The Missing Guest

Missing Guest, The (1938)

** 1/2 (out of 4)

Forgotten Universal horror film is a remake of the forgotten Universal horror film Secret of the Blue Room from 1933. A reporter goes to investigate the "Blue Room" where a man entered twenty years earlier and never came back. Once the reporter arrives at the house, another man enters the room and in the morning he is gone. Is it a ghost or something else? If you've seen the earlier version (or the second remake made in 1944) then you already know the story because all three feature the same story including who did the killings and why. This version here has a lot of comedy thrown in. Some of it works but most of the time it just comes off very obnoxious.

Newspaper writer Paul Kelly gets a tough assignment from his editor: Crash a party at a famous mansion and spend the night in the "blue room"--the site of a notorious murder 20 years ago.

Kelly's breezy manner sets the tone for this fast paced mystery that contains plentiful comic relief and just a bit of suspense. The old dark mansion is re-opening after all these years. Owner Selmer Jackson and his daughter Constance Moore are hoping to put aside the rumors that the place is haunted. Among the guests at their bash is William Lundigan, a handsome young family friend who is in love with Moore, and Edwin Stanley as the family doctor who seems to know a lot of the family history, including the story of the death in the blue room.

Having sneaked into the party, Kelly is discovered and thrown out, but appears again in the morning, having bribed a servant--anything to avoid facing his editor and being put back on the women's advice column. And the plot quickly thickens: Lundigan, having volunteered to debunk the ghost stories by spending the night in the blue room himself, has disappeared.

Paul Kelly is convincing enough as the irreverent hero. Constance Moore is earnest and smart as the beautiful damsel; not at all surprisingly, she and Kelly team up as soon as he convinces her that he's on the level: "At first I did think this ghost stuff was a gag. Now I'm beginning to wonder. You know, we could break this case in a minute if you'd help me."

Enjoyable if not exactly a classic.

This is the first remake of the 1933 Universal Horror film "Secret of the Blue Room" - the 2nd remake is the 1944 "Murder in the Blue Room". Personally I like the first film, the 1933 version best, followed by the 1944 version, and this 1938 version I like the least.

It's a standard mystery-horror of the 1930s/1940s. Nothing special about the film or it's story.

3.5/10

1938's "The Missing Guest" was Universal's first remake of their 1933 classic "Secret of the Blue Room," to be followed six years later by a second, "Murder in the Blue Room," in 1944. The first was distinguished by its fine cast and atmospheric Germanic setting, while the third was distinguished by its more lighthearted musical format, also benefitting from a good cast of familiar faces. Here, although the haunted seaside mansion on Long Island looks suitably eerie, the film is weighed down with a ton of obnoxious newspaper clowns, led by Paul Kelly's insulting 'Scoop' Hanlon, who sneaks in to conduct his own investigation of the ghostly goings on. The forbidding blue room is the salon where various owners of the mansion all met mysterious deaths, and young Larry Dearden (William Lundigan) insists on spending the night in that same room, convinced that he may discover how his father died there 20 years before. This film introduces a doctor character (Edwin Stanley) absent from the 1933 original, but retained in the next remake, around whom the solution is found (a different one for all three movies). This is also the only one to downplay the police investigators, as two excons arrive to annoy the entire household, making the last half extremely trying after at least a decent beginning. Both remakes have the camera arrive at the haunted mansion, scaring the maid who opens the front door, and have identical seaside locations (the original was set in a castle with a moat). Saddest of all, there isn't a single likable character in this idiot bunch, even leading lady Constance Moore (replaced by the far more amiable Anne Gwynne in the 1944 version), inexplicably falling for the dishonest Scoopster who naturally winds up solving the case single handed, after dozens more nosy reporters make life hell for the harried occupants. "Secret of the Blue Room" was the only one of the three issued as part of Universal's SHOCK! package released to television in 1957, but all three found their way to Pittsburgh's Chiller Theater, with "The Missing Guest" airing May 1 1976 (following 1972's "Gargoyles") and Nov 26 1977 (following 1971's "The Resurrection of Zachary Wheeler"), not seen on TV since 1988 (no great loss in this case, as its obscurity is well deserved).