REVIEWED BY WALTER ALBERT:         


THE BLACK DOLL. Universal Pictures/Crime Club Productions, Inc., 1938. Donald Woods, Nan Grey, Edgar Kennedy, C. Henry Gordon, Doris Lloyd, John Wray, Addison Richards, Holmes Herbert, William Lundigan, Fred Malatesta. Based on the novel by William Edward Hayes (1936). Director: Phil Karlson. Shown at Cinevent 42, Columbus OH, May 2010.

THE BLACK DOLL Crime Club

   The usual excellent program notes failed to include the name of the author of the book, and it was incorrectly listed as by “William Edward Haynes” in the credits on IMDb. Ellen Nehr’s Doubleday Crime Club Compendium provided the correct attribution, as well as a thumbnail sketch of the plot that showed that the film made some attempt to follow the novel.

   I say “some” because it was largely sabotaged by the performance by Edgar Kennedy as bumbling Sheriff Renick. And that’s a point I make with regret, since I’m a great fan of Kennedy, given the proper circumstance for his comedic gifts.

   The film begins promisingly in the remote mansion of recluse Nelson Rood (C. Henry Gordon), who lives with his sister Laura Leland (Doris Lloyd) and her son Rex (William Lundigan). Rood’s relationships with his family are dysfunctional, as he rules his small kingdom with an iron and unforgiving fist.

   The sudden appearance of a child’s toy, the titular black doll, arouses phantoms from his troubled past. When Rood is murdered that night, the police are summoned, with the arrival of Sherlff Renick and his antic crew dissipating the forbidding atmosphere that lent the film some tension and promise in the opening scenes.

   Donald Woods plays the detective Nick Halstead (already on the scene as the boyfriend of Rood’s daughter Marian played by a distraught Nan Grey) with some grace and a dash of humor, as he negotiates the obstacles posed by the sheriff’s ineptitude and those members of the cast who are expected to take the proceedings seriously and form a veritable phalanx of red herrings.

   As I recall, the other films in the Crime Club Series treated their material more seriously, if without enough distinction to make any of them figure in my pantheon of notable crime films.

   Universal’s Crime Club series:

Crime Club

THE WESTLAND CASE (1937)
THE BLACK DOLL (1938)
THE LADY IN THE MORGUE (1938)
DANGER ON THE AIR (1938)
THE LAST EXPRESS (1938)
THE GAMBLING SHIP (1938)
THE LAST WARNING (1938)
THE MYSTERY OF THE WHITE ROOM (1939)
INSIDE INFORMATION (1939)
HOUSE OF FEAR (1939)
THE WITNESS VANISHES (1939)

[UPDATE] 09-15-10.   For more information on the movies in this series, including the books and stories they were based on, see Comment #3. Not all of the films were based on Crime Club novels.