The Dark Hour
Cast & Crew
Charles Lamont
Ray Walker
Berton Churchill
Irene Ware
Hobart Bosworth
Hedda Hopper
Film Details
Technical Specs
Synopsis
Elsa Carson resides with her wealthy uncles, Henry and Charles Carson, whose real estate investments come into trouble when an arsonist repeatedly burns their tenements and the son and wife of tenant Arthur Bell are killed. When Henry is found dead in the Carson library, detective Jim Landis, whom Elsa has been seeing secretly over Henry's objections, finds multiple suspects. First to consider is the chemist Blake, a lodger in the home of their neighbor, retired detective Paul Bernard, who threatened Henry to arrange a marriage with Elsa in order to receive her inheritance. When Jim finds a singed dress and the murder weapon in Elsa's room, he suspects Elsa of protecting her Aunt Marian, whom Elsa believes she saw at the Carson home the night of the murder. When the Carsons' butler, Foot, is murdered, however, Uncle Charles claims he is the victim of a "pathological mania," which caused him to dress as a woman and set fire to the tenements. Bernard, however, accuses him of murdering Henry to steal his part of the Carson fortune and to keep Henry from intervening in his insurance fraud. When Foot threatened to blackmail Charles with knowledge of his crimes, he stabbed him. Having already discovered carbon monoxide gas missing from Blake's lab, Landis finds a rubber hose in Bernard's car and realizes Charles stabbed his brother after he had already died of asphyxiation. Bernard then confesses to poisoning Henry, believing he is protecting Aunt Marian, to whom the hose really belongs, until she reveals that her Chinese valet had overheard her wishing Henry dead and had killed him, just before fleeing to China. Having found the true murderers, Elsa and Jim decide to take a honeymoon in China and Marian orders Bernard to marry her.
Director
Charles Lamont
Cast
Ray Walker
Berton Churchill
Irene Ware
Hobart Bosworth
Hedda Hopper
E. E. Clive
Harold Goodwin
William V. Mong
Michael Mark
John St. Polis
Miki Morita
Aggie Herring
Katherine Sheldon
Rose Allen
Fred Kelsey
Lloyd Whitlock
William Bakewell
Crew
Film Details
Technical Specs
Quotes
Trivia
Notes
The working title for this film was The Last Trap.
