The Menace

Englishman Walter Byron -- with nary a British accent -- is imprisoned for killing his father. He escapes, and is reputed to have died in a plane crash. In reality, he has fled to America, where he has made a fortune in the Oklahoma oil fields. A field fire sent him to a plastic surgeon, who gave him a new face. So he returns to the Old Manor to discover who really killed his father. He finds the place bankrupt and in possession of the Crown, his father's widow Natalie Moorhead hoping that the resulting sale will raise enough money to allow her to move to the south of France, and his ex-fiancee, Bette Davis, assisting the fellow representing the crown. Other noteworthy members of the cast include H. B. Warner, and Oscar Apfel.

It was a terrible copy I looked at, likely one drawn from a multi-generational copy of a SLP VHS tape. As a result, I could derived very little of its visual quality; the director, Roy William Neill, was among the better of the Columbia directors at this point, indulging in some of the visual glosses that would form the basis of film noir. However, given the fuzziness and distortion, who knows? Likewise, the cast seems to be trapped in one of those creaky, old British mysteries, with an isolated manor, comic characters, and everyone under suspicion except Miss Davis, lead Arthur Byron -- who seemed to be indistinguishable from Edmund Lowe given the quality of the picture -- and Halliwell Hobbes as the Old Faithful Retainer.

I looked at it, of course, because Bette Davis has a role in it. Given the dullness of the movie, I am unlikely to look at it again.