Murder by Invitation (Monogram, 1941)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Secret of the Blue Room, TCM showed two movies directed by Phil Rosen for the second iteration of Monogram Pictures, Murder by Invitation (1941) and The Strange Mr. Gregory (1945). Phil Rosen was considered pretty much a hack director, though there are two unquestionably great movies on his résumé: The Phantom Broadcast (1933) for the first iteration of Monogram, and Dangerous Corner (1934), based on a play by J. B. Priestley and made for a major studio, RKO. While nowhere near that level, Murder by Invitation is a sheer delight, a quite entertaining mixture of murder mystery and screwball comedy (a blend that was quite common in the 1930’s until the success of film noir in general and the 1941 The Maltese Falcon in particular put an abrupt end to it). Written by George Bricker, who like Robert Charles was that rare Monogram writer who could make you laugh even when he was intending to, it begins in a New York courtroom, where attorney Garson Denham (Gavin Gordon) has filed a petition to get his aunt Cassandra “Cassie” Denham (a wonderful performance by Sarah Padden) declared incompetent and committed to a mental institution so he can get his hands on the $3 million she has stashed somewhere. Among the spectators at Cassie’s hearing are reporter Bob White (Wallace Ford, top-billed), his girlfriend and general factotum Nora O’Brien (Marian Marsh), and his photographer Eddie (Herb Vigran). During the hearing, Cassie’s quick wits and steady stream of jokes convinces Judge Moore (Wallis Clark) that she’s sane, and he dismisses the petition against her.

Then Cassie invites all her relatives to spend a week with her at her country mansion, demanding that they all show up precisely at midnight and threatening to disinherit anyone who doesn’t come. Not surprisingly, especially given the film’s title, various relatives of Cassie’s start turning up dead, starting with Garson and then Larry (Phillip Trent) and Tom (John James), who’s sitting in the garden with his wife Mary (Hazel Keener) when someone sneaks up behind them and stabs him in the back. The film anticipates Alfred Hitchcock’s The Trouble with Harry by 14 years in that the characters seem to move a lot more once they’re dead than they did when they were still alive; at one point Bob White opens a closet door in his room and the corpses of Garson and Larry tumble out – only when he tries to show the dead bodies to the local investigator, Sheriff William Boggs (George Guhl), the kind of comic-relief doofus typical of official law enforcement in these productions, they’ve disappeared, then they reappear and finally they disappear again. The corpses move around so much that Bob and Nora deduce the killer must be a male because no woman could lift dead bodies and transport them. At one point Cassie gives Bob’s photographer Eddie a shoebox which she says contains her $3 million fortune in $10,000 bills (which would have pleased my husband Charles, one of whose movie pet peeves is how often we’re shown containers supposedly filled with cash which aren’t large enough to contain that amount of money). Convinced that the killer is a family member whose motive is to eliminate the competition so they can be the sole heir to her fortune, Cassie has decided to burn the place down so whoever the killer is will reveal themselves by trying to stop her.

In the end [spoiler alert!] there turn out to be two killers, Cassie’s long-suffering maid Katie (Kay Deslys) and her chauffeur Mike (Dave O’Brien, surprisingly hunky for a Monogram leading man on the eve of World War II). Katie was expecting to inherit Cassie’s fortune and Mike, whom Katie had married secretly a year earlier, was there to provide the brawn. Then Cassie gives Eddie a $10,000 bill from her stash as payment for his service, only it turns out [double spoiler alert!] that her entire “fortune” is in now-worthless Confederate money (and Sarah Padden suddenly starts speaking in an outrageously phony Southern accent to explain that she and her whole family were from Virginia). With her own home burned to the ground (a surprisingly good special effect for a Monogram movie), Cassie accepts the proposal of neighbor Trowbridge Cadwalader Montrose (J. Arthur Young), who’s loved her from afar for decades and whom Bricker has paraded around as a red herring, partial to taking walks at 1 a.m. through his garden, which he sprays with poison to kill pests. Bob and Nora also are on their way to the altar at the fade-out. Murder by Invitation is a delightful blend of screwball comedy and murder mystery that refreshingly doesn’t take itself too seriously, and Philip Rosen turns out to be alive to the challenges of Bricker’s script and able to give the movie the insouciant flair it needs to work. Though the print we were watching wasn’t very good – it was “soft” and a bit blurry – it still was good enough to do justice to Marcel Le Picard’s cinematography; Le Picard was by far the best of Monogram’s house cameramen just then and he gives this movie an appropriate sense of the Gothic without making it too dark either literally or figuratively.