Scotland Yard Inspector Rodney Paine (Anthony Hulme) along with his friend and journalist, Pip Piper (C. Denier Warren) have come to Wickering to spend some needed R and R fishing. They have taken rooms at an Inn called Cricketers. They pause at the Inn’s bar for a pint before heading up to their rooms. As they are drinking, Cuthbert Snelling (Wilfred Noy), the butler for Mr. Gosling, the owner of an estate called Grey Towers, comes looking for police Sergeant Hopkins (Ernest Sefton) to report that his employer is dead. He tells Hopkins that Gosling appears to have been murdered.
Realizing that the local police are over their heads, Paine and Piper head up to the estate to see for themselves. When they arrive, they find that the body is missing. Snelling says that, as far as he knows, there was no one in the house at the time. Paine takes over the investigation. He notes that there is a glass of port on a coffee table that seems to have been poisoned. A search is made of the house and the grounds, but the body is not found.
The next day a body is found but it is that of George Billings (Fred Withers), the town taxi driver. Paine also finds out that a woman named Miss Casson (Evelyn Foster) was the last visitor that saw Gosling alive. Miss Casson says she came down from London the day before to apply for the position of secretary to Mr. Gosling. Paine also learns that another visitor to the area, Captain Hallam (Hamilton Keene), who says he came for the fishing, actually bought the fish he says he caught. Now Paine has several suspects, the butler, Miss Casson and Captain Hallam, but still no body, and no motive.
Paine searches the living room where Gosling’s body was supposed to be and finds that six pictures on the walls have paintings attached to the backs of the frames that had been reported stolen several years prior from Alton Castle. The paintings were done by Dirk van der Berg and are worth a fortune. It turns out that Gosling is really an international art thief named Victor Carter. Assuming that Gosling, the now Carter, was killed for the paintings, Paine still has to find out what happened to his body, who the killer is, and why was the taxi driver killed.
“The Body Vanished” AKA “The Body Vanishes” was released in 1939 and was directed by Walter Tennyson. It is a British mystery comedy. It is also a quota quickie and at 46 minutes long, it certainly is.
Even though the film is short and to the point, it is not a bad little mystery. There is a lot packed into those 46 minutes. Comic relief is provided by just about everybody although Pip Piper has the lion’s share. If you’re looking for a light but interesting little movie you can’t go wrong with this one.
There actually was a Dirk van der Berg. He was a Dutch artist that lived between 1721 and 1773. He did mostly landscapes and his main medium was watercolors.