A Shot in the Dark

A Poverty Row campus mystery from Chesterfield, 1935: a student (Charles Starrett) finds his roommate hanging outside a dorm window; the autopsy says a needle at the base of the brain. His father (Robert Warwick), an amateur criminologist, takes over. Charles Lamont directed, from Clifford Orr's novel The Dartmouth Murders. Edward Van Sloan is the professor. Three deaths, an inheritance, a half-brother from France. It telegraphs, as the Times said. It also has the stiff, static pleasure of a well-made B: rooms, alibis, a cloak. Starrett would become a western star. Here he is still a boy who cannot get into his own room.