Starring Dick Purcell, Joan Woodbury, John Hamilton, Warren Hymer, Mantan Moreland
Directed by William Beaudine
(actor & director credits courtesy IMDB.com)
A prosecuting attorney is convinced a philanthropist is the man behind three murders, but he's a deaf mute, contradicting reports the murderer spoke, and has alibis during the time of each killing.
Monogram Pictures remakes their own 1933 film, The Sphinx, casting John Hamilton in the role played by Lionel Atwill in the original. As much as I like Hamilton, whose performance as newspaper editor Perry White in The Adventures Of Superman TV series has become iconic, I'll say he plays the part well enough, but can't outdo the performance Atwill gave. However, for those who haven't seen the original, it's still a solid mystery. This version of the story seemed to me to also inject a lot more humor into the tale, with Moreland excelling in a small cameo as Purcell's only witness, and Woodbury playing the familiar part of the prosecutor's wisecracking reporter girlfriend with plenty of sass. However, the sequences with Hymer as a police sergeant trying to stay in the good graces of his combative wife take the comedy a bit over the top, especially when her voice is sped up on the telephone to the extreme.
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