Poison Pen (1939)

Tension ratchets up as more and more poison pen letters are received by inhabitants of a small village, with things ending up a murder mystery of sorts given death result from the villagers turning on each other, and we get a surprise in the gleefully grisly end, not so much from the "who" - though this is handled cleverly - but from the "why".

★★★☆☆

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Murder in Soho (aka 'Murder in the Night') (1939)

While murder features prominently in both titles, the British one ('Murder in Soho') and the US one ('Murder in the Night'), the murder in the movie committed by Cotton Club nightclub owner Steve Marco in his upstairs office ends up being an incidental thing compared to the debauched comedic revellry of nightclub patrons downstairs - drunken dances, food fights, romances, love rifts, etc., which all has very little to do with the murder and the dull Scotland Yard investigation that ensues.

★★☆☆☆

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The Cat And The Canary (1939)

It renders the absurd plot of The Cat and the Canary (1927) slightly more sensible, halving the time between Cyrus West's death and his will reading and relocating his ghost mansion to the Louisiana bayous, making it easier to believe the mansion has stood empty for ten years except for the presence of poor lonely Miss Lu, and this version ups the comedy with Bob Hope cast as Wally Campbell, the love interest dropping wisecracks left, right and centre as a lunatic called The Cat terrorises a group gathered in the mansion for the will reading.

★★★★☆

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The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939)

It is still good fun but Sherlock Holmes is not at his best in this second of the fourteen Basil Rathbone-Nigel Bruce movies and in fact spends most of the 80-minute runtime being taken for a fool by his arch-rival Professor Moriarty - he brings to mind Frasier here the way his ego leaves him looking a fool - but even worse, when in the final moments he finally twigs and realises what we the audience have known all along from the very beginning, his out-loud logic to a bewildered Watson brings to mind the sort of childish panto one hears between Adam West's Batman and Burt Ward's Robin!

★★★☆☆

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