I have a 16mm print of this film and every time I watch it I have a feeling something important is left out or edited out. Read the novel to fill in the missing details and the film will make sense. It has to do with Roland Drew's wife.
2 Reviews
Nearly everything you could want in a B mystery.
mark.waltz13 August 2019
Warning: Spoilers
From the time of Pamela Blake's voice over narration as the large house she lives in sneaks up in the fog like Mandalay in "Rebecca", I found myself hooked, especially when she described the big house as one too ugly to live in, and as I began to see it, one that even ghosts found too ugly to haunt. It's a genuine cast of wacko's here, starting with Blake's sleazy fiancee (Roland Varno) who basically tries to blackmail Blake into marrying her, and what occurs as soon as she marries Charles Gordon instead. There's Blake's bedridden mother (Virginia Brissac), a weird relative (Gertrude Michael), a barking housekeeper (Anne O'Neal), and associated creepy friends and family who pop in and out (notably Grady Sutton and Pierre Watkin) of the bizarre action. Everybody seems to have some sort of secret, and when Varno is quickly bumped off, the detectives on the case begin to point the finger at Blake. But Gordon seems to have a motive as well, so who is the real killer could be anybody's guess.
You can't expect much detail in a murder mystery that runs just under an hour, but this is a lot of fun for the type of movie it is. The weirder the characters, the more fun the performances, and Brissac and O'Neal deliver the goods, especially O'Neal who complains that the cook is complaining, not her, after she grumbles after asking to set extra plates for dinner. Varno is the type of slimeball whom murder mysteries were made for, and in his brief appearance, he outdoes the sliminess of such reprehensible characters that you can't wait to see him dispatched, unfortunately not as gruesomely as I would have liked it to have been. Republic made dozens of films like this each year, and this is up there with another one of my favorite murder mystery sleepers they made, along with "Grissly's Millions", which is also overstuffed with fun weirdos and a macabre murder plot.
You can't expect much detail in a murder mystery that runs just under an hour, but this is a lot of fun for the type of movie it is. The weirder the characters, the more fun the performances, and Brissac and O'Neal deliver the goods, especially O'Neal who complains that the cook is complaining, not her, after she grumbles after asking to set extra plates for dinner. Varno is the type of slimeball whom murder mysteries were made for, and in his brief appearance, he outdoes the sliminess of such reprehensible characters that you can't wait to see him dispatched, unfortunately not as gruesomely as I would have liked it to have been. Republic made dozens of films like this each year, and this is up there with another one of my favorite murder mystery sleepers they made, along with "Grissly's Millions", which is also overstuffed with fun weirdos and a macabre murder plot.
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