Bela Lugosi was TCM's Star of the Month in October 2024, so I recorded several of his movies that I hadn't seen before. One of his non-horror movies that I finally got around to watching just before it expired from my DVR was a murder mystery, The Death Kiss.
The movie stars off with a scene of a woman meeting a man outside a big-city café, kissing him, and walking in, after which the man is shot. The camera then pulls out to reveal that this is in fact a soundstage at a Hollywood studio, where they're filming a movie called, naturally enough, The Death Kiss. They're about to do another take of the same scene when suddenly the lead actress screams: it turns out that Myles Brent, the actor who was shot in the scene, has actually died because somebody presumably put real bullets in the gun. (This was long before Alec Baldwin was born.)
This presents all sorts of problems: the film was behind schedule so one studio boss is worried about the financials; another studio boss, Joseph Steiner (Bela Lugosi in a supporting role) has to deal with the PR mess; and, when the police come in, it turns out that pretty much everybody on the lot had some sort of reason for not being displeased that Brent was killed. This means that anybody and everybody could be a suspect, since it doesn't have to be the person who pulled the trigger who put the real bullets in the gun.
Brent's co-star in the movie-within-a-movie was Marcia Lane (Adrienne Ames), who is also the ex-Mrs. Brent, which in itself is a reason to make her a suspect. She's on the rebound with Franklyn Drew (David Manners), a screenwriter at the studio who is always up for a good mystery because he thinks he can write a better mystery than the real thing. So he starts to investigate, together with a security guard at the studio, Gulliver. Brent quickly finds a bullet casing in the wall of the set which to him conclusively proves this is a murder case since it's of a different caliber than the guns filled with blanks.
And where there's one murder in a movie like this, it's not a surprise that other people are going to be in danger. Never mind that Franklyn also has a personal interest in this case since his girlfriend is going to be one of the suspects, being the ex-wife of the dead guy. It all leads to an exciting climax as Franklyn is about to reveal the identity of the murderer on the set.
Murder mysteries are a common genre in the movies, and were especially common back in the 1930s. Murder mysteries set against the backdrop of making a movie is not uncommon either; I did a review of The Preview Murder Mystery 18 months ago. In trying to find that title, I found two other titles from that era involving murder mysteries at a movie studio, The Studio Murder Mystery and a British film called Murder on the Set. In any case, it's a convenient enough place to set a murder mystery and The Death Kiss does an entertaining job of it, even if one ultimately doesn't care all that much about who actually committed the murder.
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