The House of Fear

Theatre actor John Woodford (Donald Douglas) dies suddenly while on stage, and his body mysteriously goes missing shortly thereafter. The actor's ghost is rumoured to haunt the theatre, and the place closes down.

To try and solve the mystery, police detective McHugh (William Gargan) poses as a producer who wants to reopen the theatre, putting on Woodford's last play, 'Dangerous Currents', with the same cast members.

Mysterious notes, purportedly written by Woodford, warn the cast not to go ahead with the play, and leading man Carleton (Walter Woolf King) is found dead. The play goes ahead, however, McHugh determined to catch the killer.

A creaky whodunit with plenty of suspects, The House of Fear is like a live-action Scooby Doo episode, with the detective discovering clues along the way that help him to solve the crime. And like a Scooby Doo episode, any seemingly supernatural occurrences are explained away, with the villain chased, caught and unmasked in the final act, an outpouring of convoluted exposition explaining their motive and modus operandi.

It's all a bit too talky to be wholly entertaining, but at just over an hour, the pace is fairly brisk and there are some fun performances (Dorothy Arnold is great as gold-digger actress Gloria DeVere), although the obligatory comic relief -- El Brendel as stagehand Jeff -- is thoroughly irritating.

House of Fear, The (1939)

** (out of 4)

Lazy, routine and by the numbers remake of The Last Warning from Universal. The story is pretty much the same as an actor gets murdered during a performance and then years later the cast is brought back together to try and trap the killer. This certainly sinks to the "C" level in Universal's library and it comes off very lazy compared to the original film. Several scenes are redone here but they don't come off nearly as good as the original film. The cast is also rather boring and bland but the 67-minute running time does go by fast.

Universal's 1929 part-talkie "The Last Warning," the last film for director Paul Leni (1927's silent "The Cat and the Canary") was long thought to be a lost film, and while it remains superior to this 1939 remake, "The House of Fear," the latter need not lower its head in shame. Actor John Woodford (Donald Douglas) dies during his latest performance of the play "Dangerous Currents," in the very theatre named for Woodford himself. The police assume it's just a publicity stunt when the body disappears from Woodford's dressing room, and the case remains open for 2 years, with no solution and no corpse. Arthur McHugh (William Gargan), a detective posing as a Broadway producer, decides to bring together the original cast to repeat their performance of "Dangerous Currents," despite the rumors that the theatre is haunted by Woodford's ghost, who communicates with McHugh through a dead phone line. Also, there is one supremely eerie encounter with a spectre in the darkened theatre, and this too cannot be explained away, so there may actually be a genuine haunting. Both actresses stand out: lovely Irene Hervey (who starred in Lugosi's 1942 "Night Monster") plays Woodford's leading lady, and Dorothy Arnold (who co-starred with Lugosi in the 1939 serial "The Phantom Creeps") is the sluttish golddigger. Fast paced, many twists and turns, and consistently witty dialogue (especially Alan Dinehart); a vastly underrated Universal mystery which is too often confused with the studio's 1945 Sherlock Holmes release, plus its 'Crime Club' series, a total of 7 features that ran from 1937-1939. German director Joe May would follow this with "The Invisible Man Returns" and "The House of the Seven Gables," both 1940 releases featuring Vincent Price. "The House of Fear" made three appearances on Pittsburgh's Chiller Theater: March 22 1975 (between "The Ghost of Frankenstein" and "Horror Island"), Dec 17 1977 (following "Cult of the Cobra"), and July 2 1983 (solo).

Bearing no relation to the Sherlock Holmes 1945 outing of the same title, and actually being a little mistitled itself (shouldn't it be "Theater of Fear"?), "House of Fear" (1939) is a minor if well-plotted whodunit, a remake of a 1928 silent film called "Last Warning" (which I have not seen). It begins well, with a murder (?) during a radio show that turns out to be part of a stage play (the radio show, not the murder), it stalls midway through as it seems no progress in the investigation is being made, but there are some good stunts at the end, and an amusing turn by the little-known Dorothy Arnold as the "easiest study in town" (wink, wink). **1/2 out of 4.

Enjoyable programmer helped by a solid cast of recognizable faces and a script that's wittier than it has any right being. Despite being a Universal picture, this has no connection to the Universal Sherlock Holmes film of the same name released six years later. This is a remake of the silent film The Last Warning. It's also part of the Crime Club series.

The plot isn't any better than your average Charlie Chan flick, but there are some fun characters here with some snappy lines brought to life by great character actors like William Gargan and Alan Dinehart. The standout to me was Dorothy Arnold (who married Joe DiMaggio a few months after this was released). She's a lot of fun. Anyway check this out if you like cozy old murder mysteries with a little humor.