The Case of the Frightened Lady (1940)

Directed by George King; produced by S. W. Smith

There are strange doings at Mark’s Priory, the seat of the ancient Lebanon family. The current Lord Lebanon (Marius Goring) is being pressured into marrying his mother’s secretary, Isla Crane (Penelope Dudley Ward), whose door has just been fitted with a bolt - on the outside; a sinister doctor (Felix Aylmer) is at the beck and call of the dowager Lady Lebanon (Helen Haye), for an unknown reason and for unknown purposes; a couple of insolent servants (Roy Emerton, George Hayes) lurk at every corner. It’s not surprising then that a murder is soon committed…

The Case of the Frightened Lady is adapted from a play by Edgar Wallace, one of the most prolific writers of the 1910s and ‘20s, specialising in thriller and adventure stories. He wrote a great many tales at great speed: a cartoon in a Punch magazine I have from the 1920s depicts a book-stall owner tempting a customer with the question, “Have you read today’s Wallace, sir?” It was inevitable that the then-new medium of the motion picture would take advantage of his output, even years after he died, relatively young. Unfortunately, the cinema was not always as kind to his talent as was the written word.

The movie opens with Isla screaming, her nerves frayed to the breaking point. It’s a good opening for a play but comes across as rather affected in a movie. Indeed the story can’t seem to break from its stage origins. This is not always a bad thing in a film, but added to the sets - too much action takes place in the mansion’s improbably wide hall - and the theatre-style direction, it makes for heavy viewing.

The story itself is more interesting than it initially appears. The twists it reveals as it nears its climax turn much of the viewers’ suspicions upside down, which is gratifying. The actual solution is not, unfortunately, as great a surprise. Nonetheless, the story, with its family secrets, old house, hidden passages and creeping servants is entertaining. That it is the sort that was often lampooned as the twentieth century progressed is not really its fault; rather like a cliché that wasn’t a cliché when it started.

Yet the old-fashioned nature of the melodrama is partly to blame for the movie’s failure. I am certainly not one to reject anything because it is either old, or old-fashioned, as readers of this blog may have noted by now. However, there is a large element of The Case of the Frightened Lady that simply doesn’t translate well from stage to screen.

That has little to do with the play’s age; rather, it takes more than just a decent cast and adequate director successfully to bring either a play or a book to the cinema. The stage was, for hundreds of years, the public’s equivalent of what television was in the 1950s and ‘60s. Dozens of plays were written and produced every week - a huge percentage of them, if Punch magazine’s review section may be judged, with detective and mystery plots. Like episodes of many tv series, not all of the plays were good.

At eighty-one minutes, The Case of the Frightened Lady should have moved along briskly; that it seemed rather longer than its running time is an indication of its sluggishness. Fun at times, generally entertaining, the film fails to hold the viewers’ interest throughout. Perhaps a live audience might have helped.