MURDER BY INVITATION (1941)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*

Some online reviews call this a rip-off of the 1939 movie THE CAT AND THE CANARY, itself an adaptation of a 1922 stage play. But in truth INVITATION is a modestly pleasing inversion of the old chestnut "quarreling heirs gather for will-reading, and one tries to knock off all the competition." This time, rich old lady Denham (Sara Padden) invites all her relations to her mansion to see which of them is worth leaving her money to. In other words, she doesn't wait till she dies to see how she can screw over the relatives she likes least.

None of the potential heirs look at all sympathetic, for the movie starts out with them attempting (and failing) to put the old lady into an asylum for her eccentric behavior. This includes keeping some if not all of her money at her mansion rather than in a bank, so maybe the heirs are somewhat justified. Among the audience viewing the court battle are newspaper columnist Bob White (Wallace Ford) and his secretary-girlfriend Nora (Marian Marsh), but neither of them is invited to the mansion rendezvous of Denham and her relations.

Then one of the relatives is knife-murdered by a black-masked figure who emerges from a sliding panel, so Bob, Nora and a photographer drive out. In contrast to many old dark house flicks, the sheriff in charge of investigating the death knows Bob's newspaper rep and bends over backward to let Bob solve the case. Then someone swipes the body of the murdered man and commits a second murder. While the sheriff frets, that body disappears too. Later, as if the killer had some special grudge against the columnist, both corpses turn up in the closet of Bob's guest room.

It's just as well that INVITATION is a comedy, full of goofy one-liners, because when everything's wrapped up the bizarre actions of the murderer make no sense whatsoever. Denham starts out being somewhat sympathetic because she's eccentric but clearly not mad in the courtroom scene. But after the first murder, she shows utter indifference to the death of a relative in her house. Scripter George (HOUSE OF HORRORS) Bricker probably wanted to keep open the possibility that the old lady dunnit, but since this would be overly obvious, no one's likely to buy Denham as the perpetrator. Thus Denham's continued indifference to both a second and third murder indicates loses her whatever sympathy she'd gained. Both starring character Bob (who does not actually solve the murders) and all the supporting characters are tedious ciphers, so the only reason I gave the film a fair mythicity was due to the refreshing angle on the "gathering of the heirs" trope.

There are a fair number of pop-culture references here. Bob mentions THE CAT AND THE CANARY early on, and makes the "meta" assertion that he can't be killed because he's the "handsome juvenile lead" of the movie. A neighbor-character talks about his hobby of gardening and explains that he loves to smell flowers, which prompts Bob to compare the guy to the children's book character Ferdinand the Bull. The jokes aren't great but are certainly better than what passes for humor in most "old dark house" films.