THE LADY IN THE MORGUE (1938)

At a downtown hotel, a young woman is found hanging in the closet of her room, an apparent suicide, and she is taken to the morgue to await identification. A gangster thinks she might be his mistress, but the wealthy Courtlands think she might be their daughter who had written a letter in which she sounded suicidal, and they hire detective Bill Crane to investigate. But when the body disappears from the morgue and an attendant is found dead, it's clear that there is more to this than a lonely suicide. Crane gets an elevator operator to let him into the hotel room to snoop around, and he quickly deduces that she must have been killed by someone and hung up as a cover-up. When the cops arrive, Crane sneaks out the window and pops into another room, occupied by a young woman who is taking a shower, who turns out to be married to Sam Taylor, a musician who was the last person to have seen the dead woman alive. I think you can sense at this point that the plot is going to get a bit too convoluted for its own good, something that happens with some frequency in B-mysteries. Indeed, the gangster's moll is still alive, as is the Courtland daughter. How is the lady in the shower (who may not actually be married to Sam Taylor) involved? And, of course, who was the mystery woman and who stole her body?

This is one in a series of Crime Club mysteries made by Universal, all based on books published under a Crime Club imprint. It's short—about 70 minutes—and is shot with some interesting B-style, with lots of camera swipes as transitions between scenes, but otherwise it's par for the course for the genre. Preston Foster is acceptable as the detective, and he works well with Frank Jenks, his sidekick; their banter keeps the movie's tone lightweight. Patricia Ellis is fine as the somewhat mysterious Courtland daughter. The Courtland brother is played by Gordon Elliott, later to be a B-western star under the name "Wild Bill" Elliott. Gordon Drew, who played Prince Barin in a Flash Gordon serial, is Sam Taylor. Barbara Pepper (pictured with Foster) adds some spice as a saucy blonde. Aside from the occasionally flashy camerawork, the low-budget production is fairly bare bones; there is no musical score, the sets are on the cheap side, and the script could have been tightened up. The two most interesting scenes are set at a penthouse cocktail party and a cemetery. It all moves fairly quickly to a satisfying “roomful of suspects” ending. [YouTube]