Someone at the Door

SOMEONE AT THE DOOR is one of those comedy thrillers that were so popular. This one boasts a gorgeous print and excellent set design (creepy old country house with hidden passageways, etc.) but the plot just doesn't come together. Billy Milton and Aileen Marson play siblings. He's a hack writer looking for an angle and she's just inherited said spooky old house in the country. With a pal in tow (John Irwin), they go down to the house to hatch a plan. Believe it or else, the plan is to fake her murder and get him arrested so he can write some "my confession" stories and make some money. There's a surly butler (Edward Chapman), a bumbling cop (Charles Mortimer), and a visiting businessman Noah Beery) in the mix. There's also a missing missing servant and a cleaning woman (Hermione Gingold in her second film). Directed by Herbert Brenon from a play by Campbell and Dorothy Christie. Milton is quite brash. Marson gets a lot of loving close-ups. She made 16 films in the 1930s and died in childbirth in 1939.

A somewhat uneven spoof of the familiar ingredients of crime thrillers and mysteries of the day. Aileen Marson, who was to die tragically young, plays Sally Martin, who visits an isolated country house she has inherited, accompanied by her journalist brother Ronald, and her fiancée, Bill. This trio are straight out of Agatha Christie and Ronald comes up with an eccentric publicity stunt; Sally will go into hiding, and he will then act suspiciously and be falsely accused of her murder. Enter a gang of jewel thieves - every other quota quickie seemed to feature stolen jewellery somewhere along the line - only one of whom knows the exact location of the loot, buried somewhere in the vicinity of the house.

All the stock situations - the lonely house with secret passages and hidden chambers - and characters - the plucky ingénue, the dim-witted local copper and truculent double-crossing crooks with a 'surprise' leader, are knowingly presented. There's also an American gangster type, played by Noah Beery in one of a string of British films he made in the mid Thirties. It becomes more of a straight thriller for a time towards the end, including Beery menacing Marson, threatening to blind her with a cigarette, before the more farcical elements come to the fore again.