Famous detective Alan Curtis (Philo Vance) visits a magazine publisher. He wants start a line of mystery books. He wishes to hire Curtis to collaborate on it, and offers as a subject the murder of his partner seven years earlier -- the body vanished. He thinks he knows who did it. When Curtis and Sheila Ryan show up at his house to discuss it, they spot his body, break in and call the sheriff. Meanwhile the body has disappeared and turned up in the trunk of Curtis' sports car.
This is not your grandmother's Philo Vance. He's not a society man who dabbles in ratiocination. He has an eye for the ladies, and they for him. He speaks slang and uses a gun when appropriate. In short, it's another Black Mask style mystery, with Philo Vance's name added for marketing purposes, more Michael Shayne than the badly written character Willard Huntington Wright had created twenty years earlier. It's a fair mystery, but utterly forgettable.
The director of this movie is Reginald Leborg. That sounds like a name that an emigrant in the 7th Avenue shmatta trade might have adopted because it sounded classy. Actually, it was the pseudonym of Reginald Grobel, a scion of a Viennese banking family who wanted to make movies, and simply reversed his last name. He made a lot of movies, the last of them in 1974, if he ever directed a good one, I've yet to see it.
This is not your grandmother's Philo Vance. He's not a society man who dabbles in ratiocination. He has an eye for the ladies, and they for him. He speaks slang and uses a gun when appropriate. In short, it's another Black Mask style mystery, with Philo Vance's name added for marketing purposes, more Michael Shayne than the badly written character Willard Huntington Wright had created twenty years earlier. It's a fair mystery, but utterly forgettable.
The director of this movie is Reginald Leborg. That sounds like a name that an emigrant in the 7th Avenue shmatta trade might have adopted because it sounded classy. Actually, it was the pseudonym of Reginald Grobel, a scion of a Viennese banking family who wanted to make movies, and simply reversed his last name. He made a lot of movies, the last of them in 1974, if he ever directed a good one, I've yet to see it.