Secret of the Blue Room

Do you like mysterious mysteries? I don't mean mysteries where the murderer is tipped off right away, and then it becomes a cat-and-mouse game with a detective, I mean the ones in which you can't guess the murderer. Well, here is one of the latter, and it was, as I said in my title, a surprise.

This is a very old picture, and the nuts and bolts of the plot have been done to death; people in a scary old castle, dying off one by one due to a curse, and several servants under varying degrees of suspicion. All been done before. Gloria Stuart is lovely and sings a tuneful song, Lionel Atwill is sinister, Edward Arnold is an upstanding Police Commisioner. Just fill in the blanks for plot details. But the ending will really get your attention, which accounts for my rating of seven.

7/10 - website no longer prints my star rating.

This is certainly one of THE classic 'old mansion murder mysteries' that were so popular in the 30s; and it can contend with most of the very best of them. A great challenge for every mystery fan who likes to guess the murderer, because the plot takes so many turns and twists that it's really hard to follow even for a 'murder expert'! The settings are excellent, following the classic scheme of the old, elegant but somehow frightening isolated country house, with solid wooden stairs, long dark corridors with knight's armors in every corner, distinguished old-fashioned furniture - and a dark room with an old DARK mystery...

The cast is magnificent, headed by mystery expert Lionel Atwill, and beautiful Gloria Stuart (who had also played in "The Old Dark House" a year before) as the object of desire for no less than three young men; Edward Arnold, well-known to friends of more down-to-earth gangster movies and comedies, as the blunt detective, Paul Lukas as the suave foreign 'officer and gentleman' - even every bit part was casted just perfectly! In my opinion, an absolute 'must' for any fan of the classic mysteries of the 30s - and a good opportunity for others, who are not too familiar yet with the genre, to get to know it WELL and at its BEST!

A bit rusty and dusty, this film made by Universal in 1933 tells of three men infatuated with the daughter of Lionel Atwill who all agree for sake of ego to stay in the mysterious "blue" room, a room where no one has gone into for twenty or so years because of all the terrible things that befell the inhabitants of that room. Gloria Stuart plays the beautiful object of their affection and carefully plays on the sidelines as each man prepares and stays in the blue room. What happens? Well, that would be giving too much away, but what does ensue is a nice, tight mystery for the most part with some credible red herrings and a somewhat plausible and innovative resolution. Lionel Atwill does a fine job in his patriarchal role as does Stuart. Paul Lukas, Onslow Stevens, and the rest of the cast also do fine jobs. Story really moves this film along, and the script is very good for this time period and for a mystery. My print was somewhat faded and I am not sure if a crisper print exists. I hope so. I know it will be sometime - if anytime - for this film to get the proper DVD treatment is deserves.

1933's "Secret of the Blue Room" was a remake of a 1932 German film titled "Geheimnis des blauen Zimmers," and even uses a few exterior shots from the original, while all interiors were filmed on the same marvelous sets built for James Whale's "The Old Dark House" (1932), also seen in independents such as "The Vampire Bat" and "Strange People." The last of the vintage Universals to utilize Tchaikovsky's serene "Swan Lake" over its opening credits (following "Dracula," "Murders in the Rue Morgue," and "The Mummy"), it begins on a suitably blustery midnight, celebrating the 21st birthday of young Irene von Helldorf (Gloria Stuart), along with her father Robert (Lionel Atwill), and three determined suitors, police captain Walter Brink (Paul Lukas), newspaper reporter Frank Faber (Onslow Stevens), and the much younger Thomas Brandt (William Janney), who impulsively proposes marriage to Irene on the spot. Mocked by the others, the young Brandt brings up the locked blue room, where Irene's mother had died 20 years before, with two others falling victim within since the original tragedy, all at the stroke of 1:00AM. Betting each of his rivals that they must all spend a night in the forbidding salon, Brandt seeks to prove his bravery by going first, only to disappear without a trace before morning, the bed not even slept in. Von Helldorf is reluctant to phone the police, until on the second night, a shot rings out from the blue room, and Faber is murdered at 1:00AM. Lionel Atwill heads a superb cast in his Universal debut, and Edward Arnold turns in some solid sleuthing, as he later would in the 1935 James Whale whodunit "Remember Last Night?" Formerly husband and wife in Whale's "The Kiss Before the Mirror," are Paul Lukas and seductive Gloria Stuart (disrobing just as her jealous husband shoots her dead); she would next appear in Whale's "The Invisible Man," while Lukas would turn up in Whale's "By Candlelight." Part of the original SHOCK! package of vintage Universal horror classics released to television in 1957, this remake was itself twice remade by the same studio, in 1938 as "The Missing Guest," and in 1944 as "Murder in the Blue Room," both of which changed the backstory and added different characters (in this 1933 feature, no one solves the 20 year old mystery of the blue room). Neither of the two remakes were included in the SHOCK! package, but all three turned up on Pittsburgh's Chiller Theater, with four broadcasts for "Secret of the Blue Room" - May 18 1968 (following 1959's "Terror is a Man"), May 24 1975 (following 1940's "Chamber of Horrors" and 1943's "Calling Dr. Death"), Mar 5 1976 (following 1957's "The Deadly Mantis"), and Sept 10 1983 (solo).

Gloria Stuart, of "Titanic" fame who was a Universal film actress of the 1930s, here has just turned 21 as of midnight and is having a small birthday party with three men who are vying for her affection and her father, Lionel Atwill in the "Secret of the Blue Room." All are having a good time, when the subject comes up of the blue room. What is the blue room? What so gruesomely ever happened there? It seems it has been locked for years, because several people were mysteriously killed in that room at exactly 1:00 a.m. on separate occasions, including a detective trying to solve the murders before him. When one of them offers to stay in the room to try to solve the mystery and prove his love for Gloria in doing so, he is nowhere to be found. So begins the strange goings-on in this effective little chiller. In fact, I would watch this again, even knowing the culprit. Lionel Atwill made a career of little horror films just like this, maybe even more macabre than this. The film also stars Paul Lukas and Onslow Stevens as two of her suitors, and Robert Barrat is on hand as the butler who seems to act like he knows more about what's going on than the others do. And, Gloria Stuart sings a lovely song near the beginning of the film. For a spooky time on Halloween night, this will definitely fit the bill and you would be more than entertained by Universal's roster of capable stars and the Universal touch of the sinister creepiness of something in the air waiting for you