The Arsenal Stadium Mystery

During a charity match between the Arsenal and Trojans, one of the players collapses and dies. Initially it is thought bizarre, but it soon turns out to be murder by an unknown poison. Summon Leslie Banks, a Scotland Yard inspector with a different hat for every phase of the investigation, from his important job of directing a revue!

Banks gives an interesting and wide-ranging performance here, varying between almost clownish to menacing, offered as a deliberate choice for the investigation. He's most of the movie to me, but then, despite having played high-school soccer, I am bemused by the idea of it as a spectator sport, fiercely supported by rabid fans.

Nonetheless, that was the selling point of this movie, showing the team and staff of the Arsenal, then at the top of their standing among professional teams. About a dozen of the personnel appear, and the game itself was one played between Arsenal and Brentford, with interpolations from 'Varsity football.

I found the mystery itself rather dry and gimmicky compared to Banks' entertaining performance. However, I also have little doubt that fans of the game and of Arsenal will find this a fine time-capsule movie.

As an Arsenal fan I enjoyed this film. These days you wouldn't get members of any top football team to appear together and be apart of the plot, couldn't afford them. Decent plot and it had good pace. Lesley Banks as the Detective in charge was the star of the film along with those hats!

The third, last and - according to Rachel Low, the best - of three quality potboilers shot at Dehham during the spring and early summer by G. & S. Films (formed the previous year by Josef Somlo, who had arrived in Britain as a refugee in 1935) after an ambitious Technicolor production of 'The Mikado'.

In Low's words 'The Arsenal Stadium Mystery' "turned a routine newspaper serial into a lively and imaginative whodunnit with a footballing background". Thorold Dickinson (who had worked in a minor capacity on 'The Mikado') put his hours spent in the dark at the Film Society to good use with Soviet-style photography & editing of the football scenes; while his friend Leslie Banks enjoys himself as a detective with flamboyant taste in hats.

(Banks had ironically lost an eye in the First World War, since Edmond Knight was to lose one in North Africa in 1943; the same year that Richard Norris - also one of the footballers - was himself killed in action.)

I probably agree with most comments here: a good not great film but still interesting in so many ways, mainly from the historical perspective. The world depicted was on another planet - even though Britain was at war the lunatics would not start to take over the asylum for another 30 years or so.

Professional Arsenal take on the amateur Trojans in special football match attended by millions of blue-chins in macs and hats live on BBC radio, and even commentated by legendary voice E.V.H. Emmett borrowed from Gaumont. One of the Trojans, a bit of a womaniser with a lot of enemies falls down dead at the beginning of the second half and the game is abandoned and is simultaneously on to find out whodunit. Slade of Scotland Yard is on the case, an inspector with eccentric and disconcerting habits played fantastically by Leslie Banks in a variety of appropriate hats. Although thousands of the Arsenal fans who saw todays game at the Emirates probably live in houses built before 1940 the "beautiful game" seems to have changed almost beyond recognition - capitalist business pressures seem to have atrophied everything that was once decent about it. The footballers played and the hordes watched as though it was only a game and didn't matter - the rich thugs who go to work on the pitch today present a completely different picture! Anyone fancy going back and practising heading those leather footballs? Surely they would miss the legalised GBH and sliding about in each others phlegm and spit! The mystery itself was simple but well padded out and entertaining, and the acting abilities veered from adequately professional to woodenly amateur.

I never bothered taping or buying this because it's on UK Channel 4 every few years – I assume it's always been bought so regularly mainly as a laugh for hooligans by the schedulers and not just for film fans. Use the chance when they provide it to watch this enjoyable and decent film non-cynically instead.

Did you know that the game played at Highbury (The Arsenal Stadium,) before the outbreak of World War II, wasn't a big League match, an important FA Cup tie or even an International, it was in fact the game that was played in the film!!! Not alot of people know that! (But they do know now!)