The Great Hotel Murder (1935)
Crime novelist Roger Blackwood competes with hotel house detective Andy McCabe in solving a murder by poisoning at a medical convention.
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Best movie of this year hands down!
That was an excellent one.
A lot of fun.
It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny
On this occasion, Lowe and McLaglen (in the ninth of their ten team movies) not only quickly wear out their welcome, but the entire support cast as well. This time, Lowe is a know-it-all novelist, McLaglen a dumb house detective, who attempt to solve the murder of a hotel guest involved in the old switched rooms gag (thank you, Eran Trece)! The only halfway decent performance comes from John Wray, who handles the difficult role of a suspiciously comic suspect with amazing skill. The other players (with the exception of Herman Bing who hams it up to a frightful degree) don't bother to act at all, but are simply content to follow the lead of the leads by simply reciting or shouting their unexciting lines. Not that I blame them! To add boredom to lethargy, the movie is slackly directed by Eugene Forde (normally a quite competent and even stylish technician) in a thoroughly dull and disinterestedly routine style. Normally, an alert producer like John Stone would have noticed from the dailies that the movie was deadly dull, but at this stage Stone was deeply involved with Fox's Spanish-language division, so it's a good guess that The Great Hotel Murder was shot without any effective production supervision at all. In any case, it certainly looks that way!