Pendu à l'aube

Walter Woolf King and associates quarrel over the sale of some fancy-schmantzy jewelry. When the guy at the head of the syndicate turns up dead, King is framed by his lying associates, and widow Mona Barrie is missing. He's sentenced to be hanged, but Miss Barrie shows up and starts an elaborate ruse which involves breaking King out of prison.

It's a cheapjack PRC mystery that's so complicated that it winds up ignoring a couple of major plot threads, and the editing is pretty poor; although I thought it was a butchered print, it times in at exactly the original timing. Miss Barrie's performance suggests Eve Arden, and other actors caught in the thrall of PRC's poverty include William Farnum, Sam Bernard, and an uncredited Jimmy Aubrey. This means the acting is good, particularly King's, and the movie, despite its flubs, kept my attention throughout.

King started out in vaudeville, made it to Broadway in 1919, and was a useful and respected baritone in those days. Early talkies found him in operettas, but except for a villainous role in Laurel & Hardy's FRA DIABOLO, the box-office returns weren't there. He showed some talent in a few films in Fox's darkest hours, and his career continued to slide...hence his appearance here. TV offered him more opportunity, he worked pretty regularly through 1978 and died in 1984, aged 84.

Walter Woolf King plays an innocent man convicted of murder and facing the hangman's (or is it hangperson's) noose. Appearing in this film should have been punishment enough.

There are no surprises, and the killer's identity is obvious from the start, so there is no suspense. Mona Barrie plays the dead man's wife, who also happens to be King's former squeeze. She helps solve the murder, but does not solve the mystery of why she would act in this film. The aging William Farnum plays the prison warden; he looks like somebody propped him up for his scenes. The inept musical score is ripped off from the East Side Kids movies.

King is okay in his part, but I can't watch him without picturing him singing an aria while Harpo Marx destroys the scenery behind him.

Everyone associated with this bomb should have been sent to the gallows.