Secret of the Blue Room

A few weeks back when Lionel Atwill was the star of the day in Summer Under the Stars, there was the TCM premiere of a new-to-me movie, Secret of the Blue Room. It's available on DVD from Universal's MOD scheme.

The movie starts of with a group of people assembled at a castle. Irene von Helldorf (Gloria Stuart) is celebrating her 21st birthday along with her father Robert (Lionel Atwill) and three men who are all more or less in love with her: young and ardent Thomas (William Janney), reporter Frank (Onslow Stevens), and Capt. Walter Brink (Paul Lukas). Everybody is toasting Irene and wants to say something about her, when Thomas decides he's going to ask about something that happened 20 years earlier, when Irene was just a baby.

Apparently, one of the rooms in the house is closed off because of a series of tragedies that happened back then. One night, a woman was in the "blue room", only for her to have disappeared and her body found the next morning in the moat. Another guy was shot, and a third died in bed. All of them died right at 1:00 AM. Thomas is curious about what's in that blue room that's been closed off these last 20 years, so he proposes that each of Irene's suitors should spend a night in the blue room.

Dad thinks it's a bad idea, and the obvious answer is that if they want to investigate, they should do it together. But we wouldn't have a movie if they did that. So of course the three younger men agree, and Thomas goes off to the blue room, opened by the only key which is in the possession of imposing-looking butler Paul (Robert Barrat).

The next morning comes, and Thomas doesn't show up for breakfast. The others go up to investigate, and... Thomas has disappeared, the bed unslept in, implying that Thomas disappeared overnight, quite possibly at 1:00 AM. Now, the obvious thing to do would be to start looking for secret passages into and out of the room. You'd also think Dad would have blueprints of the place what with all those disasters that happened 20 years ago. Even if there aren't blueprints, they could measure and figure how much space is where. But nobody bothers to look for a passage, and Frank goes up to the blue room the next evening.

Frank is shot at 1:00 AM, which leads Walter to bring in police commissioner Forster (Edward Arnold). Walter doesn't want to die the next night, so he plans to get to the bottom of things once and for all....

Secret of the Blue Room isn't a bad little movie -- if you can suspend disbelief. The main problem I had with it is that I was spending the brief (66 minutes) running time of the movie poking through all the plot holes, the biggest of which I mentioned above. These people are preternatuarlly nonchalant about not investigating. And it doesn't seem as if there was much investigating done 20 years earlier. (As you can guess, there is a secret passage. Who's using it I won't say.) There were also a bunch of unexplained plot lines, such as a guy who comes knocking on the servants' entrance.

Still, fans of Universal movies of the 1930s will probably enjoy this one. It's not a horror movie despite many of the elements leading one to think there might be some horror. The movie just requires you to watch, not think so much.