MURDER BY AN ARISTOCRAT (1936)

This pleasant B-thriller turned out to be sort of an unofficial entry in a series based on the character Nurse Sarah Keate, created by mystery writer Mignon Eberhart. She was played first in 1935 by Aline MacMahon in WHILE THE PATIENT SLEPT (reviewed 4/24/04) and in 1938 by Ann Sheridan in THE PATIENT IN ROOM 18 (reviewed 3/9/02) . For this one, the character's name has been changed to Sally Keating and she's played by Marguerite Churchill, who bears a passing resemblance to Mia Farrow. I don't know for sure if Nurse Keating was the exact same literary character as Nurse Keate, but Eberhart gets screen credit for original story and the similarities between the character types and the set-up of the plots are strong. The 60-minute film is mostly enjoyable, though I didn't care much for Churchill who is by far the blandest of the three nurses. In the other films, her boyfriend is a cop but here, he's a doctor, played by Lyle Talbot, who doesn't really have much to do. The plot is a standard one, with relatives (gathered in a big old house), blackmail, and murder. The black sheep of the Thatcher family (William Davidson) is blackmailing everyone else for a big sum of money. There's a strong willed matriarch figure (though here, she's a spinster, so technically not a matriarch, I guess), a weak-willed drug addict, and a few other relatives. An attempt is made on the blackmailer's life; he is wounded and Churchill is sent out to the house in the middle of the night to care for him. She suspects the tale that the family tells of a gun-cleaning accident is fishy and she sees and hears many strange things before the blackmailer is actually killed later the next day, while no one else was home. Of course, the nurse cracks the case, without a little help from the cops. There are not a lot of other recognizable names in the cast, except for Claire Dodd as one of the relatives, though IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE's Mary Treen has a small role as a maid. [TCM]