Tomorrow at Seven (1933) gets off to a smart start, even if it seems a bit artificial, as novelist Neil Broderick notes a woman reading one of his books on the train. He blandly asks how it is, and gets quite the nasty review in riposte. Revealing himself to be Broderick, he opens himself up for a similar situation as he criticizes a rich man’s secretary, who happens to be the woman’s father.
His reverse ingratiation pays off in that he’s present when the rich man, Thornton Drake, receives a highly credible death threat, which only suffers in that it’s incorporated quite unrealistically into a jigsaw puzzle; only poetic license kept us from throwing up.
But this marks the beginning of the end for this plot, for a dated trope of the era, the clownish cop duo, arrive to check out the threat. When the woman’s father, Austin Winters, is killed, rather than Drake, the cop duo endeavour to control the situation, but are merely ineffectual and unfunny while another possible suspect, a pilot named Simons, also gets offed. The latter was probably just as well as Simons didn’t seem to have a real part to play here.
The plot is game, despite its burdens: why, after a flight to Louisiana from Chicago, is Broderick surreptitiously signaling with his lighter out the window? How did that coroner find that letter so fast, and why didn’t he finish his job? Why are the cops still trying to assert authority when they’re out of their jurisdiction? Was there a point in making the housekeeper a mute?
And how does the killer manage to turn off the lights so easily without being spotted?
It’s not a bad story, but some reworking would have done wonders for it.
