The Moonstone (1934)

Nothing special about this one - it's a typical and rather boring whodunit. The film feels very stagy (like a made for TV movie and not one for the movie theaters) and the acting is lacking and stiff - including Patric Knowles (which I never expected)! Everything happens over a stolen moonstone in a rather large mansion with several people visiting Sir John Verinder's home. The film is pretty predictable for the most part.Well, I acquired this film in a 50-Mysteries Pack so it's not to bad for the pack deal but it's not a movie I'd watch over and over (one time watching is enough) - it's just one that is a part of the 50-pack.3/10

Everybody seems desperate to get their hands on a priceless Indian gem bequested to the heroine, a young British lady (Phyllis Barry) who has no idea that her father is in debt and that a ton of people covet her newly gotten gain. Rumors of a curse on the jewel run rampant, and an early attempt to steal it fails thanks to the quick thinking of the hatchet faced housekeeper who adores Barry.Pretty lavish by Monogram standards, this creaks along, but that adds atmosphere to the spooky story. David Manners, the young hero of "Dracula" and "The Black Cat", adds another portrait of youthful innocence tossed up against unspeakable evils, while Elspeth Dudgeon (who played a man in "The Old Dark House" and a ghoul in "Shh! The Octopus!") is feisty and lovable as a rare switch in the usually sinister portrait of the housekeeper. She's a delightful old ham who knows how to steal a scene with either a sneer or a sniff, and gets the script's funniest lines. Gustav von Seyffertitz (the psychiatrist from "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town"), with that dark and sinister accent, is a top suspect along with a turban wearing Hindu (John Davidson) who claims to have switched to Christianity.Delightfully short and intriguing, this is another variation of a similar theme that went back well to the silent era and is occasionally parodied to this day. Some DVD prints run 15 minutes less than the full version, and even those ones aren't missing anything that would give the audience more clues.

If you've seen enough of these Poverty Row programmers from the 1930's, you'll recognize that they pretty much adopt a tried and true formula depending on the genre. The dark and stormy night atmospherics will often accompany a murder mystery, or as in this case, the disappearance of the valuable Herncastle Moonstone Diamond. So then you'll have to keep an eye out for the minor bit of originality that might creep in to distinguish it from the rest. What I found interesting in this flick was that bit of misdirection with the old lights out trick when the moonstone vanished for the first time and it turned out that the housekeeper grabbed it for safekeeping. Couldn't figure out why she was crawling under a table though when the lights came back on. Anyone?"The Moonstone" winds up being a fairly typical mystery which, as others on this board have mentioned, is solved rather hastily if not haphazardly using a sleepwalk gimmick masterminded by the exposed villain. As is often the case, the suspects with a real criminal past are thrown in as red herrings and get enough screen time to merit observation. There was also an interesting tidbit thrown in about the jewel having been stolen many years ago from an Indian temple, with true believers dedicated to returning it to it's former home. I guess that's why Yandoo was there; I thought he would have a larger role in the story, but that wasn't the case.I'll say this though, for a valuable diamond, Ann Verinder (Phyllis Barry) was awfully nonchalant about it. With a safe on the premises and warnings to safeguard it from most everyone around her, you would think she would find a better place to put it than under her pillow. But then I guess, you wouldn't have a story.

David Manners and Phyllis Barry star in Moonstone, one of the last pictures directed by Reginal Barker. Part of the Reelmedia/Treeline Murder Mystery Collection, the sound and picture quality are pretty rough. IMDb shows original length of 62 minutes, but the Reelmedial version is only 46 minutes... hmmmm... it was already short to begin with... wonder if the missing minutes were cut due to poor quality of the film. It has the usual murder-mystery ingredients - creepy characters, dark and stormy night, lights going out, the man from Scotland yard. The case gets conveniently solved in short order (since this version is so short to begin with) and there are no plots turns or twists. My favorite character is Betteredge, the mouthy old housekeeper, played by Elspeth Dudgeon (born in 1871!) I'd be quite interested to see the 62 minute version sometime.