MURDER AT GLEN ATHOL
US, 1933, 64 minutes, Black and white.
John Miljan, Irene Ware, Iris Adrian, Noel Madison, Oscar Apfel, Barry Norton, Harry Holman, Betty Blythe, James P. Burtis, Wilson Benge.
Directed by Frank R. Strayer.
Murder Glenn Athol is one of many small-budget murder mysteries and crime dramas directed by Frank R. Strayer during the 1930s. At the end of his career, in the late 1940s, he moved to films with more religious themes including The Pilgrimage Play.
This film runs like a filmed play, a focus on confined rooms, dialogue – as well as the intricacies of a murder mystery.
The star is John Milton, prolific player in the 1930s of many similar films, tall, an imposing presence, moustache, serious-minded. He plays a detective who writes books, on holidays with his strange assistant, Jeff (James P.Burtis, a prolific character actor in the 1930s, sometimes 10 films a year, dying in 1939).
Next door to the holiday house for the detective is a society family, plenty of skeletons in the closet, a dipsy young woman played by Iris Adrian, who has married and divorced well, with her elderly and wealthy ex-husband at the party, her present husband in an institution, his brother the target for her next husband. Her mother, Betty Blythe, is hosting the party along with her friend, a local wealthy man who has an influence with the police. In the background are criminals, pursuing the young woman because she has incriminating letters which they want to retrieve. Also present is a demure young woman, a friend of the mother, Irene Ware.
There are several murders, an attack on the alleged killer who seems to be confessing – but, of course, is not, though the police think that he is. The detective begs to differ, does his own investigation, his friend Jeff also finding clues – with a visit to the institution, a discussion with the doctor, one of the butlers (Wilson Benge a perennial butler in movies) discovering a dagger and some poison buried in the garden, and another discovery seeming to incriminate the demure woman with whom the detective is becoming infatuated.
When the detective has some chicken, prepared by Jeff, who is a rough-and-tumble type who has saved the detective’s life and the detective has saved his life several times, who can turn on the good manners at a moment’s notice, he realises the chicken is rather rigid, rigor mortis comes to mind and the solution to the murder. In the meantime, the criminals have threatened the other butler to phone the detective to demand his presence. Some mishaps, some shootouts, a car chase with the detective and Jeff shrewdly parking their car and shooting at the criminals as they drive past!
When he realises that the dead woman’s mother-in-law was heard talking to the woman when, the detective realises, she was long dead, there is an assembly of all the characters, in the Agatha Christie vein, and the detective setting up a situation where he made as if he was talking but that no one was actually listening – and the mother emotionally collapses.
And romantic ending on board a liner, Jeff allegedly on land but appearing at a porthole having stowed away on a lifeboat!
