Peggy Cummins is a stage performer with a cockney accent and a vocabulary to match. She spots Victor Mature coming out of her friend's rooms late one evening, and the next morning, she is found dead with a bible with a moss rose pressed in it. She meets with Victor Mature to threaten him with exposure. At first, he is contemptuous, but when police inspector Vincent Price has him in to discuss the case, and Miss Cummins is supposedly to identify him by his voice, he accedes to her demands. She won't take five hundred pounds, but will take two weeks at his country estate, where she meets his mother, Ethel Barrymore, and his fiancee, Patricia Medinia.
Quite obviously an A picture -- other performers include George Zucco and Rhys Williams -- it's claimed that 20th Century-Fox lost more than a million dollars on this. I can understand why. Its pace is glacial, and this hash of shopgirl fiction makes no sense; if Miss Cummins thought Mature murdered young women, her actions make very little sense. I suppose that's why I don't write for the movies, like the screenwriters of this, the usually excellent Niven Bush and Jules Furthman did.
Quite obviously an A picture -- other performers include George Zucco and Rhys Williams -- it's claimed that 20th Century-Fox lost more than a million dollars on this. I can understand why. Its pace is glacial, and this hash of shopgirl fiction makes no sense; if Miss Cummins thought Mature murdered young women, her actions make very little sense. I suppose that's why I don't write for the movies, like the screenwriters of this, the usually excellent Niven Bush and Jules Furthman did.