They were so bad, he just up and had a heart attack.
Murder with Pictures (1936) suffers from a lack of attention to detail. This is a murder mystery in which the defense lawyer of a gangster dies of a gunshot wound during a photo shoot after the gangster has been cleared of a recent murder. There’s a selection of possible murderers, most of them news photographers, along with a mystery woman. The lead is a young, poverty-stricken newsman looking for his big story, but having to wade through quite the shit storm, from veiled threats from the gangster to a woman who claims he signed a contract to marry her or pay her $5,000 – in 1936 dollars, it’s quite a headwind.
And it all feels a little artificial.
Throw into the blend the fact that the mystery woman is apparently shot in the back, yet can bound up out of bed and drive around in cars with notoriously stiff suspensions, who also takes a shot to the jaw, and is yet not kidnapped while she lays unconscious, a killer who appears out of nowhere, and a really flawed soundtrack (at least on Amazon Prime, where the captions were also at least 30 seconds behind the dialogue), and it was a difficult story to enjoy, despite the cleverness of the crime.
In the end, I think the unbelievable character responses damaged the show. But I still like the title.
