Doctor Henry Stephenson calmly strangles his wife, walks out the front door and goes to a medical conference to lecture his audience on "How to Grow Old". By the time Police Homicide Captain Victor Maclaglen and reporter Edmund Lowe show up, the dead woman's lover, Richard Arlen, is set up to be framed. When Lowe sees Arlen's sister, he decides that anyone with a sister as lovely as that can't be a murderer.
Edmund Lowe seems a lot more relaxed and natural in a three-piece suit and a battered trilby than he does in his usual evening clothes. In addition, there seems to be one-way chemistry between him and co-star Victor McLaglen, strangely far afield from their usual haunts at Fox. Of course, there their pairing commanded the best directors, while at Paramount, they had Erle Kenton -- not a bad director, but one used to letting his comic stars have their own way. He also seems to let cinematographer Karl Strauss do what he wants to, resulting in big shadows thrown against walls from low sidelights, in an ur-Noir fashion, while the camera occasionally retreats to an upper corner to gaze down at the players, or goes in for a mildly fish-eyed close-up.
What these were supposed to accomplish is unclear to me. Struss had come to Hollywood by way of New York and portrait photography. Like Arlen, his career was on the downslide, called in as often for uncredited work as for credited, and the projects he got a formal credit after 1935 were usually for smaller, more specialized producers, like Chaplin or Hal Roach. He lit his last set in 1959, and died 22 years later, aged 95.
