Wonderful character development!

That was an excellent one.

Perfectly adorable

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

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".

I won't rehash what the other reviewers have said, other than to say that most were a bit too generous. Even though this B-movie had a running time of only 67 minutes, it seemed to me more like 3 hours, as the whole story was so tedious. Everything about it is flat and stale - the production values, the acting, the writing, and especially the "humor". I am guessing it seemed old hat even in 1941. I gave it a watch because Marian Marsh was in it, and she was incredibly captivating in several of her films of the 1930's. Here she is mostly wasted. There is one basic principle shortchanged here, and it is one that I believe is basic to any kind of drama (comedy or serious, from wild fantasy to kitchen-sink realism) - the sense that those involved in the production - from the writer to the director to the actors - are playing for keeps, giving it their best. That doesn't happen here - everyone seems to be "phoning it in".

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.

Thsi film is one of those Old Dark House murder mystery films that Hollywood was so fond on in the 1940s. This B movie stars Wallace Ford as a popular newspaper columnist and Marian Marsh as his secretary/girlfriend.A rich old lady (Sarah Padden) is claimed to be insane by her family and is taken to court. The court declares her sane. Shrotly thereafter she invites all her family members to her mansion in upstate New York to spend the week so that she can watch over them to decide who to leave her $3 million estate. One by one family members are murdered, with the killer seemingly hiding and watching from hidden passageways that are throughout the house.A typical second feature film, this movie is somewhat enjoyable, but for those of you who are used to suspenseful spooky house movies, this is not what you are looking for. This movie is in the public domain and as such can be easily found on DVD and VHS.