Strip Mall of Death

I love old movies, by which I mean black and white, pre-1960s talkies. I don’t mean “classics” - I love those too, but a movie doesn’t have to be especially good to scratch my itch. Take Seven Doors to Death (1944).

It starts promisingly - a shot rings out! A woman runs out of an apartment. She jumps on the running board of a nearby car, jams a gun in the drivers neck and tells him to drive. She directs him down a dead end alley, and runs off when he crashes! The driver, Chick Chandler, goes back to the apartment and finds a corpse. But when the police arrive, there’s a different corpse.

The new corpse is June Clyde’s lawyer. When she shows up at the police station the next day, Chandler recognizes her as the lady who made him drive his car into a wall. He has already figured out that the “gun” she had in his back was a flashlight (I had guessed lipstick, but I guess the light indicates that she was snooping).

So they start investigating. It seems that Clyde’s aunt was a rich eccentric with an Egyptian chest full of jewels that is currently missing. The suspects are all connected to seven shops arranged around a fountain. They include a shady jeweler and a creepy furrier with a line in taxidermy. It gets pretty confusing - there’s another corpse that is partially mummified, and a safe cracker who left fingerprints on the job, but was already dead. These little macabre touches give the movie an Old Dark House feel.

There’s also some comedy and romance, and it all gets wrapped up in 64 minutes flat. Not exactly memorable, but a pleasant waste of an hour.