Inside the Room

Austin Trevor dons a French accent in this cryptic murder mystery. Two bodies have been found with the torn pages from an impoverished silent film star's diary in their dead hands. "Pierre Santos" pitches in to help to establish a motive for these seemingly random killings and to detect the culprit who must be staying at the grand home of "Lady Groombridge" (Marjorie Chard). This is quite a pacy affair. Nothing novel but given it had a very low budget and some very uninspired direction, it is a simple quota feature from Twickenham Studios that easily passes an hour effortlessly enough in "Poirot"-light style.

The "Diary Murders" are the talk of London. Two men have been found murdered with a torn diary page found at the scene of each crime. The diary belongs to Lilian Hope, a silent film star who recently died in poverty. Scotland Yard suspect the killer is avenging Lilian by murdering those who betrayed her in life.

Amateur sleuth Pierre Santos (Austin Trevor) is called in to help and goes to the estate of Sir George Frame (Robert Horton). Sir George had an affair with Lilian long ago and he let her down when she later needed help. It is no surprise when Sir George is found murdered like all the others, but this time Santos is on hand to gather the clues. Making his job difficult is the fact that Sir George had many guests at the estate at the time of the murder, but Santos knows one of them is the killer.

It is interesting to note that Austin Trevor had also played Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot in Alibi (1931); Black Coffee (1931); and Lord Edgeware Dies (1934). This is a rare opportunity to see Trevor playing a foreign amateur sleuth.

This is an archetypal quota quickie.It was made by that doyen of quota quickies.Julius Hagen at Twickenham Studios for release by Universal.It is a murder mystery featuring Austin Trevor as a French detective who sounds suspiciously like Hercule Poirot.It has that favourite device of a murdered corpse found in a locked room.The camera work is so static it could have been made in 1905 let alone 1935.Scenes are photographed in one of two ways.Firstly all the actors are assembled on the set so that when their lines come up they don't have to move.The alternate way is to have the scene started off by 2 actors and then when any other actors have to say a line they walk into the scene.There are no closeups and virtually no cuts within scenes.If you shut your eyes you will miss nothing.Basically this is for fans of quota quickies or whodunits.

As the title would suggest, this is a dated British murder mystery mostly set in and around an old dark house where amateur sleuth Pierre Santos (a stand in for Hercule Poirot if ever I saw one) must discover which one of the house guests has bumped off the aristocrat in whose home they are currently staying.

Before this set-up, we get a few police procedural type scenes of murders and the subsequent investigations involving old diary pages found at each crime scene, before things move towards an 'old dark house' style scenario. Sadly, during this era of British cinema, things were still very old-fashioned and stage bound, with heavily mannerismed acting and stilted dialogue. Not one drop of suspense can be wrung from the premise, leaving this an entirely ordinary movie.