Sep 231932
 
two reels

Thirteen years ago a dinner party is interrupted when the master of the house, John Morgan, dies. Only 12 of the expected 13 guests had arrived and his Last Will and Testament leaves the bulk of the estate to the missing 13th guest. Now Marie Morgan (Ginger Rogers), on her 21st birthday, has been sent to the old house which has been closed all these years. She’s electrocuted and her body left in the chair she occupied at the dinner. Police Captain Ryan (J. Farrell MacDonald) and his mentally deficient sidekick Gump (Paul Hurst) are put on the case and Ryan calls in obnoxious womanizing private Detective Phil Winston (Lyle Talbot). Then a second murder is committed by a black-robed figure, and it seems that someone plans to murder all of the still-living dinner guests in the order they sat at the table. To confuse things, Marie shows up alive; the first victim had been surgically altered to look like Marie.

Ah, Monogram Studios, king of Poverty Row. This is yet another of the many, many Dark House mysteries that they churned out in the 1930s, this one including a villain who’s straight out of the serials. It’s pushing it to call this horror or even an Old Dark House film since they keep leaving it and roaming about in the sunshine, but there’s secret passageways and murders, and plenty of screaming, so close enough.

This is a cheap flick, and it looks it. We’re talking bottom basement camera work and below bottom lighting. I hope you don’t want to actually see what is going on. Rogers and Talbot aren’t turning in their best work, and they are the only ones who give the impression of that they do this for a living.

It doesn’t seem any money was set aside for the script either, but then what charm it has might come from how stupid it is, and I’m not talking about the non-stop sexist sludge coming from Winston, who we are supposed to like. The fiendish plots (there are two of them) don’t make any sense. Why is the killer using such an elaborate method? Why is he dressed like a second-rate super villain? And why didn’t the script make Winston a police detective instead of a PI?. Private detectives cannot give commands to police officers and get judges to do their bidding. Unless the law has changed a whole lot in 80+ years, I think there’s something wrong here. But the film is easier to take when everything is silly. And this is one very silly film. I laughed at it, which beats sleeping through it. And that’s the key. It isn’t boring. It’s light, stupid fun, and not a horrible way to spend an afternoon, as long as you aren’t paying for it.

This made enough money for Rogers and Talbot to appear in a follow-up mystery, A Shriek in the Night, playing different characters. It was remade in ’43 as The Mystery of the 13th Guest.