Cory Williams (Edmund Lowe) is an actor and a playwright. After the opening of his most recent play, he is having dinner in a restaurant with his co-star and fiancé Fiona Maclair (Veda Ann Borg), his press agent Melinda Matthews (Marguerite Chapman), and two other friends. They are waiting for the early edition newspapers and the reviews on the play.
While they are waiting a woman named Longacre Lil (Esther Dale) comes into the restaurant. Lil is basically a panhandler but most of the theater people on Broadway consider her a good luck charm. They occasionally give her a handout to keep their luck running good. When Lil approaches Cory about being a member of her “club” he insults her and calls her a fake. Cory and Melinda leave the restaurant and Lil follows him down the street heckling him. When a drunk bumps into Melinda, Cory comes to her defense. A confrontation ensues, Cory hits the drunk, and he falls unconscious. A cop arrives and finds that the man is dead.
An old friend of Cory’s named Supai George (Bruce Bennett) suddenly appears. He examines the body and determines that the man died of snake bite and not from the fall. Detective Tabor (William Wright) thinks Cory is a privileged snob and his play has murder via snake bite as its main plot. Naturally Tabor suspects Cory but with no evidence he can’t prove anything.
Things get way out of hand when Cory finds out that his fiancé, Fiona is in love with a critic named Odell Gissing (Gerald Mohr). On top of that, she is still married to a man named Rob Slocumb (Leslie Denison) and was using Cory to get a juicy part in his play. It’s not long before Slocumb, Gissing and Fiona all end up dead. Tying everyone together are Cory and the method of murder, snake bite. Having seen and heard enough, Tabor arrests Cory but he escapes. Now a fugitive, Cory is depending on George and Melinda to help him get to the bottom of things and find the real killer.
“Murder in Times Square” was released in 1943 and was directed by Lew Landers. It is an American murder mystery.
This is your standard low budget “B” picture, produced by Columbia’s second-string people. Along with it come some of your basic plot holes and red herrings. But at slightly more than an hour long this fanciful who-done-it is an entertaining light mystery story.
The story may be a little thin, but the movie does have some decent actors, specifically Bruce Bennett, Gerald Mohr, John Litel and Marguerite Chapman. Unfortunately, their parts are a little small. Other than Edmund Lowe the only one with a really meaty part is Esther Dale as Longacre Lil, the loudmouth panhandler. A role that she plays to the hilt.