BEFORE DAWN. RKO Radio, 1933. Stuart Erwin, Dorothy Wilson, Warner Oland, Dudley Digges, Gertrude Hoffman, Jane Darwell. Based on a story by Edgar Wallace; director: Irving Pichel.

BEFORE DAWN Warner Oland

   As far as I’ve been able to determine, Edgar Wallace wrote this story in Hollywood especially for this film, and it was never published separately. I’m far from being an expert on Wallace, so I can easily stand to be corrected.

   Assuming that you don’t expect to see a detective story when you watch this movie, I think you’ll enjoy it immensely. (I did.) Warner Oland is the villain in this one, playing an Austrian psychoanalyst who listens intently to a dying man’s last words as he confesses to a crime that he committed 15 years earlier.

   Not only that, he reveals where a million dollars in stolen gold is hidden, somewhere in back in the US, which turns out to be in one of those spooky old dark houses that were so popular in criminous 1930s cinema.

   Slow-speaking and soft-spoken Stu Erwin plays an undercover cop who nabs Patricia Merrick (Dorothy Wilson) and her father (Dudley Digges) as a pair of phony mediums – only to discover there’s nothing phony about her at all. And off they go to the house where the suspicious death of the owner, Mrs. Marble (Jane Darwell) has occurred – the very same house where Dr. Cornelius is snooping around.

BEFORE DAWN Warner Oland

   If mediums able to speak to the dead actually exist, I’d like to think that they would be intelligent, beautiful and petite young brunettes like Dorothy Wilson, whose career in Hollywood (1932-1937) was not nearly long enough.

   She married scriptwriter Lewis R. Foster (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington) in 1936, and that was it as far as her career was concerned; she raised a family and stayed married until his death in 1974. She herself died in 1998.

   There is plenty to see in this sixty minute movie: secret doors and rooms, deadly cisterns in the basement, candles blowing out, no telephones, cops that go tearing off in the wrong direction at precisely the wrong moment, and the evil deeds of Dr. Cornelius.

   You can’t go wrong!