Room to Let

Jimmy Hanley is the young reporter with suspicions about whether everyone was accounted for in that fire at the madhouse. Valentine Dyall is Dr. Fell, who takes a room in the house of decayed gentry. He proceeds to terrorize everyone with his secretive manner and his threatening, cultured voice.

It's a variation on Marie Belloc Lowndes' THE LODGER. Dyall is the making of it, with a lovely scene in which he chides Constance Smith for turning up the gas lamps, noting that the only reason her mother lets a room to a stranger is because she needs the money. He's smooth and very scary, with his insinuating manner.

The decayed family, by the way, is named 'Musgrave', which recalls the Sherlock Holmes story 'The Musgrave Ritual. It's a nice bit suggesting that there is a mystery here... but what that mystery is will be answered by the end. Perhaps.