It’s an odd sort of party, yes.
The storytellers behind House Of Secrets (1936) play their cards close to their vests in this mystery story, but unfortunately it’s unconvincing. American Barry Wilder, while sojourning, penniless, in London, receives a call from a London solicitor. He’s heir to the Hawk’s Nest and a small fortune! Bing bing bing!
But upon visiting his new property, supposedly unoccupied, he discovers squatters, and armed squatters at that: two men and their dogs. Kicked off his own property, he doesn’t glimpse a third occupant, a young, attractive woman he had rescued from an assault on the boat that took him across the Channel.
Barry finds the entire situation puzzling: his detective friend, Starr, starts in on the situation, and discovers a highly unfriendly Home Secretary and a chief of Scotland Yard who changes from warm to cold when he hears the name Hawk’s Nest, and then Starr abruptly tells Wilder to go home to America.
Meanwhile, Wilder himself, on a late hours visit to the Nest, has discovered yet another squatter, a madman treated in a most odd manner by the other three. The madman likes to indulge in crazed laughter, which tends to be accompanied by screams from the woman, who Wilder has by now discovered is also there. Wilder keeps getting caught on the property, yet the angry squatters refuse to shoot him, and when he goes to the police, they just laugh him off. It’s all a bit surreal.
Into the soup then trips three gangsters from New York. They know what’s going on: the squatters are searching for treasure, and the gangsters will be horning in on the action if they, and their secret information, have anything to do with it!
Well, it all plays out, but the treasure is at odds with the madman, isn’t he? I shan’t give the game away.
But I will say the movie fails because of three problems.
First, and perhaps my most shallow objection, is the quality of the print of the movie. The day time scenes are fuzzy; the night time scenes, of which there are several, are almost supernaturally odd in how the human body tends to echo. Perhaps this is an effect of ‘casting a movie of low technical quality in HD.
Second is the pacing of the movie. It’s very homogenuous, with little apparent attempt to take our breaths away. The script calls for this, this, and this to happen, and by God we’ll plod our way there.
Third, it’s full of shallow characters. Wilder saves the woman on the boat and falls in love with her at the same moment, yet why? She may be pretty, but there’s more to chemistry than looks. Who’s Wilder, anyways? A guy with no money, apparently, just charm, good looks, and an accent that keeps changing. And surely the squatters must have a few juicy conflicts to keep us interested!
Part of what makes a story work is a depiction of how being part of that story, that situation, and how it’s resolved, affects the people involved, and while there may be some limp efforts to do so here, they are very ineffective.
And that wrecks what might have been a clever solution to the conundrum of a treasure hunt colliding with a captive madman. There might be the bones of a good story, perhaps even as good as The Usual Suspects (1995), though not nearly as noir, but without the character involvement, the whole thing falls utterly flat.
