Death Goes to School

Another of the streaming channels on my Roku, one whose name I can't recall offhand but that is dedicated to mystery movies and TV, has a bunch of stuff that looks like cheap public domain prints. I was looking through the films on offer, and the title Death Goes to School looked interesting enough. So I decided to watch it.

Death Goes to School is a British B movie that starts off at a girls' school in what is most likely one of the Home Counties near London but decidedly not urban. The girls are playing some sort of bat and ball game when the ball goes out of the field of play and one of the girls has to go fetch it. That girl goes through a small line of woods to one of the outbuildings on the other side, where she sees.... a dead body! She goes running to her headmistress, Miss Halstead, who tells her to stay in the office while Halstead and another teacher, Miss Shepherd (Barbara Murray) go to investigate.

They find the dead body all right; it's the body of another of the teachers at the school, Miss Cooper (Pamela Alan, as a portion of the movie is told in flashbacks thanks to the structure of the murder investigation). Miss Cooper has been strangled to death, and Miss Shepherd is horrified to see that the method of strangulation was with her scarf! That's going to make her an obvious suspect when Scotland Yard sends Inspector Campbell (Gordon Jackson) to investigate.

Campbell decides to start with all of Miss Cooper's colleagues at the school, and this being a murder mystery, it's unsurprising that everybody at the school had some reason to hate Miss Cooper, which also means that pretty much everybody is a suspect. Well, except for Miss Cooper herself since she's quite dead. One thing that Campbell beats into our heads is that one piece of evidence is a size 5 women's shoe with a low heel. Find out which woman wears size 5, and you'll go some way to figuring out who the murderer is.

Except, of course, that multiple women wear size 5, and there's always the possiblity of somebody not wearing the shoe size they normally do. The investigation continues, and Miss Shepherd shows a bit of initiative on her own in trying to solve the mystery. In any case, you know that the murderer is going to be found out at the end.

Death Goes to School is the sort of material that a decade later probably would have been episodic TV for one of the plethora of detective shows out there. It's easy enough to watch this and imagine Peter Falk as Columbo having a field day with the material. But because it's a movie, and in the public domain, the production and the print both have a decidedly low-budget feel about them. That's a bit of a shame, since there's nothing particularly wrong with the movie. There's nothing particularly noteworthy, either, down to the relatively obscure cast.

Death Goes to School is something I'd recommend if you're the sort of person who likes British movies from that era (early 1950s), or if you and a bunch of friends are interested in trying something in a genre (British B mysteries) that doesn't show up that often in America. It's entertaining enough, but not something anybody would go out of their way to look for.