Hitchcoc This is great fun. With Rathbone as the most visible of actors, it enlists a bevy of character actors from the time. In an old house, a woman who keeps cats is dying (or so everyone thinks). All the usual vultures are hovering around, waiting to get their hands on her fortune. When she suddenly takes a turn for the better, someone decides to take matters into his/her hands. Now we have a murderer on the premises and the house and its contents become a big part of the plot. Of course, each character's possible participation in the murder is weighed. Accusations abound as we are led on a merry chase. This is a cut above the low budget whodunnits that populated the screen in those days.

kapelusznik18 ****SPOILERS****Broderick Crawford is the unlikely hero in this haunted house like movie as the klutzy real estate agent Herbert A. Gilmore "Gil" Smith who can't seem to put one foot in front the other without tripping over on it. It's when Henrietta Winslow, Cecilia Loftus, is mysteriously murdered that Gil goes into action trying to uncover her killer among those gathered to hear her will read and who gets all the goodies that she's to leave over to them: It turns out that Mrs. Winslow's cats get the lion shear of her money! This leads to a number of those gathered getting killed by someone who wants to eliminate them in order to get their share of Mrs. Winslow's money as well as her entire mansion.It turns out that the house gardener Eduardo Vigos, Bela Lugosi,knows the person involved in all the murders going on among the invited guests but he's soon eliminated when he's about to expose who did them by the killer. Through the entire movie Gil ends up putting his foot in his mouth at every turn and apologizing to everyone, even the killer, until the final minutes of the movie when he finally sees the light, in the crematory oven, in who's behind them. By then the killer made his or her appearance known and planned to have Gil's girlfriend Elaine, Anna Gwynne, who figured out who the killer was cremated together with the late Mrs. Winslow's cats in order to keep the truth of his actions from seeing the light of day!***SPOILERS*** It was in fact the sinister looking back cat who seems to have supernatural powers who both saves the day as well as Gil & Eline's lives by coming out of the shadows and putting an end to the killers plans. That by it tripping over a lighted candle and setting the killer on fire before he can do any more damage. There's also in the cast Gale Sondergaad as the house maid Abigail Doone who later was to make it big in the in the film "Weird Woman" in which in being the weirdo that she is was the part she was born to star in. We also had Basil Rathborn as Montague Hartley in between his Sherlock Holmes movies roles which was an in joke in the film's dialogue. And finally the future contract killer and cat lover in his break out film "This Gun for Hire" David Ladd who despite playing tough guy and big hero parts in his future movie roles was the smallest or shortest person in the film's entire cast.

utgard14 Old lady gathers her greedy relatives in her gloomy isolated mansion for a reading of her will. Not long after, she winds up dead. Welcome to an old dark house thriller, friends. Yes, it's fairly repetitive of many other such thrillers or comedies but it's pretty entertaining at times. It has an excellent cast, most of which unfortunately have little to do. Broderick Crawford stars in an early role. He's equal parts leading man and buffoon. The kind of part Wayne Morris would have been playing over at WB. Bela Lugosi has a small, thankless part. He spends most of the movie ominously lurking in the shadows and peering in windows. Hugh Herbert provides the movie's comic relief. For the uninitiated that means he fidgets and talks to himself, punctuating every other sentence with "woo hoo." It's not very funny but I found it harmless enough. Maybe I'm just used to Herbert by now. Others may find him irritating so be warned. The rest of the cast includes Basil Rathbone, Gale Sondergaard, Anne Gwynne, Gladys Cooper, and Alan Ladd before he made it big. I agree with another reviewer that this probably would have worked better as an Abbott & Costello movie. Despite the relatively short runtime, it begins to feel overlong as it nears the hour mark. It's enjoyable enough but flawed. Still, anything Universal was putting out in the horror/thriller field in the 1940s was worth watching.

AaronCapenBanner Not connected to the 1934 film with the same name, which also starred Bela Lugosi, who here is wasted in a small role as a grounds-keeper. Typical old dark house film except it's mostly comedy, and tediously unfunny at that. Greedy relatives have gathered in hopes that their elderly relative(Henrietta Winslow) will die, she proves resilient, so someone resorts to murder in order to collect. Basil Rathbone(who looks annoyed), Anne Gwynne, Gladys Cooper, Alan Ladd, and Gale Sondergaard play the hopeful heirs, Broderick Crawford plays a hopeful buyer of the mansion, but it is Hugh Herbert as the supremely annoying Mr. Penny, obsessed with Antiques, that ruins this film irreparably, beating the one joke for 70 minutes! Still, a woman kind to all those cats has my sympathies.