In a private home on an island off Cuba, Hugh Trevor is holding a house party. As the evening progresses, he quarrels with his fiancee, Betty Compson, over her writing mystery novels. They break off their engagement. Pianist Ivan Lebedeff makes love to Rita La Roy, Sherman Lowell's wife. Later Lebedeff disappears, and Trevor confesses to his murder. After everyone goes to sleep, Lebedeff reappears.
It's a nicely turned how-catch-em story, derived from a show that played less than 30 performances on Broadway; Clark Gable had Trevor's role. That wasn't a particularly successful run, but the demand for movie materials was intense. Plays, novels, short stories were ransacked to provide stories for the hundreds of feature movies produced every year. An unproduced play serve as the basis for CASABLANCA. Smash plays and best-selling novels produced bidding wars, sustaining theater and publishing.
This movie shows its stage origins; the first few minutes, with most of the guests in one room and Lebedeff in the other room, playing, is indistinguishable from a stage show. It opens up a bit thereafter, then retreats occasionally to its stage origins, but the staging of the mystery and its uncovering makes it pretty interesting.
