While the Patient Slept

This is among the better entries in the comedy/mystery genre popular in the 1940s. No one liked the person murdered. Many people had reason to do him or her in. All are assembled in creepy surroundings.

Apart from a plot that's easy and logical, what sets this apart is Aline MacMahon. She plays a nurse who happens to be in the house and who helps the police solve the crime.

MacMahon was unique in Hollywood history. Though only in her thirties here, she was already playing an old maid. Yet she had an occasional fling at glamor roles. And she was an exceptionally good actress, with a haunting beauty.

Her rather heavy-lidded eyes seem to bore right through her co-players, here as elsewhere. ZaSu Pitts had a somewhat parallel career. But at least Erich Von Stroheim saw her as a beauty and a great actress.

Maybe MacMahon really couldn't have done it. But I think she had the potential for far greater roles than she was given. As strange as this probably sounds, I can see her, decades later, as the tragic Mary Tyrone in "Long Day's Journey Into Night." (She would surely have been better than Katharine Hepburn, an actress, I often liked, in that role.)

This is a good old-fashioned Thirties mystery, with comic turns from Guy Kibbee, Aline MacMahon, and Allen Jenkins doing his usual Sheldon Leonard- like one-step-behind sidekick cop. It's based on an early novel by Mignon G. Eberhart, who had a knack for implausible plotting that didn't matter because the action spun everything along at a nice clip. Nice to see Kibbee taking the spotlight, even if in a B movie, because he was such a stalwart supporting player, a familiar face in so many movies of the era. He and MacMahon play well off each other, even creating a bit of a romance, though MacMahon's Nurse Sarah Keate isn't quite as acerbic and witty as the character in the novel. However, the movie has its own charm, spiced with a bit of wackiness, and is a pleasant way to while away a little more than one hour.

Another little programmer from Warner Bros., complete with authentic old dark house ingredients--lots of atmospheric rain, thunder and lightning to tell a tale of a household full of jealous inhabitants, one of whom (the least likely, of course) is a murderer.

Aline McMahon does nicely as a proper nurse engaged to take care of an ill old man and soon finding herself deeply involved in solving the mystery. Guy Kibbe plays another one of his gruff but lovable detectives with dull-witted Allen Jenkins as his not too helpful sidekick.

Ray Enright was an old hand at directing these sort of things, a dependable director at Warner Bros. who gets some amiable results from a story which is a good mixture of humor and murderous doings. The finale has all the usual suspects gathered for the unveiling of the murderer--but none of it is quite convincing, even while it entertains and passes the time quickly.

This is probably the first entry in the "Lance O'Leary/Nurse Keat" detective series; in subsequent O'Leary films, he was played by much younger actors than Guy Kibbee.

A group of relatives (all played by well-known character actors) gathers in an old house (on a rainy nite, of course!) to speak to a wealthy relative, who goes into a coma.

While they wait for him to recover, all sorts of mysterious goings-on happen, including a couple of murders.

A creepy film; worth seeing!

Grandfather is dying and he had sent for his vulture family. The bickering family members argue with each other and then they find him unconscious after suffering from an apparent stroke. Someone is killed. The police is called. It's a murder mystery in an old mansion during a stormy night.

There are a ton of characters. Non of them stands out. There is a lot of back stories to keep track. It's an old fashion murder mystery set in the standard location. I would have liked to stay at that location. The mystery needs to be solved right there that night. It starts rambling on and on. I wasn't really keeping track of the characters to begin with. The further away the story gets away from that night, the less intensity it is able to retain.