Inner Sanctum *** (1948, Charles Russell, Mary Beth Hughes, Dale Belding, Billy House, Fritz Leiber Sr) – Classic Movie Review 12,137

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MURDER CLOUDED BY EVIL… EVERY SECOND A HEARTBEAT…’

Director Lew Landers’s effective and compelling 1948 American black and white film noir mystery thriller Inner Sanctum is based on the 1940s Simon & Schuster book series and the popular Inner Sanctum Mystery radio series that ran from 1941 to 1952 with over 500 episodes, and stars Charles Russell, Mary Beth Hughes, Dale Belding, Billy House, and Fritz Leiber Sr.

It is an original screenplay by Jerome T Gollard, though supposedly an adaptation of Fritz Leiber Jr’s fantasy novella Conjure Wife but with little resemblance to the book, which also inspired Bewitched.

A killer on the run is hiding out in a small town, and a boy sharing his room at a boarding house realises he has witnessed the man killing a woman.

A low-budget film series of the show had been produced by Universal Pictures in the early 1940s until 1945.

It is the only film of M R S Pictures productions, the initials of producers Richard B Morros, Samuel Rheiner and Walter Shenson.

Charles Russell plays Harold Dunlap, who accidentally kills a woman in a fight on a station platform, places her body on the open rear end of a departing train and looks for a boarding house hide out. There he encounters a young woman, Jean Maxwell (Mary Beth Hughes), with whom he appears to fall in love, and a boy who saw him at the station. He realises the boy has witnessed the killing and tries to silence him.

The cast are Charles Russell as Harold Dunlap, Mary Beth Hughes as Jean Maxwell, Dale Belding as Mike Bennett, Billy House as McFee, Fritz Leiber Sr as Doctor Valonius, Nana Bryant as Thelma Mitchell, Lee Patrick as Ruth Bennett, Roscoe Ates as Willy, Eddie Parks as Barney, Eve Miller as Dunlap’s fiancée Marie Kembar.

Release date: 15 October 1948 (US).

Runtime: 62 minutes.

Filming location: Universal Studios, 100 Universal City Plaza, Universal City, California

Dialogue sample: McFee (Billy House): ‘Some girl got herself killed on the Limited. Found her on the rear platform. Nail file, like that. Right through the heart.’ Barney (Eddie Parks): ‘Somebody do her in?’ Willy (Roscoe Ates): ‘They weren’t cleanin’ her nails.’

Inner Sanctum is in the public domain and available for free download at the Internet Archive:

https://archive.org/details/inner_sanctum

© Derek Winnert 2022 Classic Movie Review 12,137

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