I'm a fan of Zasu Pitts, so then this came up on YouTube, I jumped. Zasu doesn't show up until the second half of the film - I call that false advertising. Today's audience should not expect comedy. There are scenes that hint at mild amusement, but don't expect more. It seems as if the writers came up with scenes with comic potential, but didn't know how to pay it off. 1932 was early in the talkie era, and they just hadn't worked out timing yet. There's a lot of the talk-pause acting that made the earliest talkies stiff to later audiences. I just didn't find this movie worth finishing - even when Zasu finally made her entrance.

Strangers of the Evening features switched corpses, an amnesia victim, estranged family members, and strange doings in the funeral parlor back room. It also contains a hard-to-follow plot involving too many characters, none of whom we get to know well. Even top-billed Zasu Pitts doesn't appear until about the halfway mark, and then in a role that is as minor—yet as important—as everyone else's. Overall, it's an uneven mix of oddities and clichés that leaves one off balance yet with a vague impression of having enjoyed it quite a lot.The dialog is certainly not the star of this picture. Whew! there is some silly stuff here. Take this exchange between Theodore von Eltz as young Dr. Everett and Miriam Seegar as Ruth, the daughter of a murder victim: Dr. Everette: "Please, dear." Ruth: "Oh, don't!" Everette: "Why, Ruth…you believe that I killed him?" Ruth: "Oh, I don't know what to believe." Everette: "Oh, Ruth, dear, you've got to have faith in me." Ruth: "Well, you quarreled." Everette: "But you can't believe that I did it! I don't know what happened, but you must trust me…." And so on.However, that blend of the predictable and the weird is somehow difficult to turn off. Von Eltz is actually quite good in his limited role. Lucien Littlefield is appropriately bizarre as "Snooky," as he's called by Zasu Pitts' Sybil, a sweet loony herself who found Snooky wandering in the street wearing only a raincoat and so took him home and fell in love with him.Zasu sums it up at the end about as well as anyone could: "Oh, Snooky!"

"Strange things are happening at the city morgue, where the body of a recently deceased man ends up disappearing. At the man's funeral, it's discovered the wrong man is buried causing even more confusion. When the deceased man suddenly turns up alive, it complicates things even further for the investigator looking into the bizarre happenings at the morgue," according to the DVD sleeve's synopsis.Much of "Strangers of the Evening" looks like it was done on one take, with no rehearsal time. It looks blocked, with director Bruce Humberstone showing competence. The performers seem to have most of their lines; but, they have not really started to act them out with each other. Lead detective Eugene Palette seems to be having trouble - at one point, he is audibly cued by another actor in the scene.** Strangers of the Evening (5/15/32) Bruce Humberstone ~ Eugene Palette, Theodore von Eltz, Zasu Pitts

I suppose it goes without saying that 1930s America is a different culture than we live in today. The humor of this movie is incredibly foreign. For the entire movie I felt like the dumb blond who doesn't understand the jokes. The plot was complicated, but all and all pretty good. The acting is pretty decent. The fight scene is laughable, the one part of the movie where I think I understood the humor. The movie is set up as a mystery and in the good parts of the movie you wonder what's going on (in a suspenseful way.) And in the bad parts of the movie you wonder what's going on (in a confused way.) The ending does a fair job of cleaning up the confusion. If one's a fan of slap-stick comedy I would say this is probably a classic, but even as one who just don't get it I can say "Strangers of the Evening" tells a good enough story to earn a 6.