Drama / mysteriozní, USA, 1939, 70 min.



Sparks fly at the Hotel Eldorado in Reno when Mary Whitman arrives to file for divorce from her husband Curtis and meets Curtis' intended, Jeanne Bently. When Jeanne taunts the defenseless Mary and insults Wally Burke, her former suitor, Mrs. Russell, the owner of the hotel, orders her to leave. Before she can finish packing her bags, however, Jeanne is murdered and Mary, arrested for the crime. Mary's arrest prompts her husband Curtis, a resident of Honolulu, to ask his old friend, Charlie Chan, for help. Charlie accompanies Curtis to Reno, where he meets Sheriff Fletcher, the bumbling law man investigating the case. After winning Mary's release on the grounds of lack of evidence, Charlie visits the murder room, where he finds Dr. Ainsley. Ainsley claims that he is looking for the money that Jeanne won on the night of her murder, suggesting that Burke killed her for her winnings. A search of the room by Charlie and his son Jimmy reveals Jeanne's scrapbook with the pages from the years 1935 and 1936 cut out, and Charlie to surmises that a pair of scissors was the murder weapon. Next, Charlie finds dirt particles on the dead woman's boots, which leads him to an abandoned mine shaft in a nearby ghost town. There, he finds an engineering kit and bank book belonging to George Bently, the dead woman's husband. Bently escapes, but is captured and accused of murder by Sheriff Fletcher, although Charlie is unconvinced of his guilt. Becoming intrigued by an acid burn on Mary's sleeve that matches a burn found in the rug in Jeanne's room, Charlie traces the acid to Ainsley. The case against the doctor intensifies when Police Chief King discovers that Jeanne had written checks to Ainsley and reveals that the missing pages in the scrapbook related to Jeanne's previous marriage to Mrs. Russell's late husband, whose death had been attended by Dr. Ainsley. Before the detectives can question Mrs. Russell, however, they find her strangled and Ainsley about to administer a hypodermic needle to her. Charlie pulls the needle from his hand and discovers poison in the syringe. Charlie then assembles all the murder suspects and announces that Jeanne had been paying Ainsley to keep silent about the fact that she murdered Russell. Charlie continues that he found the missing money in Ainsley's room, but before he finishes his explanation, Vivian Wells, the hotel's social director who is in love with Ainsley, protests his innocence. Charlie then traps Vivian into exposing a burn on her arm, proving that she murdered Jeanne during a struggle for the acid bottle.
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Režie: Norman Foster
Herci: Sidney Toler, Ricardo Cortez, Phyllis Brooksová, Slim Summerville, Kane Richmond, více...

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