With the time machine set at 1936, we find ourselves on the set of this typically inconsequential quota quickie in which people in evening dress get throttled or shot without anyone being unduly alarmed.
The first ten minutes promise something quite different, with a lot of painstaking verbal exposition - first in a jury room, then at Scotland Yard - by a large uncredited cast who we never see again, but give much better performances than the waxworks with whom we have to spend the rest of the film. What they have been so earnestly discussing is the macabre case of the Laughing Murderer, which would have made far more interesting viewing than what we are then served up with for the next fifty minutes, set in one of those enormous country houses everyone lived in in pre-war movies.
It's all pleasant enough to sit through, the settings being designed by the veteran art director John Bryan, who later won an Oscar for his work on David Lean's 'Great Expectations' (1946). Female lead Sunday Wilshin (later a producer at the BBC) glides comfortably into these surroundings resembling a handsome piece of living Art Deco sculpture, with a mannish chin and blonde bobbed hair offset by a glittering, figure-hugging thirties evening gown in which she consumes endless cigarettes and sweeps about the house and grounds along with the rest of the cast, who make endless entrances and exits like characters in a Whitehall Farce.
A 33 year-old Wilfred Hyde-White looks and sounds almost exactly as he did as an old man, playing a crime writer who eventually solves the whole messy business in the final two minutes in a fittingly preposterous climax.
