The Great Hotel Murder

Edmund Lowe is crime novelist Roger Blackwood in The Great Hotel Murder, competing with house detective Victor Mclaglen to solve a guest's murder.

It appears, first of all, that the wrong man was murdered, since he changed rooms with the person across the hall and wound up poisoned.

This is one of those talky programmers where one loses the thread of the plot as the story becomes more convoluted and less interesting.

The film is somewhat erratic. As a result, as time goes on, one's attention wanes. Sometimes the dialogue is serious, and other times it tends toward humorous.

As soon as the film ended, I forgot the plot.

Mystery novelist Edmund Lowe and house detective Victor McLaglen try to figure out why a guest committed suicide..... or was he murdered?

With Eugene Forde directing, you can be assured this late Fox programmer will be efficient. Unfortunately, it has one of the problems of a lot of mysteries: too much talk. While clearly intended to play off the leads' Quirt-and-Flagg competitive comradery, a large cast of suspects and a solution that seems to come out of nowhere make this another weak movie, typical of much of the Fox output in the period leading up to the merger with 20th Century. With Mary Carlisle, Henry Stephenson, John Qualen and Madge Bellamy.

Crime novelist Roger Blackwood competes with hotel house detective Andy McCabe in solving a murder by poisoning at a medical convention. For a while they get misled by red herrings.

Edmund Lowe plays a know-it-all, dry-witted crime author and Victor Mclagen a dopey house detective - of course, he lacks in the brain department and Lowe is the opposite. I love their war of words and the put downs. Lowe's comeback lines were delivered smoothly. The mystery is engaging, there's a certain energy in the plot enough twists and turns to keep you watching. There's a good line of suspects, a neat ending, if albeit a little too slapdash as if they ran out of celluloid.

Just finished reading the book by Vincent Starrett, I watched this (on YouTube) and was unimpressed. The basic plot was similar to the book, but the screenwriters changed too much for me to accept. The book's amateur sleuth was a young film critic (not a mystery writer) and he was younger than the actor portraying him, and much less confidant.

The book is set in Chicago and Wisconsin, not California. The culprit is sort of the same, although a lot of the details in motive and exposition are different.

None of this is damning to a movie, but the film itself is too scattered to gel completely. (The whole New Year's Eve party was a silly insertion, not in the book.) There were a few things I thought were silly (like having a hotel room closet that had a lock on the outside. Huh?)

If I hadn't just read the book I don't think I'd have stuck out the entire 109 minutes runtime.

Standard murder mystery of its era, uplifted by the sometimes amusing camaraderie between Edmund Lowe and Victor McLaglen (who were paired up in several films; in this one, Lowe is the one with the brains) and occasional cleverness in its ploting (including one real surprise). But the ending is incredibly abrupt, in all the prints I have managed to find - which leads me to the theory that a 100% full print is not available anymore. ** out of 4.