady Against the Odds,” a detective story set in Los Angeles in 1943 (at 9 tonight on NBC, Channels 4, 36 and 39), opens with a swinging, high-stepping scene on a street with a hot beat--Hollywood Boulevard in its bustling, wartime glory.

It’s an unpretentious gem of a mood-setting scene that sets your expectations much higher than the rest of this warmed-over Rex Stout murder-mystery can ever deliver.

The movie, directed and shot by Bradford May, is all style and ‘40s L.A. kitsch, which is lovingly and delightfully rendered by production designer Peg McClellan.

But the period look and pointed social detail, such as the Cocoanut Grove ballroom, canary yellow convertibles and green and orange Lucky Strike packs, is finally all there is.

The plot, which plods through a series of murders affecting two next-door families basking in Beverly Hills splendor, is ponderous and cumbersome. And the raft of characters is singularly uninteresting, albeit vivacious in the co-starring heroines who are partners in a detective agency (the brash Crystal Bernard and the perky Annabeth Gish).

Although Bruce Murkoff and Laird Koenig adapted the teleplay from Rex Stout’s novel “Hand in the Glove,” this is Stout without his sedentary sleuth Nero Wolf. Oh, in this nightclub scene, the gleeful principals do gesture across the ballroom to a corpulent fellow with a big flower in his lapel, which could be a coy inside salute to the bulky figure of Nero Wolf. Then again, it might be W.C. Fields.

In any event, do you really need plot, character, a tight structure and suspense when you got such captivating excelsior? That sound you hear is Tommy Dorsey and Glenn Miller jumping at the Grove. And on the boulevard that stompin’ drummin’ is Ray Baduc’s “Big Noise From Winnetka.”

As the show’s first image signals you from its famous perch on the top of the hill, this is “Hollywoodland.” The mistake this movie made was not to go the “Pennies From Heaven” route and become a musical about two singing detectives. Where’s the imagination gone to in this town, anyway?