L'heure mystérieuse

Most entertaining movie. Watched recently on TCM. Good innovative plot, if a bit convoluted. Some fine acting... Never a dull moment... Very good court scenes with good dialogue. London of the 1930'a well captured, particularly the cars, streets and traffic, also very good house interiors. Recommended for a step back in time....

Loretta Young always managed to bring a certain cool quality to her movies and has come to epitomize the feminine beauty and elegance of the 1930s. It's hard to tell if The Unguarded Hour would've turned out quite as well without an actress of her charm to divert the viewer from the plot holes. The story itself is very entertaining and amusing, once you come to accept their motives and not ask questions such as "why on earth doesn't she tell everything to her husband and get it over with?" But of course, a woman of such beauty and elegance (there, I said it again) can't be wrong, can she? And we wouldn't have had a movie to start with.

If you manage to get a hold of this rarely seen gem which hasn't been released on DVD as yet, you're quite sure to spend a very enjoyable time, trying to guess the perpetrator of the villainy and feasting your eyes on the rosy cheeks and elegant gowns of the damsel in distress.

Great dialogue, the beautiful and sexy Loretta, Henry Daniell at his sleazy best, Roland Young with his gay-friend-who-flirts-with-the-wife quips, a plot that keeps you guessing: like many an entertaining film, the parts are more than the sum. So much fun that its unbelievable ending just seems out of place. Its source is one of those clever stage mysteries made for the Middle Class. Most of Sam Wood's movies are pretty good; it's not that far from the Marx Brothers to this.

Loretta Young, Franchot Tone, Lewis Stone, Roland Young, and Henry Daniell are all involved in "The Unguarded Hour," a 1936 film directed by Sam Wood.

Young plays Lady Dearden, a newlywed whose husband's (Tone) promising career as a prosecutor is threatened by letters he wrote to another woman before he was married. The blackmailer (Daniell) gives Lady Dearden some complicated instructions by which to deliver the money to him. She follows his instructions but in doing so, she becomes the only witness in a case her husband is trying. Though a man's life is at stake, she doesn't want her husband to know of the incident.

Pretty good if talky film, with the 23-year-old Young stealing every scene in which she appears with her glorious looks and gentle quality. There are still beautiful actresses, but Young truly had a special look and a gentility we probably won't see again. Franchot does a good job as her handsome husband, and Roland Young is delightful as a family friend. Henry Daniell, who played slimeballs so well, plays a slimeball here.

Enjoyable.

Unguarded Hour, The (1936)

*** (out of 4)

A future D.A. (Franchot Tone) is being blackmailed over letters written to a former mistress so his wife (Loretta Young) goes to pay off the blackmailer (Henry Daniell). There's more to the story including the mistress being murdered as well as another murder case that took place where Young went to drop off the money but I won't go into much detail about those issues because how they come up is half the fun of the film. I really wasn't expecting much from this film but it turned out to be a very intelligent little thriller that has some great acting by the leads and supporting cast. Loretta Young is great as usual as the wife who must decide to save an innocent man's life or ruin the career of her husband. There's one scene in the film where Tone, Lewis Stone and Roland Young are putting on a fake trial and talking about how what seems to be hiding up guilt might just be the person telling the truth. This is a terrific little scene and all three actors really sell it perfectly. There's a lot of dialogue in this movie but director Wood keeps everything moving along at a fast pace. The title refers to an hour in every person's life where they can't prove where they were and there's no one there to back up where they might have been so if they were charged with a crime there's no way they could get out of it.