The Hat Box Mystery

Tom Neal is out of town on a job, when a man walks in and asks his secretary, Amanda Blake, to get a picture of his wife coming out of a building so he can prove she's been cheating on him. He says she knows he is trying to get a photo for a divorce, so he's rigged a camera in a hatbox. When Miss Blake carries out the instructions, the gun in the box goes off and Miss Blake is jailed while the District Attorney waits to see if the woman in the hospital dies.

It's a very early Lippert production, so the production values are poor. Hillyer seems to have used his connections and the short money to get Allen Jenkins to play Neal's comic sidekick who's dumber than a bag of bowling bowls and some other talent, but the movie is underwritten and Hillyer's dialogue direction is awful. Jenkins reads his lines all right, and so does Miss Blake, but everyone else sounds as if they can't be bothered to phone it in.

The only interesting aspect of the movie is the opening credits; they begin with a title card, then there's a cut to the set, where Neal introduces the central cast, then it's back to the titles.

This seems to have been shot as the beginning of a series. Six weeks later, Lippert unleashed THE CASE OF THE BABY SITTER, with Hillyer directing and the same core cast.