BEFORE MORNING

US, 1933, 67 minutes, Black-and-white.
Leo Carrillo, Lora Baxter, Taylor Holmes, Louise Prussing, Russell Hicks.
Directed by Arthur Hoerl.

Before Morning is based on a successful Broadway play, adapted by the director, Arthur Hoerl. He directed only four films but was celebrated as a screenwriter from the early 1920s to the late 1960s.

Perhaps because the director is better as a writer than as a director, the film was more interesting in its plot and twists rather than in its execution.

This is early sound filmmaking, small-budget, featuring character actor Leo Carrillo as a seeming doctor, specialising in blackmail, but ultimately revealed to be a police inspector testing out the suspects.

The focus of the film is on an actress, Lora Baxter (a screenwriter, performing vaudeville and in theatre whose only film this was) retiring, about to get married, with a daughter in hospital for whom she sings over the phone, who is visited by an older man who wanted to marry her after getting a divorce from his wife. He feels unwell, goes into the bedroom and dies. To avoid any scandal, the actress’s friends all band together to remove the body from the apartment and take it to a special clinic.

The alleged head of the clinic arrives and rather browbeat is the actress, accusing her of murder, the fact that the man had died of nicotine poisoning. She is given a legacy in the dead man’s will and the doctor pressurises the actress to sign over the money so that he can give a false report that the man died of natural causes. He also contacts the dead man’s wife who arrives, dismayed. However, she is open to the hushing up of any scandal, she planning to get married, and is willing to cede the money to the doctor.

A bit desperate, the wife having taken the box of pills of her dead husband, the actress decides that she wants to do the right thing no matter what. When some friends of the actress arrive, they reveal that the doctor is not the doctor and the wife then tries to throw herself from the balcony… The friends reveal that he is a police inspector, he apologising for what he put the actress through, she then happy to be with the man she intends to marry…

While the plot is interesting, the pace of the film is very slow, the cast pausing before delivering their lines, Leo Carrillo is not exactly the person you would hire to impersonate the specialist – and all the men involved, quite suddenly, appear in the apartment at the end of the film.

A curiosity item with a better plot than performance and production.