El candelabro fatal

Nina Foch comes to see psychiatrist Warner Baxter. She''s been sleepwalking onto the beach from her house by the shore, and having threatening, incoherent dreams. Eventually, Baxter comes to visit her. Miss Foch's family is decayed gentry. Although she has the house, she earns a living as a textile designer. She also runs a perpetual house party for family and friends, including mildly nutty chemist George Zucco, her sister and brother-in-law, and so forth. To see if there is something about her bedroom, she sleeps in one of the guest rooms and has Baxter take hers for the night.... and he has threatening, incoherent dreams and goes sleepwalking onto the beach. Then Zucco turns up dead.....and everyone in the house seems intent on the inquest declaring it an accident.

It's a pretty good mystery, although there's a fake-science edge to it, but the cast of capable performers do nicely with the material under high-speed director Eugene Forde. The result is an excellent B picture, one of the series that occupied Bater for most of the last decade of his life.