Lady Detective Holiday - WHILE THE PATIENT SLEPT

While the Patient Slept (1935) - It's a dark and stormy night in the mansion and the family vultures are gathering to watch the old man die.  Everybody is half hysterical by nature, everybody has got some kind of angle, and they all have their claws into each other.  There is something to do with a missing twin brother and a green figurine of an elephant.  Nurse Sarah Keate, played by Aline MacMahon, has been called in to supervise the coma.  Aline MacMahon and her eyebrows.  Her archingly elevated eyebrows.  She is a fine figure of a woman, but those eyebrows are her best feature.  Just look at them.

When the most hated relative is gunned down in the middle of the night on the main stairway, it's time to call in the law, in the form of blustering Detective Lance O'Leary (Guy Kibbee) and his ridiculous sidekick (Allen Jenkins).

From then on it's a lot of nocturnal rambling, shouted questions, the whole mob gathered in the living room, lightning flashing, a mysterious silhouette, a groping hand.  Look out, Nurse Sarah, look out for that groping hand!

This is the first of five movies based on the Nurse Sarah Keate novels of Mignon G. Eberhart.  It is based on the second of those novels and the first of them wasn't made into a movie until later.  The weird thing is that as soon as Keate and O'Leary meet, they act like they have worked on many a crime before, and the sidekick blurts out, "Every time there's a murder SHE pops up," which makes you think, what the hell, did I miss some other Nurse Sarah Keate movie that came before this?  But no you did not.  It's a ploy.  Five different movies made by two different studios, played by four different actresses and given three different names, that is the score for the literary Nurse Keate.  You can look it up if you want to know the whole deal.  This one is a well-produced B movie, good as these things go.  Naturally she is the one who finds the most clues and gets into the most peril from the mysterious figure with the groping hand, but you have to ignore the usual number of inexplicable instances of people covering for each other and not telling what they know and saying something happened when it didn't or didn't happen when it did, and finding out the butler has a criminal record but what does that have to do with anything.  Don't they always have a criminal record just to throw things off?  It's a mild way to fill the bill - did they put these before the main feature so you would have to sit through them, or after so you could bail out?  I don't know.