Sinister Hands

Starring: Jack Mulhall & Mischa Auer Director: Armand Schaefer

A millionaire is murdered at a séance and all in attendance had a good reason to commit the crime.

Don't let this entertaining bit of mystery and murder escape your viewing pleasure. Try to guess the murderer in this one. (HINT: It's not the butler.) It is quite good.

A silly rich woman invites her swami psychic advisor to a party to entertain her goofy friends, who have been decadently hanging around the estate, playing tennis, dancing, and swimming in their big ol' 30's bathing suits. Her husband doesn't approve of the swami, his daughter's gangster fianc?, and all the other "rats" and "gee-gah-los" who've been hanging around the place, and he makes a lot of enemies among them. So, when he ends up dead during the lights-out portion of the swami's crystal ball act, it's unclear who did it. Detective Devlin (Jack Mulhall, star of the Burn 'Em Up Barnes serial, whose approach to acting seems to be SHOUTING ALL HIS LINES) is brought in to investigate, interviewing all the suspects. His job's not easy since they all had motives, and, to make things even more difficult, the killer strikes again... right when a guy was about to tell Devlin the real killer's identity over the phone, leading to the immortal line, "I know who killed Mr. Lang! It was AAARRRGGGGH!" The old-timeyness of this will likely shake off the short-attention-span crowd early, but it's not all bad if you have a tolerance for "quaint." I figured out the gimmick well before the end, though, so call me Encyclopedia Brown. The director, Armand Schaefer, also directed the aforementioned Burn 'Em Up Barnes, as well as Clyde Beatty's (grrrrreaaaat!!) Lost Jungle serial and a whole slew of b-westerns, despite being nearly completely deaf.