BY WHOSE HAND?


US, 1932, 65 minutes, Black-and-white.
Ben Lyon, Barbara Weeks, Kenneth Thomson, Nat Pendleton, Tom Dugan , Dwight Frye.
Directed by Benjamin Stoloff.

By Whose Hand? is an assured supporting feature from Columbia Studios, with quite some effective sets and production values, especially the action taking place on a train.

The film opens with a murder in a sleeping carriage, a poised knife, the reaction of the murdered man only in his face. He is reading a newspaper with the heading that a killer has escaped from jail.

The clock winds back for a flashback, people arriving at the station to take the train. There is quite a range of people in the one carriage that the film focuses on. An eager journalist, flirting with the girl behind a paper stand, sees the police hurrying to the station and hops on the car. He is about to leave when he sees an attractive young woman and decides to go on the train. She responds very favourable to him – and, jokingly posing as husband-and-wife, with some romantic touches, they are engaged by the end of the train ride and then he is sentenced to life! Marrying her.

There is a femme fatale engaged in a conversation at the station, pretending to be French, but interested in a jeweller who has a roving eye even as he is farewelling his wife. They meet on the train, the have a conversation about jewellery, she steals the jewels but hides them in the heroine’s suitcase. There is also a cantankerous man complaining about not getting to sleep. There are the various guards on the train and those in the engine – who are killed by the killer. The police are also guarding a young man who has given up the killer to the police as well as a woman posing as a widow with her husband’s body in a coffin, going to feed her dog but loosening the coffin for the killer’s escape.

The young man who had betrayed the killer gets loose from his guard, gets a gun, travels through the carriages but is himself killed. The cantankerous man turns out to have had a set against the jeweller who gave him up and subsequently served a prison sentence. He did the murder. The young woman set to steal the jewels is recognised by the journalist and arrested.

At a difficult moment, gun trained, the journalist turns the light off, there is a scuffle, some dead, the killer captured.

Not a bad 65 minutes supporting feature.