SpuffyWeb Sadly Over-hyped

Dynamixor The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

AnhartLinkin This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

InformationRap This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

gridoon2018 An engaging title, but not a particularly engaging B-movie. First of all, they made THREE of these movies with Jim Bannon and Barton Yarborough as leads? They are OK as supporting characters but hardly a charismatic pair of leads; Nina Foch and George Macready far outshine the rest of the cast, but the former exits the picture abruptly. The mystery plot intrigues you at first, with its Oriental mysticism and its peculiar flashback-within-a-flashback-structure, but it has a tendency of revealing its secrets to the viewer too early, and ultimately it turns out to be more of a "Scooby-Doo" type of deal. Henry Levin's direction is no more than functional. ** out of 4.

cm-albrecht This woeful film begins with a flimsy, transparent and preposterous plot, followed by wooden performances and action from actors who recite their stilted lines mechanically. George Macready was so outstandingly bad that I'm amazed he wasn't immediately banned from Hollywood forever. Fortunately for all of us he survived to become a pretty good actor. The direction was slow and predictable every step of the way and of course, since this was obviously filmed on pocket change, the entire production showed it. "I Love a Mystery" may have been a popular radio show in its day, and evidently some fans enjoyed this film as well. When TCM offered this, I taped it, hoping for something more in the line of some of the other '40s noir films. Sad.

mgconlan-1 It certainly does, and yet that's part of the charm of this incredible (in both senses) film. One wonders how Charles "Blackie" O'Neal went from writing Val Lewton's masterpiece "The Seventh Victim" (also about a secret society hounding someone to suicide) to penning something this utterly silly and unbelievable. It's all too reminiscent of "The Maltese Falcon" — the San Francisco setting, the use of an historical secret society for the MacGuffin, even a mysterious villain known as "Mr. G." — in ways that only remind one of how much better "Falcon" was as a story and a film. But the cast is excellent (though as usual with these productions. Barton Yarborough's "comic" relief gets trying at times, Jim Bannon is a capable hero and George Macready and Nina Foch show their worthiness for the bigger and better roles they got later), the production values good and the overall atmosphere better than I'd expect from a hack director like Henry Levin. It's one of those movies that throws so many movie clichés at you in such a willy-nilly fashion that in the end it attains a sort of accidental surrealism — and (here's why I marked the "spoiler" button) it contains a visualized flashback narrated by a character who turns out to be lying five years before Alfred Hitchcock supposedly innovated that in "Stage Fright."

Norm-30 Despite the comments by the other reviewer, I thot this was one of THE most entertaining mysteries of the 30's - 40's! (And, I own over 700 films!). It contains MANY plot twists, and plot "twist-twists"; nothing is as it seems. The entire film gives a creepy, "something is about to happen" atmosphere and shows a VERY creative author, as Calton E. Morse was! A mystery you won't forget!Norm