The Unknown (1946)

The last of Columbia's three-film series derived from the radio show 'I Love a Mystery', (following I Love a Mystery (1945) and The Devil's Mask (1946)), The Unknown (1946), despite also being directed by Henry Levin), has a somewhat different feel to its predecessors.  This time around the two investigators, Jack and Doc, don't appear until some way into the film, with the opening taken up with a lengthy flashback, apparently narrated by a dead woman, which provides the backstory for the subsequent drama.  This sequence is actually very atmospheric, with family secrets exposed, an accidental death made to look like murder and a body being walled up behind a fireplace and the fall out across the years of these events.  After this, we're back in the present, with Jack and Doc standing at the gates of the run down old Southern mansion which had been the venue for the flashback, with their latest client, a young woman who might be a long lost relative of the family that owns the old pile.  From here, the film settles down to be one of those 'spooky old house' thrillers in the vein of the 'Cat and the Canary', with a will reading, an apparently mad sister and her two surly brothers eager to get their hands on their deceased mother's estate.  There's lots of creeping around secret passages by candlelight, strange goings on in the family crypt, cries in the night and a couple of murders.

Of its kind, The Unknown is pretty well done, going through all of the tropes audiences might expect from this sort of scenario.  Levin's direction is very atmospheric and, for a B-movie, the production values are solid.  The film's main problem is its predictability:  the main plot twist really shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who has seen a few other movies of this genre.  Unlike its two predecessors, which had plot twists galore and fast paced action scenes, The Unknown seems, by comparison, fairly conventional and sedate.  Indeed, the more langourous pace is established at the film's beginning, with the long, almost dream-like, flashback.  While the pace picks up somewhat after this, the unwinding of the plot is still leisurely, with the climax, conversely feeling somewhat hurried in its tying up of various plot elements.  The two detectives, played, as ever, by Jim Bannon and Barton Yarborough, often seem marginalised, with much of the plot (and its resolution) centring on their client Nina Arnold (Jeff Donnell).  Doc, in particular, seems to have little to do for most of the film, other than acting as a sounding board for Jack's musings on the case.  Nonetheless, The Unknown remains an enjoyable enough feature, even though it feels more like a generic mystery B-movie than an adaptation of the 'I Love a Mystery' radio series, lacking most of its characteristic bizarre plot touches which the previous two movies had embraced.  Whilst spooky and atmospheric, unlike the source material and earlier films. it never really feels macabre.  But at seventy one minutes, it never has time to try the patience of viewers, providing a slickly made, if predictable, entertainment.