No, not a real-life murder case; rather, it's a 1930 short:
I always enjoy the Spooky Season where I watch plenty of appropriate films (mostly horror, but not exclusively) yet always, by Halloween I am happy to move onto all the other genres and engage in my usual wide variety. This year, I especially feel burned out; that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a fun journey but it was nice to check out a 1930 Laurel & Hardy short which I later found out has a tragic backstory… more on that later.
How I first knew this even existed: tomorrow night Turner Classic Movies will play the short. As it’s available on YouTube in HD quality, I went that route instead. This decidedly isn’t horror; instead, the elements of “spooky old mansion during a dark stormy night,”, “a black cat,” “a bat,” a creepy painting and a murder mystery are the spooky elements. The plot seems to be a riff on The Cat and the Canary: Laurel’s relative Ebeneezer dies but the police think he was murdered. Various suspects are stuck in the house via police order and through the night, some mysteriously disappear.
The half hour short is more a genre spoof than anything else & the ending was probably cliché even in 1930—but I still found the whole effort to be fine. There were enough laughs where I can’t carp too loudly. Frank Austin as the old butler tickled me pink: what a funny, expressive face he had. What I learned afterwards was that shortly before filming, Laurel and his wife lost a newborn child; that’s a horrible story only brought up because others did and it may have dictated the number of gags this had… or the lack thereof. Nevertheless, this was what I needed in late October, 2023.
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