The Thirteenth Guest (M. H. Hoffman, Inc., Monogram Pictures, 1932)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (January 8), my husband Charles and I watched a quite odd mini-thriller from Monogram Pictures and M. H. Hoffman’s company called The Thirteenth Guest (1932), starring an actress named Ginger Rogers who in 1932 was already a substantial “name” in major-studio films even though she wasn’t yet a star. (That would come a year later when she jumped from Warner Bros. to RKO, they teamed her with Fred Astaire on various ornate dance floors … and the rest, as they say, is history.) Rogers was already a bigger “name” than Monogram could afford, and her co-star, Lyle Talbot, was also a Warners contractee at the time, so it’s a bit surprising they ended up making a film together at Monogram. The director was Albert Ray, whose slow-paced style qualifies as a non-toxic alternative to Sominex and largely takes the edge off a story that could in surer hands have been the basis of a quite good thriller. Ray was a veteran of the silent era who’d been directing since 1915, though for the first 10 years of his career he made only shorts and didn’t get to direct a feature until Fun’s Fun in 1925. The most interesting behind-the-camera person involved in this movie is the writer of the source novel, Armitage Trail. Though the name on his birth certificate was Maurice R. Coons, it was as “Armitage Trail” that he wrote two published novels, The Thirteenth Guest (1929) and Scarface (1930). Trail nè Coons was one of a number of writers who decided to turn his experience as a journalist covering the Prohibition-era gangsters in Chicago into a career in Hollywood, though unlike some of the others (Herman J. Mankiewicz, Ben Hecht, Bartlett Cormack, W. R. Burnett) he didn’t have a long career. According to Burnett, who worked on the script for the 1932 film of Scarface with Trail, he slipped into alcoholism and ended up dying of a heart attack in 1930, age 28, outside the Paramount Theatre in Hollywood. Trail apparently also wrote under pseudonyms – there are reports that he wrote entire issues of pulp magazines using various aliases – but the only works known as his today are his two novels. The Thirteenth Guest was adapted for the screen by Frances Hyland and an uncredited Arthur Hoerl – and Hoerl has a weird backstory of his own as the writer on the overwrought and silly anti-drug film Reefer Madness (1938), a.k.a. The Burning Question, a.k.a. Tell Your Children.

With those formidable, if a bit bizarre, talents behind the camera it would be nice to report that The Thirteenth Guest is a largely forgotten masterpiece (though, predictably, Monogram kept it in circulation for over a decade because of Rogers’s presence; and they even remade it as Mystery of the Thirteenth Guest with a director with an even worse reputation than Albert Ray’s: William Beaudine). Alas, though it’s only 69 minutes long it’s a ponderous bore that well overstays its welcome. The heroine is Marie Morgan (Ginger Rogers), who has just turned 21 when the film begins. She receives a letter from her long-deceased father, whose attorney John Barksdale (Robert Klein) has withheld it from her for 13 years. The letter summons Marie to an old dark house where her dad used to live until 13 years earlier, when he summoned his relatives to a dinner party and one of them never made it. Morgan père sealed up the house and kept it exactly as it was That Night (so far Trail has ripped off Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four and Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations), though at Barksdale’s request the electricity and telephone have been turned back on. In fact, the phone is booby-trapped; the receiver handle is made of solid steel and, when a black-hooded figure trips a switch, the person holding the receiver is immediately electrocuted. That almost immediately happens to Marie Morgan, only Monogram wasn’t about to pay Warners a loan-out fee to use Ginger Rogers only to kill her off in the first five minutes. It turns out later that the real Marie Morgan is still alive and the person who got the hot shot in her place is a woman named Lily (also Ginger Rogers) who was subjected to plastic surgery to make her look exactly like Marie. (We never learn who made her over, or why.) Barksdale is the second victim, and there’s a weird assortment of other suspects, including Marie’s brother Harold, known as “Bud” (James Eagles); his companion, Thor Jensen (Eddie Phillips) – the two are so close Captain Ryan of the local police (J. Farrell MacDonald) calls them “boyfriends” in this so-called “pre-Code” film – and Marie’s various relatives, Uncle John Adams (Ervin Alderson); Aunt Jane Thornton (Ethel Wales); Uncle Dick Thornton (Phillips Smalley); his wife, Aunt Marjorie Thornton (Frances Rich); and a mysterious medico, Dr. Sherwood (Crauford Kent).

There’s also an even more mysterious “Uncle Albert” – or was it “Alberts”? – who’s eventually revealed as the hooded killer. His motive was to murder the rest of the family to grab the $1 million inheritance Marie’s dad had left her. One of the gimmicks is that all of the present-day victims (including Barksdale, the second victim) were at that original dinner party 13 years earlier, though Marie, Harold and Thor were all still children then. The hero who solves the crime is private detective Phil Winston (Lyle Talbot), who’s called in by Captain Ryan and his doofus assistant, Detective Grump (Paul Hurst, playing one of the most repulsive so-called “comic relief” characters ever created for a film like this). I suspect if Trail had lived longer he’d have written a series of novels with Phil Winston as essentially his Philo Vance. Lyle Talbot is the one actor in the piece who overcomes Ray’s almost nonexistent direction and actually creates a powerful, moving characterization with some emotional intensity. He gets a neat scene in which he’s necking in a big chair with his girlfriend de jour when Captain Ryan calls him – and keeps calling. In one scene his girlfriend takes the call and pretends to be the operator you could call on the phone in those days to get the correct time. (I remember the phone company offering that service in my childhood, though by then it was a machine delivering the time rather than a live human.) Of course there’s a matching scene in which Phil Winston is necking with Marie Morgan in the same chair and going through the same routine! The Thirteenth Guest is one of those frustratingly mediocre movies with a great movie stuck inside it and struggling to get out. The basic plot is clichéd and rather silly, but it could have been the germ of a great film, and Ginger Rogers’s performance shows signs here and there of her trademarks during her star years – the spunkiness, the independence, the unwillingness to take shit from anyone – even though she’s nothing more than an ordinarily good-looking woman walking through a part and waiting for her dance partner to arrive.