User Reviews

When the story begins, you see an old lady discover the body of her nephew. She's so upset, she ends up falling down the steps and injuring herself. As for the dead man, it appears initially to be a suicide. After all, he was shot in the head and it appeared that no one could have gotten in the room to murder him. But when the body is examined, there are no powder burns...and the victim couldn't have shot himself. So, Inspector Patten (Regis Toomey) asks his girlfriend, Nurse Adams (Lee Patrick) to go to the home to be the old lady's personal nurse...and to keep an eye open for clues. I am not sure about the legality of all this!

This murder mystery has one of the dumbest scenes I can recall having seen. When a woman is murdered after receiving an injection, the doctor says he suspects the woman was given poison. When he inspects the bottle the nurse gave him, he TASTES the drug and proclaims "This is arsenic!!". First, how would he know what arsenic tastes like? Second, if you suspect poisoning, who would taste the suspected drug to determine if it's poison. After all, it IS poison!!! Too bad it wasn't cyanide...one taste of that would have instantly killed the idiot doctor!! Or, if the doctor was the killer, why taste the drug when you know it's arsenic? Arsenic, last time I heard about it, is bad!!

During the 1930s and 40s, Hollywood made a bazillion B-murder mysteries. So, in many ways this one is similar to all the others. It is a bit better made (aside from the STUPID arsenic sequence) since it was made at Warner Brothers and not some ultra-cheap studio like PRC or Monogram. But it also has many of the typical cliches and follows the usual formula again and again....and at times it is entertaining and others it's a bit silly. And, sadly, at the end it needed someone to explain to everyone (including the audience) WHY all this occurred and why! Watchable but nothing outstanding for this type of movie.

This film is a remake of the 1932 Warner Brothers film "Miss Pinkerton". Warner Brothers was a major recycler of movie material with the same movie sometimes being remade twice during the 30's and 40's. The original film did not really have any precode moments to speak of. It was just a creaky old house murder mystery with Joan Blondell in the role of the nurse of the old lady who had the terrible shock of discovering her nephew's body. George Brent played the inexperienced police detective who was out to solve the crime.

In this film Regis Toomey is the inexperienced detective and Lee Patrick is the nurse. Regis Toomey is better at playing a bumbling detective than George Brent - Brent just played the part too deliberately. On the other hand I think I prefer Blondell in the original as the nurse. Lee Patrick certainly could play the "wise cracking dame" pretty well, but she was 40 when this film was made versus Blondell who was 26 when she played the role and was more age appropriate for the part.

The one thing that has improved over the years were production values - the sound recording is better, and you can see detail better even though this is an old dark house. Still, I think there is nothing of note that this remake adds to the original. If you haven't seen "Miss Pinkerton" I think you'll like it, but if you have seen the original I'd just stick with that.

This is the third version of the same story, first made in 1932 as "Miss Pinkerton", and remade in 1935 as "While the Patient Slept". I guess we'll just have to it's a mystery along the lines of many others made in the 1930s and 40s surrounding a house of mystery where an elderly person fears for their life, and usually ends up dead with everybody wondering who's going to be mentioned as a beneficiary in the will. The old person in this film is a face who will be very familiar to those who have seen many classics of the 1930s and 1940s, particularly "The Wizard of Oz". For me however, Clara Blandick will be remembered for a substantial number of memorable roles, minor parts in many films but on occasion such as this one, a major player.

Blandick is the spinster matriarch of a troubled family who apparently witnesses the suicide of a nephew and then is entrusted into the care of nurse Lee Patrick while mysterious occurrences around her large house continue. Three quarters of the way through the film, Blandick meets her maker, and it comes up to nurse Patrick and her boss, Regis Toomey, to find out who the real killer is, especially when Patrick is accused of replacing arsenic for the medicine in the hypodermic needle requested by the doctor. Unfortunately, Toomey and Blandick, who played the hero and his possessive mother, in the 1932 Barbara Stanwyck soap opera "Shopworn", do not appear together.

This was probably the only leading role for Warner Brothers character actress Lee Patrick who played an assortment of parts in a 1930s, 40's and 50's, ranging from wisecracking secretaries to jilted lovers to dizzy Society matrons. Reminding me of Celeste Holm in this film, Patrick does a good job and showing the fear of her character yet adds humor when she has to stand up to Blandick who tries to deceive her in several scenes. The film has enough differences with the other two versions to stand apart and that makes it much better than I had expected it to be.