William Powell plays Philo Vance for the last time in this enjoyable Warner Brothers B murder mystery. Because it is a B, there are some problems with the script and some problems with the art design. I'll get into that later.
Vance is at a dog show on Long Island showing his Scottish terrier Captain. This is where we meet Archer Coe (Robert Barrat), also a dog show enthusiast as well as a collector of Chinese Art who has an unfaithful mistress (Helen Vinson). Coe argues with and crosses just about every character in the film. Coe is discovered dead the next morning, a bullet in his head, the gun that shot him in his hand, a head wound from a blunt instrument, and a stab wound in his back with his bedroom door locked from the inside. The police are about to call this one a suicide(???) when enters Philo Vance to systematically figure out who did it. Oh, and there is an additional body in the foyer closet.
Powell is great here as Vance, the perfect combination of masculinity and sophistication. He played the same role over at Paramount three other times. Oddly enough, Eugene Pallette as Sgt. Heath is ported over here in the same role he played in the other films. He is the same kind of sidekick cop that Guild (Nat Pendleton) was in The Thin Man. He probably would have never found the body in the closet and had Coe ruled a suicide if not for Vance, but his self esteem is never bothered by this and the two play off of each other perfectly as old pals.
Michael Curtiz' direction gives this B some extra punch, and I never thought I'd see Jack La Rue convincingly play an effete Italian after having seen him as a ruthless thug in "Story of Temple Drake", but he does pull it off.
There are a couple of holes I will just mention. First, before Coe is murdered, the dog of one of his foes is kidnapped and killed. The killer of that dog is never discovered nor is it even mentioned later in the film. Next, when Vance is describing how the murders were carried out, he has a set of detailed miniature models of the buildings involved in his explanation of the crime. These models can be broken out with detailed sectional views of each. Where on earth did he get such a thing on short notice?
