At World Attractions Inc., on stage 13, they are shooting the final scene of the remake of the movie “Song of the Toreador”. The original film was silent and starred Edwin Strange (Conway Tearle). It made him a star. Not long after that Strange died in a fire. That was seven years ago. The leads in the remake are Neil DuBeck (Rod La Rocque) and Claire Woodward Smith (Gail Patrick). The director is E. Gordon Smith (Ian Keith). Smith also directed the first film. Claire who is married to Smith was once married to Strange before he died.
After the scene is finished DuBeck shows Smith a threatening note he received. It says that he won’t live long enough to see the official preview of the completed film. He says that it is the sixth death threat he has received. By now DuBeck is pretty frazzled. Smith makes light of it and says that it may be something the publicity department cooked up for the film. They talk to Johnny Morgan (Reginald Denny) who denies knowing anything about it.
When the film is completed everyone goes to the preview. When the film is over Claire realizes that Neil is dead. The autopsy shows he was poisoned. Detective McKane (Thomas E. Jackson) begins his investigation. Soon other notes appear. Claire receives a death threat. During a scene the prop gun is found to have real bullets and she is almost shot. McKane closes down the entire studio and refuses to let anyone leave until whoever is doing this is found. Johnny decides to do some investigating himself. But whoever this mystery killer is, he won’t be satisfied until the entire movie studio is destroyed.
“The Preview Murder Mystery” was released in 1936 and was directed by Robert Florey. It is an American murder mystery was comedic undertones.
The movie is your average who-done-it film with a couple red herrings. I didn’t find the mystery to be anything really special. You do get a little slice of the behind the scenes making of a movie. The film was shot on the Paramount sets. There is even a movie within a movie. There are also a couple scenes of other movies being filmed. One is a comedy and another looks similar to “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari”, except that Caligari was a silent film.
Reginald Denny was the founder of Radioplane Company. Radioplane was an aviation company that produced drone aircraft used in WWII. After the war the company was sold to Northrop Industries. One of the workers at the company while it was still Radioplane was Norma Jean Dougherty, later known as Marilyn Monroe. Denny’s last film was “Batman” 1966 where he played Commodore Schmidlapp.