In Vienna, a dying gangster named Joe Valerie (Frank Reicher) tells the doctor, Dr. Paul Cornelius (Warner Oland), that fifteen years ago he stole a million dollars in gold and hid it in a large house in America. He begs Cornelius to end his pain and misery in exchange for the location of the gold. Cornelius accommodates the dying man’s last wish.
In America, Dwight Wilson (Stuart Erwin) is working bunco trying to expose fake clairvoyants. He visits Patricia Merrick (Dorothy Wilson), who bills herself as Mademoiselle Mystera. Patricia and her father Horace (Dudley Digges) are arrested and taken to police headquarters along with a string of others. Patricia, however, is the real thing and manages to convince Dwight by describing his childhood relationship with his deceased sister.
Dwight convinces the chief of detectives, John O’Hara (Oscar Apfel) to let Patricia solve a crime and prove her claim. The chief and Dwight settle on the unusual death of Mrs. Marble (Jane Darwell), an old woman who recently died in a fall down the stairs. The old woman’s servant, Mattie (Gertrude Hoffman) blames ghosts. Soon Dr. Cornelius shows up at the Marble estate looking for the gold.
“Before Dawn” was released in 1933 and was directed by Irving Pichel. It is an American pre-code poverty row crime mystery and an old dark house movie. The film is based on a story by Edgar Wallace.
There isn’t a lot of mystery here, but it is a decent thriller and was interesting to watch. The plot isn’t complicated, but the atmosphere is gothic and spooky.
The main plot hole in the movie is the fact that Patricia was unable to contact Dwight’s nonexistent aunt in the afterlife and this was supposed to be proof that she was a fraud. In fact, it proves the opposite. The fact that her father kept the three dollars that Dwight forked over for the consultation doesn’t prove anything one way or the other. Just because you paid to have someone contact a relative in the afterlife, doesn’t mean that they want to talk to you.
Swedish Warner Oland usually played Asian characters. This is one of the few times that his character was not.