The Dark Hour (Chesterfield, 1936)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After the Lifetime movie I showed Charles a film on YouTube that proved to be deadly dull: The Dark Hour, a 1936 production by the Chesterfield Motion Picture Company, which shared many behind-the-camera production personnel with a sister company called Invincible. They were able to access major-studio production facilities for their films – earlier Chesterfield movies were not only distributed by Universal but actually carried a tag line, “Filmed at Universal City,” indicating they had access to Universal’s sets and other infrastructure – though by 1936 they had severed their connection with Universal and were shooting at the old RKO-Pathé lot instead. The film was written by Ewart Adamson based on a 1926 murder mystery called The Last Trap by novelist Sinclair Gluck, who in his earlier years had written in the hard-boiled style of Carroll John Daly and Dashiell Hammett but by the mid-1920’s had settled on writing an American imitation of the British thrillers of Edgar Wallace. The direction is by Charles Lamont, who would later go on to a quasi-respectable career at Universal directing some of the later Abbott and Costello movies as well as at least two in the Ma and Pa Kettle series.

Alas, while quite a few both major and not-so-major studios were turning out fast, energetic gangster movies throughout the 1930’s, they were seemingly incapable of turning out interesting films about other sorts of crime. The best non-gangster crime films from the 1930’s were the original version of The Maltese Falcon from 1931 (directed by Roy Del Ruth and starring Ricardo Cortez as Sam Spade, a truly great movie that’s unfortunately been totally overshadowed by the even greater remake from 1941 with Humphrey Bogart as star and John Huston making his directorial debut) and The Thin Man from 1934 – not coincidentally, both based on Dashiell Hammett novels. Apparently the title of The Last Trap had to be changed to The Dark Hour because Lamont had already made a film called The Last Trap a year before (though the imdb.com page on the 1935 The Last Trap is blank and only Lamont’s name is listed – not the writers, cast members or production company, which leads me to suspect the film itself is lost).

The Dark Hour begins with the usual introduction of the suspects and the information that the guy who’s going to get killed was such a terrible person we really won’t feel sorry to see him exit. The victim-to-be is Henry Carson (William V. Mong), who lives with his brother Charles (Hobart Bosworth, a star in the early silent days who was reduced to making films like this to stay alive), his sister Mrs. Tallman (Hedda Hopper, bitchy as usual and the only true source of energy in this film), and their niece Elsa Carson (Irene Ware, pretty enough on the eyes but with virtually no discernible acting skills). Elsa is dating police detective Jim Landis (Ray Walker, top-billed and one of the homeliest-looking leading men I’ve ever seen: it’s not like we really want these two to get together at the end even though we know from other movies that that’s probably what’s going to happen), but Uncle Henry has taken a dislike to him. Instead he wants Elsa to marry Peter Blake (Harold Goodwin), a research chemist who is renting a room from the Carsons and using it to create a formula that will make him invisible … oops, wrong movie. For some reason Uncle Henry would rather have Elsa marry Peter than Jim, and he’s told more than one person in the cast that Elsa will marry Jim “over my dead body” – to which Mrs. Tallman answers in Hedda Hopper’s nastiest tones, “That can be arranged.”

There’s also a butler named Foot (E. E. Clive, Hollywood’s go-to guy for imperious British butlers until Arthur Treacher came along) who skulks around so sinisterly I was wondering if this was going to be one of those movies in which the butler did do it. And there are a couple of other servants in the household, including Arthur Bell (Michael Marks) and a cook named Mrs. Dubbin (Aggie Herring) who reminded me of S. J. Perelman’s description of the wife the hero of 1915’s A Fool There Was was cheating on with Theda Bara as “an ambulatory laundry bag played by Mabel Frenyear.” At one point she’s actually accused of stealing one of Mrs. Tallman’s dresses to disguise herself – the fact that short, stocky Mrs. Dubbins would not even come close to fitting in a dress made for tall, leggy Mrs. Tallman is cheerily ignored, just as is the obvious conflict of interest that Detective Landis would have in being assigned to investigate a murder case in which his girlfriend is one of the principal suspects. In any case, Landis is assigned to the case and he seeks out the help of retired detective Paul Bernard (Berton Churchill, billed second). The two of them go through a dizzying array of suspects and theories of the case, including the deduction that Uncle Henry was not killed by being stabbed by a dagger concealed in an old scabbard, but had already been killed by carbon monoxide poisoning before he was stabbed. They are able to figure out how the gas was introduced into the room, too: it came from a tank of chemicals Peter Blake was using in his researches and was piped to the death room via a gas vent in the chandelier. (Who was still using gas jets for light in 1936? Just about everybody had already wired for electricity.)

They go through virtually the entire cast list, including Charlie Carson (who stole a dress from his sister and used it to disguise himself; he confesses to the “crime” of cross-dressing as a woman but insists that he had nothing to do with his brother’s murder), Mrs. Tallman and even Paul Bernard himself, who adds his own “confession” to the weird mix of twists at the end (this script makes it seem like Sinclair Gluck and Ewart Adamson were the spiritual ancestors of the modern-day King of Reversals, Tony Gilroy), before they decide that the real murderer was yet another servant, a Chinese man named Choong (Niki Morita) who can’t be arrested because as soon as the crime was discovered he high-tailed it back to China. The film contains a snatch of racist dialogue in that it’s assumed that Choong knew how to handle chemical gases because of his experience using carbon tetrachloride as a dry cleaner (how stereotypical!), but that’s not the problem with this movie. The real problem is it’s dull, dull, dull; most of the plot points are delivered in dialogue instead of action (a typical failing of 1930’s “B”’s before more artful people like Val Lewton and Joseph Lewis would figure out how to make the budgetary limitations of “B” movies work for them instead of against them), and this film was so boring both Charles and I had trouble staying awake until the end even though it was barely over an hour long.