THE SECRET OF THE LOCH (1934)

In a small Scottish village, Joe, perhaps slightly inebriated, runs into a tavern one misty night claiming to have seen the legendary Loch Ness Monster, a giant sea serpent creature that supposedly lives in the Scottish lake. There has been a rash of sightings lately and people who have gone underwater looking for it have not returned. In London at a conference of morphologists, Professor Heggie claims the beast is real and that it's a relative of a dinosaur. His fellow scientists laugh him off the stage, but Jimmy, a reporter, smells a good story and follows Heggie back to his village. Lots of other reporters have had the same idea, but Jimmy gets a leg up by breaking into Heggie's house and flirting with his granddaughter Angela. He gets on the good side of Angus, Heggie's beefy assistant, by wearing a tartan tie of the MacNockie clan (a tie which he filched from a girl at his newspaper) of which Angus happens to be a member. With nothing concrete to go on, Jimmy gets fired by his boss and told that only an interview with the monster will save him. Heggie hires a diver to look for the serpent one night, but he runs into some trouble and his air hose comes to the surface without him. Heggie is charged with negligence in the diver's death and Jimmy, who now is in love with Angela, decides to take a dive himself and settle the matter. 

The Loch Ness Monster has been a pop culture phenomenon since 1934 when a British newspaper published a photograph of the monster, a blurry shot of what looks like a toy dinosaur coming out of the water. This film, which came out at the end of 1934, appears to be a quickie attempt to exploit that photo's popularity. Though a handful of sightings were reported before the 1930s, it wasn't until the photo and a separate account of a sighting became news, perhaps because of the building of a new road which gave more access to the loch, that Nessie became a legend. This is mostly a comedy, despite the death of the diver, with humor provided by the village locals and the morphologists. In the last few minutes, Jimmy does indeed see the monster (an iguana photographically enlarged and matted into an underwater shot) and later a group of men see it rise up out of the loch, in a shot that looks very much like the newspaper photo. Seymour Hicks, a distinguished stage actor known for playing Scrooge in an early sound version of A Christmas Carol, is Heggie, and he doesn't seem to be too happy in the role. Frederick Peisley, however, throws himself into the comic romantic lead as Jimmy (pictured), and Gibson Gowland (the star of GREED) is fine in the semi-comic role of Angus. Nancy O'Neil has the underwritten part of Angela. In the 70-minute movie, we don't even get near the loch until the 50-minute mark, so don't watch this expecting a serious sci-fi, adventure, or horror film, though the murky atmosphere of most of the scenes is effective—with some of the murkiness due to the age of the unrestored print. As a novelty, and as the first film about the monster, it's kind of fun. As far as other movies on the subject, there haven't been many, with the most well-known one being a Scooby-Doo cartoon movie made for video in 2004. [YouTube]