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Colonel Wolters (Berton Churchill), an amateur detective & head of
the Sphinx Club, a club of yet more amateur detectives, receives a death
threat from the Crooked Circle, a circle of crooks (hence the name), who
decide that their only female member is to kill Wolters (but since they
always come together hooded, we don't know who she is) ...
Far from taking this threat slightly, Wolters retreats to his newly
acquired haunted mansion accompanied by Sphinx club members Harry (Roscoe
Karns) & the sinister Hindu Yoganda (C.Henry Gordon). Rand (Ben Lyon),
another member of the club supposed to guard Wolters, ends up temporarily
arrested thanks to his own butler Rankin (Frank Reicher). When he finally
can convince the police he is not a criminal & tries to find his
fiancee Thelma (Irene Purcell), he finds out she has gone to Wolters'
mansion, the exact place she has urged him not to go. Once at the mansion
though, Thelma is nowhere to be found, while the whole place seems to be
haunted by creepy violin playing that seems to come out of nowhere but
announce doom ... & as it happens in those old mansions, at one
poibnt the clock strikes 13, the lights go out, a woman - Thelma - screams
for help & pretty much everybody disappears. Only eventually can
everybody be found again ... only Wolters has been strangled, & it
becomes clear that Yoganda is in league with Thelma, who goes out of her
way to hide from everybody else. After some more investigations (that at
one point again involve butler Rankin, who seems to come out of nowhere)
& afteer discovering several hidden panels & secret passageways,
Rand comes to the conclusion that Yoganda has something to do with it all,
& pretty much cornered, Yoganda agrees to reveal the truth, &
leads everyone through another secret passageway to a secret room where
the Crooked Circle is in session, & Yoganda - a secret service agent,
as it turns out - starts unmasking them one by one ... their leader turns
out ot be Rankin the butler, but among their ranks is also Thelma, who
soon turns out to be a secret sservice agent too, substituting for Yvonne
(Ethel Clayton), the real Crooked Circle member. Turns out that Yoganda
& Thelma were after the Crooked Circle all along, & just used the
death threat against Colonel Wolters to get them ... & of course
Wolters isn't dead after all, Yoganda has only put him into suspended
animation to make everyone - including the Crooked Circle - think he's
dead ... 'cause who would try to kill a dead man ? & the spooky
violin ? It was played by an eccentric hermit (Raymond Hatton) who has
placed speakers everywhere in the house just to scare its inhabitants
away, as he likes to think of the house as his ... Zasu Pitts &
James Gleason have the comic parts, as frightened housekeeper &
incompetent cop, respectively. Nothing much new here, since in
the 1930's, old dark house movies were a dime a dozen, the genre
formula was well established, & this film uses pretty much all the
genre mainstays, including sinister butlers, suspicious hindus, secret
panels, hidden passageways, hysterical housekeepers, hooded villains,
secret societies, ... However, Crooked Circle uses a light
approach to the genre & delivers the goods at a reasonably fast pace,
which makes the somewhat convoluted & inconsistent story take backseat
& makes this film enjoyable after all.
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