The audience knows from the start who the killer is in this above average B comedy from Producers Releasing Corporation. It is a very funny murder mystery where the neglected head of a wealthy family (character actor J. Edward Bromberg), cast against type, finds himself on the run when he discovers the corpse of enemy Paul Guilfoyle in his trunk. The audience knows that "Slippery Joe" (Ben Welden) killed Guilfoyle, and in his attempt to frame Bromberg forgot to pick up the evidence that would convict him of a crime Guilfoyle had locked in his safe but slipped into his jacket before Welden shot him. Up in the mountain inn, the body keeps disappearing, and to make things worse for Bromberg and Welden (finding out where Bromberg is thanks to a nosy convenience store clerk), Bromberg's dizzy wife (Isabel Randolph) and ungrateful children (Eric Sinclair and Lorell Sheldon) show up, only to prevent the family from becoming involved in any scandal rather than to help him get out of this jam. More mayhem has the corpse going from car trunk to crate to closet and seemingly back again, and Randolph's cute pooch becomes involved to help expose the killer.
I would have to call this perhaps PRC's very best comedy as well as one of the best comedies of 1945. It keeps you glued for its hour running time, and how can you not help think of Hitchcock's "The Trouble With Harry", made a decade later? Another comedy, "Stella" (1950, with Ann Sheridan and Victor Mature, had a similar plot). Charles Coleman is delightfully droll as the butler. A funny bit of character development as Bromberg basically the forgotten man in his own family even though it is he who brings home the bacon. At the end, the family is grateful and apologetic to Bromberg, but a funny twist at the end is well staged. PRC did a great job of making us believe this family was that daffy and wealthy (very much out of the "My Man Godfrey" school of screwball comedy), and the sets for both the family mansion and mountain inn are very well designed. Bromberg, best known for playing hard characters and villains, turns a complete 180 degrees, playing the type of part that Lloyd Corrigan had always been typecast in, and steals the nose right out from everybody, including that missing corpse and the cute pup.
I would have to call this perhaps PRC's very best comedy as well as one of the best comedies of 1945. It keeps you glued for its hour running time, and how can you not help think of Hitchcock's "The Trouble With Harry", made a decade later? Another comedy, "Stella" (1950, with Ann Sheridan and Victor Mature, had a similar plot). Charles Coleman is delightfully droll as the butler. A funny bit of character development as Bromberg basically the forgotten man in his own family even though it is he who brings home the bacon. At the end, the family is grateful and apologetic to Bromberg, but a funny twist at the end is well staged. PRC did a great job of making us believe this family was that daffy and wealthy (very much out of the "My Man Godfrey" school of screwball comedy), and the sets for both the family mansion and mountain inn are very well designed. Bromberg, best known for playing hard characters and villains, turns a complete 180 degrees, playing the type of part that Lloyd Corrigan had always been typecast in, and steals the nose right out from everybody, including that missing corpse and the cute pup.