THE ROGUES' TAVERN

US, 1936, 70 minutes, Black and white.
Wallace Ford, Barbara Pepper, Joan Woodbury, Claire Kimball Young, John Elliott.
Directed by Bob Hill.

The Rogues’ Tavern is a murder mystery of the 1930s, a complicated plot which reminds audiences of something from those old stories where a mysterious stranger invites a whole lot of people to a secluded house and then begins to murder them. The plot, though quite implausible, is interesting enough, especially in the revelation of who the murderer is.

It started off like something of a screwball comedy with Wallace Ford and Barbara Pepper, he a detective and she a shop detective, who want to get married immediately but cannot do it in the state and are sent by a kindly adviser across the state border where a justice of the peace will do the ceremony. There is a lot of to-ing and fro-ing between the couple.

They arrive at the remote hotel, managed by an elderly couple, with a rather slow-witted man as the general dogsbody for the visitors. They find a number of men there already, who seem to know each other, but are rather edgy, waiting for the person who invited them (who does arrive thinking he has been invited by them). There is also a mysterious woman who has, she says, powers of reading the cards. When her first customer dies, with dog’s teeth marks on his neck, everybody takes it for granted that it is the big dog, part-wolf, that belongs to the hotel. Another man tries to shoot the dog, fails, goes to his room and he too is bitten.

They ring the coroner who fails to arrive, find that the phone lines have been cut, everybody moving into rather panic mode except Jimmy, the detective, played genially by Wallace Ford, and his fiancee, Margie, Barbara Pepper in something of a Jean Harlow style, who go into detection mode.

Jimmy suspects that it is murder rather than killings by the dog and, later, Margie finds the dog mask with the teeth. There are various suspects, especially the owner of the hotel who is in a wheelchair the later showing himself capable of getting to his feet. The question is whom is he shielding? One theory is of an old scientist with bizarre glasses – who materialises outside the house, spends a lot of time looking in windows, but is, in fact, a red herring character.

Mrs Jamison, who manages the hotel for her husband, helps with the searching for evidence, especially in the basement where, eventually, they are all trapped. As with the other films, there is a recorded voice threatening everyone, and an explosive which can be set off destroying them all, vengeance by Mrs Jamison for the group, a syndicate of jewel smugglers across the border, who are responsible for the death of her sister. Jimmy to the rescue and overpowering Mrs Jamison – just as the justice of the peace arrives!

Entertaining but not at all a must-see!