Post by Salzmank on Apr 19, 2017 16:12:43 GMT
The Night of the Party, directed by Michael Powell in his salad days and starring Ernest Thesiger (most famous as Dr. Pretorius in James Whale's hilarious Bride of Frankenstein).
There's a grand, animated, vivacious, dotty, juicy (any more adjectives I can come up with?) performance from Thesiger--he's the best thing about the movie, and (of what I've seen) I'd place this performance right under his work for Whale.
The sequences at the party itself, and the suspense of the murder game, are admirably portrayed by Powell--very good and well-done. Thesiger's sudden appearance with the gun is both clever and funny.
The plotting is intriguing, though I never had much doubt as to the identity of the murderer. (Well, I had a trifle of a doubt: I thought they might go the route of making the police commissioner, Sir John what's-his-name [motive: to protect his daughter's honor], the murderer, but then I said, "Nah," and went back to my original choice, which was correct.) In particular, the murder game business is better than 99% of examples of this trope--see, for example, its nadir in Ngaio Marsh's first book, A Man Lay Dead--and, as strange as this opinion may be, the plotting has some curious similarities with The Last of Sheila (in particular, the scene set in the ruined abbey)!
Unlike in the case of Remember Last Night?, which I believe Sondheim and Perkins must have seen (or at least known about) before making Sheila, I'll chock off these similarities to a coincidence, but it still amuses me.
My only real criticism is that it ends far too abruptly after the murderer's hilarious confession speech.
P.S. Nowadays, it's an extremely rare film--it has never been on DVD or even VHS--but it's on YouTube at the moment. I don't know how long it will be there, though.
Nope, strike that! I found another copy of it on YouTube here.