The Thirteenth Guest



AKA: Lady Beware

Police Captain Ryan and his friend, Private Investigator Phil Winston, are pulled into a puzzling case involving Marie Morgan, a young woman who was lured back to her abandoned family home 13 years after the sudden death of her father during a dinner party, only to mysteriously wind up dead, with her body discovered in the same seat she sat in during the ill fated dinner party.



Only…it turns out Marie isn’t actually dead and the corpse in the morgue is an impostor. More concerning still, yet another diner guest is found dead hours later, again sitting at the dinner table in the same seat he occupied 13 years ago. Clearly, someone is trying to off all the living guests who attended the dinner party 13 years prior. But for what purpose and who they are currently remains unknown. Meaning Captain Ryan and Inspector Winston better hurry up and figure out who the culprit is before anyone else up sitting at a very familiar place setting.



The Thirteenth Guest is an American pre-Code era mystery/thriller from 1932. It was based on a story of the same name by author Armitage Trail, who was probably better known for his novel Scarface and its various film adaptations. Like a lot of cheap, pre-Code era productions, the film has been largely forgotten, with the film falling into the public domain some time ago, due to the right holders not bothering to renew the copyright.

But at the time of its release, the film was not only very well received, but also ended up being rather profitable for its production company, Monogram Pictures, who re-released it several times in the 30s and 40s to capitalize on the success of two of the film’s stars, Ginger Rogers, several years before she ever waltzed on screen with Fred Astaire, and Lyle Talbot, who some may remember less for his movie roles and more for his recurring part on the 50s and 60s sitcom The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet. The movie was so popular, in fact, that Monogram remade the film in 1943 as The Mystery of the 13th Guest, which was also rather well received, though not as charming without a familiar face like Roger’s at the forefront. I’ve not yet seen the remake (I’ll get to it eventually), but I do agree that the original is…shall we say a quaint little product of its time.


For instance, no one dresses this nicely to go out anymore.

Full and honest disclosure, I’m actually growing more and more fond of a lot of these early mystery and horror films from the 30s through the 60s. Most of them are cheap, yes. But it’s nice to occasionally watch an entertaining film without having to plan out and dedicate 150+ minutes of my life to it. Not that I don’t like the longer, more modern mystery movies. I enjoy the Knives Out series just as much as the next guy. But there’s something rather refreshing about a movie that manages to tell an interesting, compelling story in just a little over an hour. I appreciate when movies don’t waste my time. And at only 69 minutes Thirteenth Guest really can’t afford to dilly dally. So it moves at a pretty good clip, only occasionally breaking up the pace to inject a little humor into the script in the form of Detective Grump, the inept officer who does things like fall asleep on the job and sleepily answer his GUN instead of his phone, and who’s only on the force due to nepotism. His effectiveness is…very hit or miss. But he’s used sparingly, so it’s not so bad and doesn’t prevent the movie from answering all of its pressing questions….


How have you managed not to kill yourself up to this point?

…Except perhaps for the reason why it’s called the “13th” Guest. Because even if you’re only including Marie’s father as the sole host (as opposed to him and his wife or even his kids) and add everyone else, including his immediate family to the ‘guest’ count, then there are actually only 12 guests to the dinner party, including the mysterious guy who never showed up. Because, damn it, you are not considered a ‘guest’ at your own party! That’s not how that works. Someone there had to host. Meaning the number in the movie title is egregiously wrong. Wrong, I tell you!

But maybe I’m just being too pedantic about it.


No, it’s everybody else who’s wrong!

As for the story itself, it’s simply a nice, quick little mystery flick. It establishes the characters and backstory quickly and early, slowly drops puzzling clues along the way, throws in some reveals and red herrings, even a twist (!), and then wraps everything up with a nice bow tie. The injected humor is iffy sometimes, the film’s ‘black masked’ killer feels horribly cheesy and trope-y by today’s standards, and the film does contain quite a few pop culture references from the time period that will likely go over many viewer’s heads. But none of that gets in the way of understanding the story or its conclusion. Save perhaps from wondering why Marie would somehow end up with Winston after he behaved like a little sexist dick to her so many times but…*sigh*…that’s just another reflection of the time period, I suppose. But hey, at least on the bright side, since this is a pre-Code film, the movie wasn’t censored like it might have been had it been made in 1934. Meaning you get interesting lines like the one from the police who refer to Marie’s brother’s companion as his “boyfriend”, without anyone so much as batting an eye. So I suppose you gotta take the good with the bad with this one.



A quick word of caution to anyone who might want to watch this though. Since it’s in the public domain, that means every Tom, Dick and Harry movie company, and some of their inbred cousins, that are looking to make a quick buck can release this thing, and as a result there are a lot of shoddy versions of it floating around. For instance, the version I watched was released by some company called Red Rocket Media, who I guess are so obscure that I couldn’t even find a proper website for them. That or they’re so ashamed of themselves that they don’t want anyone to be able to contact them. Because this version looked atrocious. And if you go to watch the film you’ll immediately know you picked the wrong one, not just because the giant Red Rocket logo will tip you off, but because it was also colorized. And not properly colorized in any way either. Much like The Black Room I watched last year, I’m like 99.99% certain that they simply ran the film through a (cheap) AI filter and called it a day. Colors jump and change from frame to frame, sometimes when the character has barely moved-





Then to make matters worse, the image is cropped from the original version in an attempt to fit the screen-





AND I’m pretty sure they pulled it from a crappy VHS copy, because there’s a lot of this type of lovely artifacting all throughout the film-


Lovely

Oh! And the AI they used was SO bad that at one point I’m convinced that it mistook a shadow for a human, so it kept trying to add a face to it every few frames-


Gah!

That, or the film is secretly cursed or haunted. Or maybe it’s just this version that was haunted. Either way I found much of this crappy transfer very distracting.

So if you want to watch The Thirteenth Guest for free on Tubi or something, look up the one titled Lady Beware and avoid the one titled The Thirteenth Guest. Because if you enjoy mysteries then you really should watch it, cause it’s a fun little film and a nice, quick watch with a decent story and good acting. But if you want something with more depth, a bit darker, or more modern, then you probably won’t find much here to pique your interest, unless you’re curious about pre-Code films.

The Thirteenth Guest is available on a variety of streaming services.

The Thirteenth Guest is also available on a variety of different DVD releases. So be sure to check what you’re getting before you commit.

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