Behind the great title is one of the worst movies in which Bela Lugosi ever appeared. It’s a B-level murder mystery, but I have a hard time figuring out who’s the dead guy. None of these characters have a pulse. Not even Bela.
Meanwhile, first-time director Clifford Sanforth makes all the usual missteps that you see in every bad low-budget crime and western film from this time. His camera is stuck in concrete, his shots are stage-y, his pace is clunky, his actors are just a bunch of eyes and mouths, the script is boring and nobody here knows the meaning of the word “style”.
An inventor who’s made advancements in cathode ray technology is murdered in the middle of his demonstration at an opulent home. Which one of these tuxedos or evening dresses in the room did the deed? I promise that you won’t care. The only interesting thing about this movie is that it’s a document, however slipshod and ponderous (even at a slender run time of about fifty-four minutes), of the early, early, early days of television, back when the very idea of it was futuristic. There were fledgling networks (pretty much all branching out from radio), but the only things they broadcast were footage of orchestras and shit. It was in an experimental stage. TV sucked so bad in 1935, it made the new season of The Walking Dead look good. No one had a TV in their home back then, not even the extremely wealthy unless they maybe knew David Sarnoff personally. It was a strange and mysterious thing, on the level of a flying car. There’s a tiny little pearl of that excitement here, buried under a lot of hack drawing room whodunit horseshit.