Having won the screen rights to the latest Philo Vance book -- or lost it, depending on your viewpoint -- MGM put it together in the most desultory manner they could, producing a movie that ran 61 minutes -- not their shortest feature, but not one calling for an intermission. While casting Edmund Lowe is an obvious choice for Vance, he's loaded down with love interest, the underused Virginia Bruce, and the filled the cast with the usual MGM regulars: Nat Pendleton, Jessie Relph, H. B. Warner, Henry B. Walthall, and topped it all with Edward Marin to direct.
How can you expect anything terribly interesting from that description? You can't, and that's what you get. Oh, the mystery portion of it is good. There's even a point at which Lowe snaps his fingers, informing the audience that we have all the clues we need to figure it out. Did I solve it? I got half of it, which I think makes it a fair mystery. As a movie, it's a programmer, and the pacing, on reflection, seems a lot slower than it might have been. Whether that's good or not, I cannot say.
How can you expect anything terribly interesting from that description? You can't, and that's what you get. Oh, the mystery portion of it is good. There's even a point at which Lowe snaps his fingers, informing the audience that we have all the clues we need to figure it out. Did I solve it? I got half of it, which I think makes it a fair mystery. As a movie, it's a programmer, and the pacing, on reflection, seems a lot slower than it might have been. Whether that's good or not, I cannot say.