Murder at Dawn

My idea of torture, which might perhaps be inflicted upon terrorist suspects in order to make them scream and divulge their confederates, would be to tie them down, prop open their eyelids with those tools used by optic surgeons, and force them to watch this film. Richard Thorpe directed it, and later he learned how to direct, as proved by 'A Toy Wife' six years later, but at this early stage in what was to be a long career (offering him plenty of time to go to confession and tell some holy father that he had committed the sin of directing 'Murder at Dawn' abominably), he seemed to imagine that film direction was something one does with a knife in a butcher shop, serving up the offal to the masses, of which this is a misshapen specimen. To pretend that this is a film is like pretending that an ant is an elephant. Of course, everything is relative. After all, to a flea, an ant is an elephant. And similarly, to Richard Thorpe in 1932, this presumably did appear to be a film. But we who live in later times are not fooled: this is unmistakably a piece of rubbish.