The Girl in Black Stockings

If you want to see a fun, even if not that good, low-budget mystery, you could do worse than to watch The Girl in Black Stockings, which TCM is showing tomorrow afternoon at 12:15 PM ET.

Lex Barker, who is probably best known for having played Tarzan in the early 1950s, plays David, a prosecuting attorney from Los Angeles who is on vacation at a resort in Utah that has a pool, thus allowing him to strip down to his 1950s style swim trunks and show us that yes, he had the body to play Tarzan. He's not there too long when, suddenly, one of the guests gets murdered. Everybody at the resort is a suspect, and because David's a prosecutor from the big city, he's just the right person to help the local Utah police investigate. Complicating matters is the fact that not only could anybody there be a suspect; one of the guests, Beth (played by Anne Bancroft) is a woman with whom David had a past. (Yeah right they just happen to meet in some middle-of-nowhere Utah town. Funny how Hollywood works.)

This being a Hollywood murder mystery, it comes as no surprise that this is a wacky cast of suspects. Ron Randell plays Edmund, the owner of the resort, a man who is now a quadraplegic and has a hangup about women. (However, with everybody being a suspect, you start to wonder whether being bound in a wheelchair is just a ruse and he's the murderer.) He's being taken care of by his sister (Marie Windsor). But, since Edmund has that problem with women, you know there's a busty one here, and that woman is Mamie Van Doren, who has just as much in the way of assets as Lex Barker and is given ample opportunity to display them. Along the way, there's a character who gets killed by walking backwards into a buzzsaw, although you can see it coming a mile away when the characters visit a sawmill; and our hero actually does solve the mystery.

Not that the mystery or its solution is particuarly satisfying; The Girl in Black Stockings is fairly mindless entertainment that will keep you entertained for the 75 or so minutes that it runs. Instead, watch for a cast of names you'll probably recognize trying to act their way through material that's much too overripe. That, and some nice location shooting. Unfortunately, The Girl in Black Stockings doesn't seem to be available on DVD, so you'll have to catch the TCM showings.