Thanks to an appreciative write-up by William K. Everson in his illustrated genre study Classics of the Horror Film (Citadel Press, 1974), a generation of MonsterKids has been primed for over thirty years to see the sadly obscure Murder by the Clock (1931). Quoth Everson:

“Murder by the Clock created quite an impact on its original release, perhaps because it drew atmosphere from the just-beginning cycle of horror films to beef up the generally prosaic and talkative quality of the mystery films of the day… It’s a full-blooded film, and audiences of the time were thoroughly scared by the comparative realism of the tomb and graveyard scenes, and by the unrestrained menace of Irving Pichel, a lecherous giant of a half-wit, than by the more fanciful horrors of Vampires and Monsters.”

Murder by the Clock starts off as standard grab-the-will thriller, masking itself in the guise of a whodunit in the crepuscular mold of Avery Hopwood and Mary Roberts Rhinehart’s Broadway hit The Bat, which by then had been adapted twice for the movies by Roland West, first as the 1926 silent The Bat and then as The Bat Whispers in 1930. The film does, in its first reels, hew closely to the Hopwood-Rhinehart paradigm, laying the action largely inside the creepy Endicott family mansion, where menacing shadows play against the wash of comfortless candle light and clutching fingers grasp at unsuspecting throats.

Where the film differs from its seeming inspiration is in the decision to reveal very early on the killer of wealthy widow Julia Endicott (Blanche Friderici), whose last will and testament has named her drunkard nephew Herbert (Walter McGrail, later “The Boss” in Reefer Madness) her sole heir at the expense of her retarded son Philip (Irving Pichel), a hulking manchild who fantasizes about stabbing and choking people. This choice delights Herbert’s “witch” of a wife Laura (Lilyan Tashman), a golddigger who goads her weakling husband into strangling his “miserable old hag” of an aunt, a crime for which police like Philip due to his diminished mental status and penchant for incriminating ejaculations (“I can break things!”). With Philip locked away, Laura compels her artist lover Tom Hollister (Lester Vail) to putting a knife in the back of the guilt-wracked Herbert, thus ensuring that the Endicott family fortune will be hers… until dogged police detective Valcour (William “Stage” Boyd) smells a rat.

The transference of evil from person to person in the service of human greed looks ahead to Mario Bava’s deeply cynical Twitch of the Death Nerve (1969), in which heirs to a lakeside estate do blithely away with one another to get their hands on the deed, leaving a body count as long as the list of suspects. Although she never gets any blood on her own hands, the villain of this piece is undeniably the avaricious Laura Endicott, one of the most merciless bitches in movie history. As played by Lilyan Tashman, Laura is an inveterate flirt (“I could be awfully fond of you”) who will bat her eyelashes at a dedicated cop or a raving madman as long as she gets her way. As hateful as she is, it’s hard not to admire Laura’s determination as she slashes her way through a society of gullible pantywaists and milquetoasts – the very “important” men who have destroyed the nation’s economy with their hubris and corruption. Smiling with atavistic glee as Philip (whom she has told she really loves) throttles Hollister, Laura is the only character in the film who seems to be having fun and it’s a perverse joy watching her work.

Lilyan Tashman’s scenes with William “Stage” Boyd are a lot of fun and (as noted by William Everson) Valcour’s climactic handover of the unrepentant Laura to the long arm of the law is similar to Sam Spade’s regretful remanding of Brigid O’Shaughnessy in the final pages of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon, the first film version of which had been released by Warner Brothers a month before Murder by the Clock. Sadly appropriate for a movie so choked with visions of early death, both Tashman and Boyd would themselves die within four years – the actress from cancer in March of 1934 and her leading man from a liver ailment exacerbated by alcoholism almost exactly a year later. Their Murder by the Clock costars Martha Mattox (a veteran of the 1927 version of The Cat and the Canary, who appears here as the faithful Endicott family retainer) and Blanche Friderici had both died unexpectedly in 1933. On a happier note, Irving Pichel would soon be dividing his time between occasional acting gigs (as the evilest of henchmen in Dracula’s Daughter in 1935) and directing films, with The Most Dangerous Game (1932), which he helmed alongside Ernest B. Shoedsack, She (1935), on which he shares credit with Lansing C. Holden, and Destination Moon (1950) being among his better and best remembered efforts. Pichel died of a heart attack in 1954.

Produced by Paramount Pictures, Murder by the Clock was adapted by Henry Myers (Destry Rides Again) from a story credited to Broadway playwright Rufus King (whose hit musical whodunit Murder at the Vanities would provide paychecks for Bela Lugosi, Bob Cummings and Freaks star Olga Baklanova) and a play by Charles Beahan, best known for Broadway comedies (and a tragically short-lived marriage to doomed starlet Sidney Fox, Lugosi’s costar in Murders in the Rue Morgue). The production was entrusted to British émigré Edward Sloman, an East Ender with a background in legitimate theatre who in 1915 sailed for Hollywood, working his way to a seat in the director’s chair via the lowly status of bit player and freelance scenarist hocking story ideas for a quarter a pop. Sloman did good work in the silent era and Murder by the Clock benefits from a number of eerily quiet patches.

Laboring behind the camera was Karl Struss, a pioneer in trick photography who had healed the lepers of the silent Ben-Hur (1925) on-camera using his special filters and would work similar magic to turn Frederick March into a monster for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931). While Struss doesn’t employ much in the way of camera trickery in Murder by the Clock, his hand is felt in the film’s deliciously Gothic atmosphere, from the opening frames set inside a sprawling Manhattan cemetery to its climactic set-to within the stone walls of the Endicott family sepulcher, a scene underscored not with incidental music but with the unsettling blare of the claxon Julia Endicott has had installed in her tomb for fear that she might be buried alive.

Given the proliferation of funereal imagery, it seems likely that Murder by the Clock was an attempt by Paramount to cash in on the surprise success Universal Studios enjoyed with Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931). Murder by the Clock went into theaters in July of 1927, more or less midway between the February release date of Dracula and the November premiere of James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931). While its own relative success at the box office in no way cramped Universal’s style, Murder by the Clock did attract some enthusiastic press. In its July 27, 1931 issue, the critic for Time declared:

“A good detective story often makes an audience laugh louder than a clever comedy, since laughter is the method most people use for pretending not to be scared, or for relief after moments of vicarious terror. Audiences at Murder by the Clock chuckle and squeal as they are meant to do.”

Despite the melodramatic sturm und drang, the creaky stagecraft and the overtly theatrical playing of the actors (whose number includes Regis Toomey as an Irish beat cop with a yen for the Endicott’s maid), Murder by the Clock is – whether by design or happy accident – a surprisingly frank and pessimistic view of American family values during the Great Depression. Sold off in a package deal between Paramount and Universal Studios in the 1950s, the film got some TV play before lapsing into undeserved obscurity. Unlicensed copies transferred from those 16mm TV prints can be had from the public domain-raiders at Sinister Cinema, who offer a decent-looking DVD-R for $16.95.