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.

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.

In the 1930s and 40s, Hollywood made a bazillion B-mystery movies where amateurs often were smarter and more capable at solving murders than the cops! Typically, the cops were pretty dumb and a reporter (or some other non-policeman) solved everything! If they'd only made a few of them, I would probably have enjoyed "Sinner Take All", but the familiarity of the film make it just a simple time-passer and nothing more.

In a change in typical casting, Bruce Cabot plays reporter Ernie Hyams. A say a change because most of the time, Cabot played bad guys! In this story, rich family members start getting threatening letters....and soon, they start getting killed off as well. Ernie manages to put it all together by the end.

Nothing unusual of noteworthy here. Cabot is quite good and the film competently made....but not exactly memorable either. BY tomorrow, I'll probably have forgotten most of it!

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.