London by Night

There are a couple more movies on my DVR that are on TCM's schedule tomorrow that I didn't notice until this afternoon. So after dinner I sat down to watch the short programmer London by Night since it's airing tomorrow at 5:00 PM.

George Murphy plays Michael Denis, a reporter working in London who's about to take a vacation in Paris. But before that can happen, the barmaid Bessie (Virginia Field) at the pub where Michael is having a drink claims that she saw a dead body in the tobacconist's shop across the way. Everybody runs to investigate, and finds... nothing. Well, not quite nothing. A mysterious man with an umbrella has somehow been able to flee the scene, but the police are able to follow him down ot an embankment, where he shoots the cop that's following him.

So now everybody's looking for a man with a black umbrella, which could be a lot of people since it's not as if men in London carried fancy umbrellas. Indeed, Michael thinks his dog has found the mystery man, and when Michael and the dog find the man, it turns out to be Squires, the butler to wealthy Sir Arthur Herrick (Montagu Love) and his daughter Patricia (Rita Johnson). Obviously a dead end, since Squires has an alibi for the previous events.

But, as you can guess, Michael and Patricia begin to fall in love, even though her dad is none too happy about it because of the big social class differences. A socialite marrying a newspaperman? The horror! By now, Michael's postponed his trip to Paris to investigate, help Scotland Yard and Inspector Jefferson (George Zucco). There's still another attempted murder or two, however, before the case is solved....

London by Night is little more than a B movie, and one that made me think of The Mystery of Mr. X even though the two have a whole lot of differences. With the exception of some stock footage of London used in rear-projection photography, everything is done on sets and the backlot. But being MGM, they just about have the class to take this little trifle and turn it into something that's not great by any stretch of the imagination, but would have entertained the people looking for a movie at the bottom of the bill on their night out at the theater.