The Dark Hour (1936) Review - A dusty, silly little B-mystery

If you have a soft spot for dusty, black-and-white whodunits where everyone is trapped in a giant living room, The Dark Hour is a cozy way to spend an hour. But if you get annoyed by characters repeating the same clues three times, you should probably skip this one. 🕵️‍♂️

It is one of those ultra-cheap 1930s mysteries from Chesterfield Pictures. They did not have much money, so mostly they just put twenty actors in a room and had them talk.

The setup is classic. An old millionaire gets blackmailed, then ends up dead, and everyone in his family has a reason to be happy about it.

Enter the detectives.

One of them is Fred Kelsey, who basically made a career out of playing the dumbest cop in cinema history. Seriously, if you saw his work in The House of Mystery, you know exactly what he does here.

He scratches his head, gets angry at chairs, and suspects the wrong person every five minutes. The other guy is Ray Walker, playing the snappy, fast-talking investigator who actually has a brain.

There is this one scene where a character is trying to act devastated, but they keep glancing at the corner of the frame. It looks like they were reading their lines off a giant cardboard sheet held up by a stagehand.

Also, Hedda Hopper is in this! Before she became the feared gossip queen of Hollywood, she was doing these B-movies.

She has this incredible, icy stare that makes everyone else in the scene look like they are about to cry. Honestly, she is the best thing in the movie.

The sound design is incredibly weird. In some shots, the background noise completely cuts out, leaving this heavy, dead silence.

Then suddenly, a grandfather clock starts ticking so loudly it sounds like a bomb. I swear they just had one microphone hanging from a broomstick and kept moving it around.

There is a moment where a character tries to sneak out through a window. The window is clearly just a wooden frame with no glass in it, but they still struggle to "open" it. It is beautiful.

Also, why do old movies always have people pouring drinks that look like straight water? They call it whiskey, but it has zero color. 🥃

Anyway, the plot gets a bit tangled near the end. The solution to the murder feels like the writers just picked a name out of a hat in the last ten minutes.

But that is part of the charm, isn't it? It does not try to be a masterpiece.

Some random things I noticed:

• The maid has about three lines but looks terrified the entire time.
• A very obvious shadow of the camera crew on the hallway wall during the hallway scene.
• The victim's mustache is so fake it seems to tilt when he speaks.

If you want something deep, go watch something else. But if you want a silly, harmless mystery with some fun character actors, give it a spin.