Just Before Dawn

This film starring Warner Baxter as Dr. Robert Ordway was outstanding with people wanting plastic surgery and the skin on their fingers be remove in order to avoid fingerprinting. Karl Ganss, (Martin Kosleck) is an undertaker and shady character who often played roles in WW II films as a Nazi, gave an outstanding performance. In this story, Dr. Ordway is visited by a neighbor across his street to help a man who has fainted at their party. Ordway finds out the man is diabetic and needs a shot of insulin and injects him, he revives and then quickly dies, placing Ordway as his killer. Many people are murdered and Dr. Ordway manages to impersonate a murderer who was at large from Indianaoplis, Indinia. There are many twists and turns and it will be very hard to figure out who is responsible for all these crimes committed.

Some new neighbors of Dr. Ordway call on him one nigh as the man of the house is not feeling well. Turns out he's a diabetic and missed his insulin shot. Warner Baxter gives him his shot, but moments later the man is dead.

After that introduction the police allow Baxter a free hand t work as their agent in solving the crime. The investigation leads him to a funeral parlor where he director Martin Kosleck has an interesting sideline in plastic surgery for criminal types.

Baxter takes a potentially fatal gamble in finding he final solution. Watch and see what i mean.

In this entry of the Crime Doctor series, starring Warner Baxter as psychiatrist Dr. Robert Ordway, Ordway's neighbor knocks on his door one night and asks him to attend to a party guest, a diabetic, who has passed out. He hasn't taken his insulin, which he usually takes before dinner, but dinner has been delayed. Dr. Ordway asks the diabetic's sister where he keeps his insulin, she retrieves it, and Ordway gives him the dose. The man regains consciousness for just a few minutes and then dies. Ordway has injected him with a mixture of insulin and poison. As the police say to Ordway the next day "Someone has made a fine sucker out of you." It turns out that Walter Foster, the victim, was a man who inherited 250 thousand dollars - a tidy sum in those days - and in a couple of years had blown through it all. The victim also had some interesting last words "God has given you one face, and you make yourselves another", from Hamlet. Me? If I was in such a bind I'm sure I would just say "Help me I'm dying!!!", rather than quote Shakespeare, but that's another story.

Angry that he has been made the patsy in this murder, and also having his natural curiosity about crime, Ordway goes about trying to find the murderer. This entry just oozes atmosphere. You have strange goings on at a funeral parlor, a screaming woman trapped in the funeral parlor with a dead body that is to be buried the next morning, and the parlor's hearse driving around menacingly at night, looking more like it is in search of creating corpses rather than just hauling them.

This entry was directed by William Castle and has that macabre feeling for which his films were well known. I'd say the story and direction make this a cut above the other Crime Doctor films, not that any of the others were bad or even mediocre. I'd recommend it.

Interesting Doctor Ordway's investigation ,with good scenes in the mortician's funeral parlor ;it's an easy place to get rid of dead bodies, although there are plenty of implausibilities , Shakespeare's quotation to begin with , but it's the name of the game : extremely eventful ,with many characters, many suspects ,and an originality:although Ordway summons and gathers all the suspects a la Hercule Poirot , the whodunit is solved later on ,when the hero is alone with the murderer.

This time Dr. Ordway (WARNER BAXTER) is involved in a plot concerning diabetics and insulin with the reliable MARTIN KOSLECK as the villain of the piece who is not above switching a bottle of insulin for poison and making Dr. Ordway the unsuspecting killer.

While there are plenty of suspects who might have wanted the deceased man out of the way, the plot hinges mostly on sinister doings at the Ganss Mortuary run by Kosleck who is prone to dispose of anyone who is going to reveal information to Dr. Ordway.

It's a good old-fashioned mystery with some creepy characters among the villains assisting Kosleck and the plot is less murky than some of the others in the crime doctor series. There's a clever plot twist with the doctor using supposed blindness as deception in catching the killer.

Summing up: One of the better entries in the crime doctor series.