The Mystery of the 13th Guest (1943)

The greatest movie ever!

Sadly Over-hyped

If you're interested in the topic at hand, you should just watch it and judge yourself because the reviews have gone very biased by people that didn't even watch it and just hate (or love) the creator. I liked it, it was well written, narrated, and directed and it was about a topic that interests me.

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

Perhaps I am not as well-versed in movie history as others are. I don't know what a Monogram film is.I like mysteries and it was recommended in Netflix. I was surprised to see it only lasted an hour. Of course, well before the hour was up I was grateful for that fact.This is not a good movie. It's akin to a bad short story; you just have to finish even though you know it's not going to get any better.The grandfather dies and the folks who were at dinner 13 years before begin dying off. Who is responsible? We eventually find out, but there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason as to why that person is responsible.The dialogue is insipid. The acting is not good. The lighting doesn't seem too good either. There's the hard-edge detective and the campy one-liners. It just didn't work.Spare yourself; there are better movies out there. There's nothing about this that I find worth sitting through.

I missed the opening titles of this movie and did not realize it was a Monogram picture.The first few minutes showed great promise, but when the police arrived after the criminal commission, the movie collapsed into the giant abyss of failure.The script has to be the worst ever, accompanied by equally bad acting.The agony was excruciating.Wanting to determine the identity of the 13th guest, I stuck it out for the duration, knowing it was only an hour long.Alas, the mystery prevails.But then, what more could be expected.

I'm a big fan of B detective movies with wise-cracking heroes, but few of them are as bad as this one. The acting is abysmal, the dialog is flat (with characters making embarrassingly inappropriate attempts at witticisms), the story has a vaguely interesting premise but it goes nowhere.At least I think it goes nowhere. Honestly, about halfway through this hour-long movie my attention wandered and I went over to work on my computer while the movie kept running. I definitely missed some important plot points - for example, I have no idea who the 13th guest turned out to be, assuming that was ever explained. But giving this movie half my attention was still more attention than it deserved.

A young girl arrives at her ancestral home and is promptly murdered-- -or is she? Twelve years earlier the murdered woman, as a little girl, had attended a birthday party for her dying grandfather. Thirteen partygoers were invited but only twelve attended. The thirteenth guest was death.Now, in the present, the original twelve guests are members of the family fighting over the will and someone wants the money badly enough to kill for it. Detective Dick Purcell is called in to solve the crime, aided by comic sidekicks and the usual inept policemen who only seem to inhabit "B" mysteries. Directed by William "One Shot" Beaudine, this 60 minute quickie is a darn good version of the Armitage Trail mystery and manages to be a little better that its 1932 predecessor-----though for some reason the 1943 film is much more difficult to see.