JohnHowardReid Perennial second-from-the-left-cop-in-the-station-house, George Guhl, has a featured role, would you believe, in Monogram's 1941 tale, "Murder by Invitation", which turns out to be a peculiar amalgamation of Mrs. Longfellow Deeds Meets the Cat and the Canary. With halfway competent direction and a halfway appropriate well- healed budget, this effort may well have turned out as sleeper of the year. The money is there all right, but Phil Rosen's direction is strictly from hunger. The picture's potential drama is never realized. Obviously left largely to their own devices, the players do what they can to salvage the film. Although inclined to over-act, I thought Sarah Padden carried off the main role with a fair amount of conviction, although other reviewers disagree. George Guhl was a big letdown, and I was also disappointed that Marian Marsh was simply pictured as just another pretty blonde in this outing and no longer the charismatic charmer of "Beauty and the Boss".

classicsoncall Well you'll have yourself some fun with this murder mystery even if it turns out to be somewhat nonsensical by the time it's over. The family of sixty five year old Cassandra 'Cassie' Denham (Sarah Padden) is trying to have her declared incompetent so they can get a crack at her three million dollar estate. How nephew Garson (Gavin Gordon) figured he could argue that point by mentioning a five hundred dollar unsecured loan she made to someone on a handshake just made me shake my head. Who was the real crazy one here?During the course of the story, one of the characters mentions that it has all the elements of a good murder mystery, if by that you mean a midnight invitation to a spooky old mansion, a mysterious set of eyes under a hooded mask peering through sliding doors, and a pair of bodies falling out of a closet more than once. I was surprised they didn't use the old lights out trick here as that would have been standard for the era and quite to be expected.Even with the dead bodies turning up, this one never gets to be all that serious, as New York Evening Star reporter Bob White (Wallace Ford) keeps things light with photographer sidekick Eddie (Herb Vigran) and girl friend Nora O'Brien (Marian Marsh) along for the ride. You won't believe Aunt Cassie's solution to the problem of turning up the murderer; I think she really might have been crazy after all. You don't want to think too much about this one once the final credits roll because when it's all over, the three million was in Confederate bills and the house was up in flames. On top of that, Cassie was going to get married. If you tried to come up with this yourself, you wouldn't be able to do it.

mark.waltz So does apparently eccentric matron Sarah Padden, the spinster matriarch of a greedy family who wants to put her in a nut house so they can get their grungy hands on her fortune of $3 million. She invites them all to spend a week in her mountaintop mansion where you know what starts to happen. You've seen this all before, but right from the beginning, this film's tongue is so far into its cheek that the laughter starts rolling as soon as the old dear takes the stand in her defense. Padden is adorable, insulting her family and outlandishly insufferable in-laws (which includes Minerva Urecal, the "poor man's" Marjorie Main) and even columnist Wallace Ford whom she admits to that she reads his column but didn't reveal it on the stand because it might hurt her case.While this plot line has been overdone (often very predictably), it has never been done so fun, and you can see elements of later comedies with the same theme ("Murder By Death" and "Clue") in its short 64 minute running time. A film so much fun deserves a higher rating because the laugh quotient is greater than normal. To say more would spoil the delights.

Hitchcoc This is a formula piece. It's been done a hundred times. The greed of the relatives causes them to try to get the old lady committed. Their motives are so obvious that any chance they had goes down the tube within minutes. Now they're in over their heads and have to use their resources to survive. Meanwhile, the red herrings start swimming upstream. I should have hated it, but the crazy overacting and general being of the film are rather pleasant in a maniacal sort of way. The conclusion is satisfying and justice is done. The one drawback is that the bad guys are so pathetic and incompetent that they don't pose much of a threat.