Watch The Thirteenth Chair For Free

Save your money for something good and enjoyable

This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.

It’s fine. It's literally the definition of a fine movie. You’ve seen it before, you know every beat and outcome before the characters even do. Only question is how much escapism you’re looking for.

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

Quite surprisingly, an awful film. I've liked a lot of director Tod Browning's films, both before and after this effort (He Who Gets Slapped (1924), The Unknown (1927), Where East is East (1929), Freaks (1932), and The Devil-Doll (1936)), but this one is uncharacteristically dry as toast. One common factor from another film of his that I didn't care for as much as others (Dracula (1931)) is Bela Lugosi, who I find wooden and awkward, but he doesn't account for all of the film's problems. Everyone is wooden and awkward. It's is a shame, because also in the cast is Margaret Wycherly, who was so great in White Heat twenty years later, and Leila Hyams, a lesser-known actor who I've liked seeing in supporting roles in other films from this era.The sins of the film are many. The direction and editing is so poor it's hard to fathom from Browning, though I read later that some of his issues stemmed not only from sound being a new and limiting technology, but that sound director Douglas Shearer (brother of Norma) was part of the problem. I'm not sure if that's true or false, but regardless, the end product is awful, visually and sound-wise. It doesn't help that the quality of the surviving print has degraded, often making it hard to understand the dialogue. I can't recall a single scene or moment that I thought was truly good; almost all of the action takes place in a single room, and it's worse than stagey. There is never a 'wow' or macabre moment, or even an interesting turn of the plot. What could have been an interesting story along the line of an Agatha Christie mystery, with all of the potential culprits in the room with the detective sifting through the facts, becomes an exercise in tedium, moving at a snail's pace. I advise avoiding this one like the plague.

Looking at the reviews, I saw that there was a group that loved the film and a group that hated it. When I see this kind of sharp dichotomy, I like to comment. I first saw the overall rating as 5.1, which seemed unfairly low. I liked the film because it was very superior writing and I was wowed by the performances of Margaret Wycherly and Bela Lugosi. The film was taken from a play with the dialog mostly intact. The writing for the play, as well as the play itself, was a critical and popular success - as was the film. Margaret Wycherly was a well-known and highly respected British actress who also appeared in the play. All reviews are valid if they honestly and clearly describe the reviewer's reactions. I don't like murder mysteries, but I took a chance on this one because I liked the story outline and I was pleasantly surprised. I happen to hate horror pictures so I was not a fan of Bela Lugosi, but he was great in this non-horror role. One negative review called it too "stagey" and indeed that's a valid observation as it was a stage play adapted to film. I have seen stage plays that were filmed as they were played on stage, but the filmed version never seemed right - however, this stage script was very well adapted to film - also keeping the high quality script intact. Perhaps, the most telling negative comment was that the film was "dull". And indeed if one really likes standard murder mystery films with lots of physical action (or if one is just in the mood for such), one might find the film "dull". The reader of reviews needs to find which reviews reflect his/her tastes and criteria and go with that review.

Early talkie feature based on a popular stage play. A murder has been committed and a bunch of people hire a medium to conduct a séance to see who the murderer is. While the lights are out there's ANOTHER murder...so it's someone in that room.What follows is an obvious, dull and creaky murder mystery. Most of the cast overacts to a ridiculous degree. They act like they're on stage (where you have to overdo things) and it looks silly on screen. Most embarrassing is Bela Lugosi (two years before "Dracula") who REALLY overdoes it as a police inspector. Static direction by Tod Browning (who was always overrated) doesn't help.For Browning and Lugosi completists only. I give it a 3.

This isn't a typical Tod Browning film. It's more or less a very basic filming of a stage play (I gather; I don't know that for sure, but it feels very stagey) about a group of rich people who hire a medium to find out who killed their friend (and, to some of the group, an enemy). When they go into their seance, right as the name of the killer is about to be spoken, one of the men in the circle, the one who was succeeding at questioning the medium, is stabbed in the back. They then call a detective (Bela Lugosi) who grills them, trying to discover who murdered both of these men. I don't generally like whodunits, especially the Clue variety, where a detective gathers all the suspects in a room and attempts to root out the real killer, but The Thirteenth Chair is exceptionally written. The characters, and there are many, are quite well developed. The climactic scene, while asking that we suspend our disbelief, is truly suspenseful. See this gem if you ever get the chance. 9/10.