IMDb meta-data is run time a snappy 1 hour and 1 minute, rated 6.2 by 151 cinemitizens.
Released on 1 December 1944.
Genre: Noir, Comedy.
Verdict: All singing, all dancing gal pals do what has to be done.
To dispel superstitions about a mansion where a murder took place twenty years ago, the family puts on a party for family and friends. As the guests gather and cavort, the upstairs Blue Room, where the deed occurred is nonetheless kept locked.
Brash, a young suitor for Daughter, insists that he spend the night in the Blue Room to prove it is safe. This kNight errant hopes to win patronal favour for his matrimonial suit by this exploit. Sure, that is understood but safe from what?
Thereafter the plot thickens. The next morning, though the bell in the Blue Room rings for the butler, no one is there in the Blue Room when the ever typecast butler Edwards enters. Bernie OIds on loan from countless other cop shows, comes to investigate but makes no progress, apart from chewing on a toothpick. Brash has disappeared.
The sleuthing is taken over by the three Jazzy-belles on hand to entertain the guests. These wisecracking gal pals mix song with inference and dance with investigation. They are amusing. The music has zest. The dancing is Olympic standards. Very diverting. All so much better than say the Ritz Brothers, originally contracted for this film before they got a better offer.
Needless to say there is a villain, and it is a he, the one least suspicious. Of course.
For once Ian Wolfe as the eternal butler gets some good lines and moments on camera, and he makes the most of them.
The Jazzy-belles carry the picture, a scratch group assembled for this film, it seems: Grace McDonald, Betty Kean, and June Preisser. Two of them had short careers but McDonald continued in television into the 1980s.
A rarity then for the time with these three as the principal players.
The screenplay confused the fraternity brothers. At one point, speaking of the death in the Blue Room, a member of the family says no one knows how the victim, her father, died. Later her brother says their father was shot. In both cases the attending physician is present along with several others. Throughout there is friendly ghost in attendance who is not integrated into the story but is there for comic irritation.
As this film made it way across the country, the newsreels that preceded it would have carried the news of the enormous and ominous reverses Allied Armies began to suffer in the Battle of Bulge.
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