Director Robert Florey had first come to Hollywood in the early 1920s as a reporter for the French "Cinemagazine" to interview stars for a series of articles on Hollywood. He felt so at home that he stayed and his easy going nature made him many friends - he always felt a great camaraderie with the old stars. His films are often characterized with experimental camera work (he had made a few avant garde shorts during the late 20s). "The Preview Murder Mystery" is a re-working of an early Paramount talkie "The Studio Murder Mystery" (1929) which starred an up and coming Frederic March as an insufferable matinée idol whose death leaves many people as suspects. Florey asked Paramount to offer the role of Neil Du Beck to his old friend John Gilbert who he had met on his very first day in Hollywood. Gilbert had not worked in a while and was finding comfort in alcohol and when Paramount did not meet his price he refused the part. Unfortunately Gilbert died while the film was still shooting.Neil Du Beck (Rod La Rocque) is World Attractions (Paramount) fastest rising actor who is due to become a star of the first magnitude with the release of "Song of the Toreador". The director Gordon Smith (Ian Keith) has remade it from one of his greatest silent successes featuring the greatest star of the day Edwin Strange (Conway Tearle). No one is holding out much hope for it's success as Du Beck has been receiving threatening letters claiming he will not live to see the movie previewed, so he and the rest of the cast are pretty jumpy. Again no one is taking the threats seriously until he is actually killed, then afterwards everyone remembers Smith's suspicious behaviour - then Smith is found dead!!!Apart from Conway Tearle, Jack Mulhall, Bryant Washburn and Chester Conklin probably gave the audiences of the day a trip down memory lane. There was even an illusionary thrill - through the cobwebby sets a man bursts through - it is Du Beck, but no, it is his stand-in (Du Beck had died earlier in the movie)!! There is even a parody on "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" with similar sets etc, but when the young actor (Henry Brandon) who plays "Batboy" refuses to go on due to fear and stress and then confesses he is a vegetarian because meat makes him nervous - the director is disgusted!!! The ending is a surprise but is definitely in keeping with Florey's love of old Hollywood and unlike "Hollywood Boulevard" the slight romantic subplot between Reginald Denny and Frances Drake doesn't get in the way of the main mystery.Just a couple of years before, Gail Patrick had been a sweet ingenue but she was now perfecting her icy brittleness which would see her a standout in "My Man Godfrey".

Someone first threatens and then kills people connected with one film at a film studio. Reginald Reginald Denny investigates.Robert Florey sends up life in a film studio in an okay murder mystery. It's more intriguing for the throw away stuff then the main plot which never seems to be what Florey is interested in.Watching the film I was shocked at how retro the film felt. It seemed more like a film from 1932 or 1933 as opposed 1936. There is a denseness to to the staging with everyone all crowded around the center of the frame. You got this in early sound films because of the mics- but not in 1936.It's good but it's not quite great

The only disappointing aspect of this wow of a movie is that (aside from a brief shot of Charlie Ruggles which I suspect is a newsreel clip) we don't see any guest stars. But perhaps it's just as well. There's really no time for them. And there's always a danger they could slow up the action which moves like the proverbial express train from start to finish. Not only does director Robert Florey keep the wittily suspenseful screen-play sparking on all six cylinders, he does so by using an extraordinarily large variety and number of camera set-ups. Most shots are held for only a few seconds and very few (perhaps only five or six) of the set-ups are repeated (which makes for brilliant film-making, but it's also quite extraordinary).By "B"-picture standards, production values are right out of the box. Not only are many of the multiple sets absolutely crowded with extra players but Florey has invented lots of inside gags. As might be expected he has used some of his technicians to augment the crowd, but has enjoyably switched their roles. Thus the assistant director Fritz Collings appears on camera as the sound man, while director of photography Karl Struss has been demoted to camera operator and film editor James Smith can be glimpsed as an assistant in his own cutting-room.Needless to say, the whole movie was lensed on "location" inside Paramount Studios itself. These are the real sound stages, this is the real back lot, those are the real Paramount gates. That's why most of the action takes place at night. The movie had to be lensed when everyone else at the studio had gone home (which is probably the main reason we don't see any guest stars).It's obvious that Florey had a lot of fun making this picture. I love his "horror" take with the bat man made up like the somnambulist in Caligari explaining to the director that he's actually scared silly because he's a vegetarian. And notice that director E. Gordon Smith is handed some Ernst Lubitsch mannerisms including peering at the action through the cameraman's viewing glass (actually borrowed from Struss for this occasion. He always wore it. He had it looped on a long cord around his neck).The screenplay offers not only a tingling, fast-moving, hair-raising mystery thriller but a whole gallery of fascinating characters creatively brought to life by a group of surprisingly charismatic (if second-string) players. Oddly top-billed (her role is not only small but comparatively unimportant) is the now-forgotten Frances Drake who was enjoying a brief run as a leading "B"-movie star at the time. She's not only extremely pretty but delightfully personable, so the surprise is not that she's top-billed in this one, but that her reign extended for only five or six years.For once, Reginald Denny does well by the hero spot and doesn't over-do the comedy. It's the stunning Gail Patrick, however, who walks away with the picture's acting honors, strongly supported by Ian Keith, George Barbier, Thomas Jackson, Conway Tearle and the little-known Jack Raymond who has one of his largest roles here in a largely uncredited 100-picture career.And now a final few words about the marvelously film-noirish photography. Critics (both contemporary and present day) as well as Struss himself regard this as one of his finest films, so it's doubly good to see him on camera here, both artistically and histrionically (I think he even has one word of dialogue: "Yep!"), although I should mention that Struss had his own camera which he certainly used for the studio exteriors. I don't know for sure whether the bulky Paramount camera he's pretending to operate was actually used to photograph any scenes in the movie at all, but I would say probably not. The camera-work is so fluid it seems to me that Struss' own more portable camera with its turret lens was used throughout.

This 1936 film from director Robert Florey is a return for him to the field of dark films, a path he almost started on early in his career. Florey did Murders in the Rue Morgue in 1932 as a consolation for being dropped from Frankenstein. In 1935 he directed The Florentine Dagger, another thriller. The Preview Murder Mystery was his most taut suspense film up to that date.It is almost an ensemble piece with Reginald Denny and Frances Drake as the romantic leads, but there isn't much time for romance in this 60 minute murder mystery. What stands out most here is the editing. There are simply a TON of shots in this film. I don't think there is a single shot that lasts more than 10 seconds. Florey gives us every angle and many points of view for each scene and there are many short scenes so that if you get up to go to the bathroom, you'll miss a good chunk of the details. It's a pretty simple plot, but with many twists. An actor is threatened to be murdered before the preview of the movie he is shooting. After the screening he is found dead and the actress and director are next on the murderer's wish list. Ian Keith puts in a nice turn as the suspicious director. Rod LaRoque is good early as the doomed lead actor. Gail Patrick basically gets to look beautiful and Denny and Drake make a decent team, but they just don't have too much to do. This is really a director's piece and Florey makes the most of all of his opportunities. He even gets to do a mock horror film scene late in the movie that looks good, and there is a comedy scene of another film being shot on a different stage with Chester Conklin in a cameo. Curios they are, but these are gratuitous, and unfortunately almost kill the pace of this movie just as we are about to reach the conclusion. All in all though, a nice way to spend an hour for classic mystery buffs.