As this was revealed to all the bank officers and soon after, her father was dead, Gwen is certain the events are connected. After all, her father had just uncovered underhanded practices at the bank, as someone had been forging bank documents. Just not a particularly striking example of the 30s/40s detective boom.Īs with all the other films on set I was going to cover Mystery House separately, but as it turns out this film is another Lance O'Leary vehicle! Man, it's a good thing I realised this was a sequel before posting my review for Patient in Room 18! It's also lucky I chose to discuss Patient first, deeming Mystery House to be a broad enough title that it should be covered last.Plot: An affluent banker has turned up dead in an apparent suicide, but his daughter Gwen (Anne Nagel) is convinced foul play was involved. Overall, The Patient in Room 18 is a bit of a snooze, but it's not an awful way to spend an evening. I wasn't much of a fan of Patric Knowles as the lead detective, but I liked Ann Sheridan! Some characters are more annoying than others, but there's nothing that wrong with the performances. Wow, nice to see a film from 1937 acknowledge that smoking is bad! You go, guys, and for that reason alone I'm more forgiving of this movie for its flaws.Īnother quite impressive scene was a scene shot all in one take, when the other nurse is trying to move some flowers and keeps getting interrupted by others. One very interesting scene is when Lance is trying to smoke and his gruff nurse beau tears it from his mouth, because "They're not good for you!". Nurse Sarah Keate is your typical 'take-no-guff' 1940s woman, and is much more enjoyable, getting in a few snappy lines here and there, like when the police detective was talking with her. It's not bad, entertainingly so or otherwise, but it's all so perfunctory.Īs far as characters go, Lance O'Leary is certainly interesting, but the film paints a pretty glum picture of him, if he's prone to legitimate nervous breakdowns after a single unsolved case! We less want him to solve this current mystery and more to see him leave it to the professionals, because he's clearly not mentally fit for this line of work! If one failure was enough to drive him into mania, then I hate to see where he'll end up! The biggest crime is this movie is that it's just rather dull. Neither are that great showcases of their genre, but boy do they have satisfying death scenes for the villains! I guess that's one thing this has in common with The Wayne Murder Case. ![]() The round-up and reveal is very confusing and contains many conveniences, but one thing I did find pretty hilarious was the fate of the murderer. The leads just sort of bum around until they stumble upon new things. ![]() O'Leary's skills rarely contribute to the discovery of new information (often they're found by other people, like the manservant Higgins or Keate), and there's very little actual investigation into any of the murder victims. ![]() It's also a bit of a cheat that O'Leary's big clue to finding out who the murderer is a witness, rather than clues he's discovered himself. Patient in Room 18 has such a bodycount, but that's a moot point since we see who the killer is the moment he commits the deed! For the life of me though I had no idea who I was looking at. Whodunnits with large body counts are usually disappointing in the respect that the suspect pool thins with each new murder. Too many characters to keep track of, not helped by them all looking pretty interchangeable, and all Doctors or nurses to boot, often with similar hairstyles. Bit of an issue is how the movie spends so much time building up O'Leary that by the time we get to the main story, it all starts feeling a bit much. ![]() The Patient in Room 18 is a disappointing film. Together with the nurse Sarah Keate, O'Leary must uncover the killer before another death occurs. The relative peace there however is shattered when a wealthy new patient is murdered, over a supply of expensive radium he had for medical treatment. Noted detective Lance O'Leary has undergone one of the few failures in his otherwise impeccable and illustrious career, and with his sense of self-worth shattered, his doctor recommends him a stay at a rest home. Having covered such 'gems' as Sh! the Octopus and The Smiling Ghost, and such gems as The Hidden Hand and Find the Blackmailer, I now reach The Patient in Room 18, and Mystery House. Finally I reach the last two films on the classic Hollywood mystery set I've been chipping away at for the past year or so.
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