Sinner Take All

I just this morning watched Sinner Take All (1936) on TCM. It is definitely a B movie, but just good enough to keep the viewer interested in finding out which suspect will be the killer. Bruce Cabot plays the reporter who is also a lawyer working on the case. Margaret Lindsay has the female lead. Neither Cabot nor Lindsay generates much interest. Joseph Calleia is always good and here plays a shady nightclub owner, as he usually does. Stanley Ridges has a small role here, but in a few years he would shine as a great nemesis for Errol Flynn in They Died With Their Boots On. It's all a fairly routine MGM production. The reporter hero works directly with the police and sometimes even seems to be in charge of the investigation. Sinner Take All is nothing special, but can be a pleasant way to spend seventy four minutes.

New York tycoon Aaron Lampier is desperate to find his missing daughter Lorraine. Crime reporter turned lawyer Ernie Hyams gets the assignment and he finds her gambling in a nightclub. It turns out that the family members have all received mysterious threats. Lampier's son is killed under suspicious circumstances.

I don't really know these actors. It would help if somebody be a familiar face. Margaret Lindsay is a perfectly pleasant girl but the role requires someone flashier. Maybe she could be a platinum blonde and a bit hotter. The character is supposed to be a wild child party girl. She's a little too middle-of-the-road which is endemic of this movie. The hero is bland. The mystery is not that compelling. The filmmaking is functional. It's all a bit average.

"Sinner Take all" was based on the mystery novel, "Murder for a Wanton" by Whitman Chambers. The book title makes a little more sense to me than does the movie title. When I first read the title on TCM's schedule I thought it was some sort of morality play. It turns out to be a fairly decent murder story involving the members of a wealthy family being killed one by one. Bruce Cabot of "King Kong" fame is the reporter/would-be lawyer investigating the strange happenings which tend to point a guilty finger at his would-be girlfriend played by Margaret Lindsay. Why Lindsay never reached star status in Hollywood is a good question since she does such an outstanding acting job in this film. The marvelous Charley Grapewin plays the patriarch, a different type role for him. Joseph Calleia plays a role that suits him well as the owner of a casino with apparent mob connections. George Zucco makes the most of his small part and the old cowboy Raymond Hatton has a brief scene as a hotel clerk. Also watch for Dorothy Kilgallen who appears briefly as a reporter. An actress named Eadie Adams appears as Shirley Allen. She so impressed me that I looked up information on her because I had not seen her in a movie before. She had a very short career. Does anyone know the reason? The character who impressed me the least was Capt. Bill Royce played by Edward Pawley. I was pleased that the writers did not make him a stupid, bumbling policeman but rather a thorough, intelligent investigator. Still the performance seemed stilted and the actor appeared bored in his role.

The film was directed by a studio man, Errol Taggart, who at times seemed to copy such movie geniuses as Sergei Eisenstein. By cutting techniques partly developed by Eisenstein he, for example, cuts from a flaming car to a flaming match. Eisenstein always had a symbolic reason for such cutting. There is nothing symbolic that I could see in the cutting used by Taggart. Later, Alfred Hitchcock would wisely use such cutting for metaphoric effect, for example, a train going into a tunnel for sexual consummation.

With better scripting--the intended humor often falls flat--and better directing, this could have been one of the best murder mysteries of the period. I especially liked the way the ending was handled. You will be surprised how the guilty person reacts to being caught. If you enjoy old mystery movies, you should like this one.

There are several things to dislike about "Sinner Take All", a 1936 mystery movie from MGM. The main problem is the hard-to-swallow screenplay, in which the hero is an average-guy reporter who also works for a lawyer with a British accent, who represents the rich guy who owns the newspaper, who has three dissolute children with motives to kill him to inherit his money and there are several killings that take place in the family. Got that so far?

Anyway, the reporter-lawyer liaison (Bruce Cabot) decides to solve the whole mess and falls in love with the rich guy's daughter (Margaret Lindsay) and tries to prevent her from getting killed. Loads of suspects in the miscast cast, several of whose characters are insufficiently developed to be legitimate suspects. The deus ex machina is really off the wall - of course, the murderer is impossible to determine until the whole surreal plot comes to a head in the last scene.

Very unsatisfactory murder mystery with a slapped-together cast and implausible story. I rate it a five because there are mystery fans who will marvel at the cleverness of disguising the murderer, but I felt the movie does not play fair in this regard.

Good murder story in this little programmer helped immensely by breezy performances by Bruce Cabot (always underrated) and Margaret Lindsay. Cabot plays a former reported who has become a lawyer. But the man he works for (Charley Grapewin) also owns the newspapers so when his family starts receiving threatening notes, he's put back on the job as a reporter. As the family members starts getting knocked off in gruesome "accidents," Cabot digs deeper into the lives of the rich. It's one of those murder mysteries where EVERYONE is a suspect. Nicely done film.

Cabot had his biggest success in King Kong but was never able to follow up with anything important. Same with Lindsay; she was around for years as leads in B films and second leads (Jezebel) in big films. Both are attractive and fun to watch.

Sinner Takes All also has a few familiar faces including Joseph Calleia as the nightclub owner, Stanley Ridges as the editor, Vivienne Osborne as his wife, Dorothy Kilgallen as a news hen; Harry Holman as a cop, George Zucco as Bascombe, and Jonathan Hale as the doctor.

And yes that's the same Dorothy Kilgallen who was a panelist on What's My Line and who died mysteriously after announcing she had discovered something about the Kennedy assassination.