THE SPECKLED BAND (1931) ** If the most important things, to you, about a film are atmospheric locations and theatrical faces, this is the one you want. If you're really into the use of silence as background music, or early superimposition and fading of faces as a narrative device, there's something here. Otherwise my suspicion is that you, like me, will be at least as perplexed (not to say confused) as entertained. Jack Raymond uses the devices of the day idiosyncratically, not to say willfully so, but either has no sense of pacing or a radical one. Scenes cut bizarrely into the next with neither warning nor explanation, it would be enough to make you wonder if Raymond didn't have Spinozan tendencies except that he announces flashbacks like dinner being served. There's not a point in there I don't think, but you could make one up if you wanted to. As Raymond Massey is a more ponderous than deliberative Sherlock Holmes (no way this guy could hang with Ronald Howard on even a game show), it helps that most of the clues are spread thick and early. That being the case, I admit that I didn't put them all together even as quickly as Massey, so there may be enough to it to amuse the (lower) percentiles of the whodoneit crowd satisfied with butexactlyhowdeedoit.
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