Secret of the Blue Room (Universal, 1933)

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

Last night (Thursday, July 6) at 8 I turned on Turner Classic Movies for a night of three “B” films, including one from Universal in 1933 called Secret of the Blue Room that starred Lionel Atwill, Gloria Stuart and Paul Lukas in a murder mystery written by Erich Philippi (“original” story) and William Hurlbut (screenplay) and directed by Kurt Neumann. (Hurlbut is best known today as co-writer of the stunning script for The Bride of Frankenstein and Neumann for having directed Wake Up and Dream, the last film Russ Columbo made before his tragic early death in 1934.) Atwill, in one of his few clean-shaven films (usually he had some amount of facial hair), plays German nobleman Robert von Helldorf, and Stuart is his daughter Irene. The film opens on the night of Irene’s 21st birthday, at a party hosted by her father and featuring her three suitors, Army officer Captain Walter Brink (Paul Lukas, looking oddly about 10 years younger than he did as Professor Bhaer in the Katharine Hepburn/George Cukor Little Women the same year), journalist Frank Faber (Onslow Stevens) and overgrown boy Thomas Brandt (William Janney). Thomas approaches Irene and says that now that she’s turned 21 he wants to marry her, but she puts him off with a noncommittal response that indicates she wants to “play the field” a bit longer before she ties herself down to just one man.

Over dinner and drinks Robert tells Irene and us about the legend of the castle’s “Blue Room,” in which three people – Robert’s sister, his best friend and a detective investigating the two previous deaths – all died in the Blue Room 20 years before within days of each other. Robert’s sister was thrown from a window into the castle’s moat, the best friend was shot and the detective was strangled. After that Robert ordered the Blue Room to be locked up and never used again. Thomas announces that he’s challenging the other men each to spend a night alone in the Blue Room to show that the room isn’t cursed. Thomas is the first to do this but he disappears precisely at 1 a.m., when the deaths 20 years ago occurred. The next afternoon, Irene lets herself into the Blue Room but is attacked by an unknown assailant. Frank is the next one to try to beat the curse of the Blue Room, but after Frank starts playing the piano (both the castle’s living room and the Blue Room are equipped with pianos, and in an early scene Gloria Stuart is shown singing and playing one – it probably wasn’t her piano playing but it was definitely her voice, and it was quite attractive) the music suddenly cuts off, and when the others reach the Blue Room they find that Frank has been shot to death. A mysterious stranger (André von Haden) shows up to supply a red herring, though Robert explains that he’s not only Robert’s brother but Irene’s actual father – he left Irene’s mother before Irene was born, Robert offered to put up the mother but she died shortly after giving birth to Irene, and all those years Robert raised Irene as a single parent and didn’t tell her he was merely her uncle, not her dad.

Midway through the movie an oppressive police commissioner, Forster (Edward Arnold at his hammiest; even in much better movies than this, like Josef von Sternberg’s Crime and Punishment or James Whale’s Remember Last Night?, playing a cop seemed to bring out the worst in him), shows up and starts browbeating everyone to try to solve Frank’s murder. Eventually there’s a big fight scene in the catacombs under the von Helldorf castle, ably represented by all those musty-looking sets from Universal’s classic horror movies, in which Captain Brink grapples with and tries to avoid being shot by an unseen assailant (director Kurt Neumann and cinematographer Charles J. Stumar carefully avoid revealing what he looks like) who turns out to be [spoiler alert!] Thomas Brandt. Apparently he discovered the secret doorways and passages that honeycombed the von Helldorf castle, found his way into the Blue Room via them, and hatched this plot to get rid of Irene’s two other suitors. We never learn what those previous crimes from 20 years before were about – my hopes for a plot à la The Galton Case by Ross Macdonald, in which the detective has to solve a crime that occurred a generation earlier to get the clue needed to solve the most recent one, were dashed – and Secret of the Blue Room ends up as a pretty standard and rather dull murder mystery which Universal, producers Carl Laemmle, Jr. and Henry Henigson, and director Neumann tried to enliven by shoehorning in some of the studio’s horror iconography. (It didn’t work.) I’m pretty sure I’d seen Secret of the Blue Room before but I can’t remember when or where – most likely on one of the horror packages Universal was re-releasing to TV in the 1980’s – even though for some reason Universal had enough faith in this story that they remade it in 1944 as Murder in the Blue Room as a vehicle for three comediennes, the “Three Jazzy Jazzabelles” (Grace MacDonald, Betty Keen and June Preisser), after the Ritz Brothers wisely turned it down!