The Crime of the Century

The crime of the century wasn't quite the crime of the century. It was a doozy, it was a mystery, but it was also solvable. When I think, "crime of the century," I think of a crime that was gotten away with.

The movie began with Dr. Emil Brandt (Jean Hersholt) pleading to detectives Riley (Robert Elliott) and Martin (David Landau) to lock him up. Why? Because he planned to commit murder for money. If the cops locked him up then he couldn't commit the murder.

He had hypnotized a man by the name of Philip Ames (Samuel S. Hinds) and commanded him to steal $100,000 and bring it back to him by 8:15 p.m. He was then going to kill Philip and take the $100,000 for himself. The killing part is why he wanted to be locked up. He couldn't trust himself not to kill Philip, but police don't make arrests for crimes that haven't happened.

It turns out that Dr. Brandt needed the money to appease his wife, Freda (Wynne Gibson). She was a gold digger and was going to double cross Dr. Brandt and run off with the money with her lover, Gilbert Reid (Gordon Westcott). She never got that chance because a fourth person (someone besides Freda, Gilbert, or Dr. Brandt) entered the house, killed Philip, and took the money. The main suspects were the three aforementioned with an outside chance of it being one of the detectives, or the newspaperman, Dan McKee (Stuart Erwin), or the help, or another man who was anonymous.

There was enough intrigue with the murder and the cast of characters that I stayed tuned in. $100,000 is enough for just about anyone to commit murder, so everybody was in play. There was very little focus on characters with the exception of establishing who they were and a small glimpse of what type of person they were, and that allowed the movie to stay focused on the murder and solving the murder. That's what I want from a murder mystery. I don't need to know a whole lot about each character except what's germane to the plot. "The Crime of the Century" kept everything crime-centric even if it wasn't "the crime of the century."

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