Murder by Television

When one watches an old B movie from one of the poverty row studios, you should go in cutting a little slack. This picture, even with that mea culpa, does not fare well. Bela Lugosi does an excellent job in the acting department, but up against the passionless talking automatons in this turkey, Huntz Hall would come off as Laurence Olivier.

The story is simple. Watching a TV broadcast, a man suddenly chokes and dies on camera. (He probably wanted to get out of this waste of celluloid as soon as possible.) Now, the room full of people are all suspects, and the cops close up the house until the crime is solved.

Besides moving along so slowly that the hour length seems interminable, this isn't the only sin the producers made on this curio. The usual banter with racial stereotypes is embarrassing to say the least. From the Chinese houseboy who rattles off Charlie Chan and Confucious sayings so badly you can't understand his words half the time, to Hattie McDaniell slipping up and even using proper English for a moment when the writing for her character has the usual "negro" speech patterns, it is a textbook example of how racist a time the 1930s were.

It is probably because of bad movies like this that Mr, Lugosi's career went into such a tailspin that eventually took his life. Yet, he does acquit himself nicely in the acting department here playing not only a scientist but his own twin (though the two Belas never share a scene due, I suspect, to a dismally low budget) The fact that the film is so horrendous and wastes a great opportunity to utilize the budding medium of television And even the solution to the mystery is the pits. I won't give a spoiler here, but there IS no way to spoil this ending. It was pitiful - along with the rest of this script.

On top of all this, the copies that exist are so bad and have many jump-cuts throughout. A true shame and waste of the legendary Bela Lugosi.

Finally, I wonder if this director had much of a career beyond this joke of a studio that most likely was owned by some theater chain (as many such studios did prior to the anti-trust laws.) He probably went into accounting or some other less creative field.