The Lady in Scarlet

Reginald Denny stars a a detective who gets involved with the murder of an antique dealer.

For the most part this is a by the book murder mystery with several interesting twists in it. The plot basically is that a wealthy antique dealer is suspicious that his wife is having an affair. People are watching the house and the husband appears to be involved in crooked dealings. The wife while out with her lover notices an old friend and semi famous detective at the bar. The lover leaves and the wife talks to the detective whom she talks into taking her home. Once there they find the husband dead and a very twisty, and not entirely fair, murder investigation is set in motion.

Denny is as always a joy to behold and his interplay with his girl Friday is funny, if not rather cruel. Frankly if it wasn't clear they loved each other it would be abusive.

A friend watched most of this with me and sat there in disbelief at the creakiness of it and of the bad acting. But this is an independent programmer that was made fast and cheap so that fact it is of any quality is usually a plus. Its not as bad as she made it out to be, and I don't think she hated it, she just enjoyed the camp value of it all.

I liked it, but I didn't love it. Its a movie that sort of is unexceptional in anyway, and so just sort of is. Its a pleasant time killer and nothing more. In answer to Lucy's question, yes at some point I will watch this again, if only to see what I missed plot wise since the clues appear to all be there even if not clearly....

From 1935, The Lady in Scarlett stars Reginald Denny, Patricia Farr, and Dorothy Revier, directed by Charles Lamont.

The wife (Revier) of wealthy art dealer, Albert J. Sayre (John T. Murray) runs into a detective friend (Denny) and his assistant (Farr) at a restaurant. He drives her home, and they find her husband dead.

Sayre's daughter Alice (Claudia Dell) claims her father disinherited her and is sure her stepmother killed him for the money. It's revealed that the new will wasn't signed, and the assets are to be split.

However, the attorney warns Alice that her father had heavy losses in the stock market. Alice says there were bonds worth 100,000 put aside for her in the safe. When the safe is opened, however, there are no bonds. Alice insists her stepmother stole them.

Decent whodunit with very uneven acting. This film had nice potential for a series starring Denny and Farr, who had both fun repartee and some dialogue that really pushed the humor too much and in a few cases, was demeaning.

Farr was a good comedienne who died at 35 from pancreatic cancer. Toned down by a director, it's easy to see she would have been very good.

Denny is delightful, elegant, smooth, and amusing. It's a shame he didn't have more opportunities in this type of role.

For the genre and the time, this is a pretty good murder mystery. Other reviewers have noted the similarity to the Thin Man Nick and Nora roles. I found the couple in this movie to be many rungs down on the ladder from Nick and Nora. The couple are husband and wife, and she's not a detective - she's his secretary. Unfortunately, the faux battling between the couple is less than playful to modern eyes - he shoves her from behind, taps her drink into her face, takes a slap at her body, and constantly refers to her in explicitly belittling terms. Yes, we're supposed to understand that it's 'banter,' but the writing took it to far - unlike the Thin Man, which is always played in an obviously affectionate manner. Here, the last words out of his mouth are "Come on, stupid." Not nice at all.

Having said that, the movie works fairly well. The detective is smarter than the police inspector, but the inspector is not a clown - he's just one acceptable step behind. The wife/sidekick is given some stilted lines - they just didn't get the Nora Charles role right here. There are multiple suspects, and attractive women. For fans of the genre, it's definitely worth watching, though you may cringe at some of the husband's 'playfulness,' as I did. There's a fine line between playful and cruel, evidently.

Reginald Denny is on good form in this rather formulaic whodunnit as "Oliver Keith" - an accomplished PI drafted in to investigate the killing of a wealthy art dealer. Once on the case, he discovers there is a lot more to the case than just the fatality - and there are no lack of suspects mired in this tale of greed and ambition. What helps this along nicely is the engaging double-play between Denny and his equally competent, if somewhat undervalued, assistant "Ella" (Patricia Farr) and Lew Kelly is quite good as the pretty hapless policeman. Only an hour long, but still a decently paced nostalgic look at crime fighting in days when everyone wore a hat and called themselves Mr. & Miss.

During the 1930s and 40s, the quality as well as cheapo studios made zillions of murder mystery films--so many that it's easy to get them all mixed up in your head. While some of the films were stand-outs, such as the Charlie Chan or Saint films, too many just weren't made very well or offered nothing but retreads of the same old same old characters and stories. In many ways, "The Lady in Scarlett" is yet another dreary mystery films--with the usual get 'em all together in a room and get one of them to incriminate him/herself at the end of the film finale. These were ludicrous but so many of the films followed this same sort of formula. In most ways, this film did too...but fortunately, it did offer two things to set it apart--Reginald Denny's erudite persona and his assistant, who was anything but! In fact, she was a complete smart aleck and kept me interested in an otherwise passable film. Well worth seeing just because of her!