THE CROOKED CIRCLE (1932)
Article #349 by Dave Sindelar
Viewing date: 3-1-2002
Posting date: 7-16-2002

A secret society bent on evil vows to take revenge on an amateur detection society that sent one of their members to prison.

This forgotten horror is one of the old dark house variety, as the action eventually moves into a mansion that is believed to be haunted by the ghost of a violinist. It is a supremely silly movie, creaky and edited with a hatchet, but it throws so many creepy suspicious characters at you and rounds it out with several comic relief characters (two of which are James Gleason and Zasu Pitts) that it keeps you diverted, even if the comic bits are wildly uneven. You have to be in the mood for this sort of thing, but if you are, this is one of the better ones I’ve found.

Incidentally, the company that put this out is called World Wide Pictures. Their logo consisted of a pretty woman holding two big globes out in front of her chest. Uhh, yeah. I wonder if this logo was still around after the Hays office went into effect.