With a runtime of just 73-minutes, this 1933 whodunnit, the fifth of fifteen films adapted from the detective novels of S S Van Dine between 1929 and 1947, has a very high body count - four, including the first untimely death of a prize show dog - and it is up to super-sleuth Philo Vance, played by William Powell, to catch the culprit, which he does despite the solution to the mystery being quite preposterous, revealed in a laughable denouement.
★★★☆☆
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