recommended

Good concept, poorly executed.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

****SPOILERS****Broderick Crawford is the unlikely hero in this haunted house like movie as the klutzy real estate agent Herbert A. Gilmore "Gil" Smith who can't seem to put one foot in front the other without tripping over on it. It's when Henrietta Winslow, Cecilia Loftus, is mysteriously murdered that Gil goes into action trying to uncover her killer among those gathered to hear her will read and who gets all the goodies that she's to leave over to them: It turns out that Mrs. Winslow's cats get the lion shear of her money! This leads to a number of those gathered getting killed by someone who wants to eliminate them in order to get their share of Mrs. Winslow's money as well as her entire mansion.It turns out that the house gardener Eduardo Vigos, Bela Lugosi,knows the person involved in all the murders going on among the invited guests but he's soon eliminated when he's about to expose who did them by the killer. Through the entire movie Gil ends up putting his foot in his mouth at every turn and apologizing to everyone, even the killer, until the final minutes of the movie when he finally sees the light, in the crematory oven, in who's behind them. By then the killer made his or her appearance known and planned to have Gil's girlfriend Elaine, Anna Gwynne, who figured out who the killer was cremated together with the late Mrs. Winslow's cats in order to keep the truth of his actions from seeing the light of day!***SPOILERS*** It was in fact the sinister looking back cat who seems to have supernatural powers who both saves the day as well as Gil & Eline's lives by coming out of the shadows and putting an end to the killers plans. That by it tripping over a lighted candle and setting the killer on fire before he can do any more damage. There's also in the cast Gale Sondergaad as the house maid Abigail Doone who later was to make it big in the in the film "Weird Woman" in which in being the weirdo that she is was the part she was born to star in. We also had Basil Rathborn as Montague Hartley in between his Sherlock Holmes movies roles which was an in joke in the film's dialogue. And finally the future contract killer and cat lover in his break out film "This Gun for Hire" David Ladd who despite playing tough guy and big hero parts in his future movie roles was the smallest or shortest person in the film's entire cast.

Old lady gathers her greedy relatives in her gloomy isolated mansion for a reading of her will. Not long after, she winds up dead. Welcome to an old dark house thriller, friends. Yes, it's fairly repetitive of many other such thrillers or comedies but it's pretty entertaining at times. It has an excellent cast, most of which unfortunately have little to do. Broderick Crawford stars in an early role. He's equal parts leading man and buffoon. The kind of part Wayne Morris would have been playing over at WB. Bela Lugosi has a small, thankless part. He spends most of the movie ominously lurking in the shadows and peering in windows. Hugh Herbert provides the movie's comic relief. For the uninitiated that means he fidgets and talks to himself, punctuating every other sentence with "woo hoo." It's not very funny but I found it harmless enough. Maybe I'm just used to Herbert by now. Others may find him irritating so be warned. The rest of the cast includes Basil Rathbone, Gale Sondergaard, Anne Gwynne, Gladys Cooper, and Alan Ladd before he made it big. I agree with another reviewer that this probably would have worked better as an Abbott & Costello movie. Despite the relatively short runtime, it begins to feel overlong as it nears the hour mark. It's enjoyable enough but flawed. Still, anything Universal was putting out in the horror/thriller field in the 1940s was worth watching.

Not connected to the 1934 film with the same name, which also starred Bela Lugosi, who here is wasted in a small role as a grounds-keeper. Typical old dark house film except it's mostly comedy, and tediously unfunny at that. Greedy relatives have gathered in hopes that their elderly relative(Henrietta Winslow) will die, she proves resilient, so someone resorts to murder in order to collect. Basil Rathbone(who looks annoyed), Anne Gwynne, Gladys Cooper, Alan Ladd, and Gale Sondergaard play the hopeful heirs, Broderick Crawford plays a hopeful buyer of the mansion, but it is Hugh Herbert as the supremely annoying Mr. Penny, obsessed with Antiques, that ruins this film irreparably, beating the one joke for 70 minutes! Still, a woman kind to all those cats has my sympathies.

Given one of the most abused titles in cinema history (innumerable films were supposedly inspired by Edgar Allan Poe's short story but few, if any, bothered to be faithful to it), the plot of this one could go in any direction. Universal had already used the title for one of its most stylish (and potent) horror offerings in 1934, so the 'remake' tried something entirely different: an old dark house comedy-chiller on the lines of THE CAT AND THE CANARY (itself brought to the screen several times, the most recent up to that time emanating from 1939). As always with this kind of film, we get a plethora of characters brought together for the hearing of a will and then starting to die violently one by one; the cast is notable and eclectic – including two horror stars (Basil Rathbone and Bela Lugosi: the latter was also in the earlier version, where his role was far more substantial), whereas the comedy is supplied by Broderick Crawford (proving surprisingly adept and likably accident-prone!) and the insufferable Hugh Herbert. Of course, there is a damsel-in-distress (pretty Anne Gwynne, also serving as Crawford's love interest) being invariably the one to receive the lion's share of the fortune possessed by the dotty (and cat-loving) owner of the estate; also on hand are Gale Sondergaard (as the sinister housekeeper, a virtual reprise of her role in the aforementioned version of THE CAT AND THE CANARY) and Gladys Cooper and Alan Ladd(!) as mother and son (the former is married to Rathbone, but he carries on an affair with another relative present). Being definitely a B-movie, the film is best compared to similarly modest ventures in this vein: even so, not involving recognizable comics (such as THE GORILLA [1939] did with The Ritz Brothers) or a horrific figure (a' la NIGHT MONSTER [1942]) – both films, incidentally, feature Bela Lugosi in an almost identical (and equally thankless) part – the film ends up not satisfying anyone…even if it is harmless enough as entertainment, the eerie atmosphere well up to par and the identity of the villain (who perishes flamboyantly in a blaze) a genuine surprise.