This being Thursday, it's time for another edition of Thursday Movie Picks, the blogathon run by Wandering Through the Shelves. We're halfway through a month of mystery themes, and this week's theme is mystery movies centered on media or technology. With that in mind, I wound up selecting two movies that have to do with the media, and one that deals with technology:
The Unsuspected (1947). Claude Rains plays the host of a popular radio program dealing with mystery and true crime. One night, Rains' secretary is found hanging from the chandelier in Rains' apartment, in what seems to the characters like an obvious suicide, except that we know it's really a murder. But who killed the young woman, and why?
Lured (1947). This time, the media in question is the personals section of the newspaper. Lucille Ball plays a taxi dancer in London, where a bunch of young women are going missing after answering personal ads. One of the women was Ball's best friend, so Scotland Yard detective Charles Coburn asks Ball to help with the investigation to find the killer. George Sanders seems like a likely suspect, but is he really the guilty party? This is a decidedly non-comic turn for Ball, who shows she really could do more than just be zany.
Kid Glove Killer (1942). Van Heflin stars in this B movie that, when I blogged about ages ago, I titled the post, CSI 1942. That's because Heflin plays an investigator with the police department who does CSI-type work before they had that term, using technology to find who's bombed a reformist mayoral candidate. Marsha Hunt, who died last week at the age of 104, plays the female lead, a woman who's involved with both Heflin and the guy who actually committed the murder (technically not much mystery for the viewer since we know who did it). The movie is actually an expansion of one of the old MGM Crime Does Not Pay shorts into a B-movie length, and is quite fun.
2 comments:
I haven't seen any of your picks this week, but that's the norm for me. These sound interesting
I have not seen any of these but I love to see them. I love George Sanders and Claude Rains. Lucille old be really good in dramatic roles. I would give the last one a shot too because the actors are good.
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