Watch The Hat Box Mystery For Free

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

If the ambition is to provide two hours of instantly forgettable, popcorn-munching escapism, it succeeds.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Blistering performances.

At UNDER 44 minutes, you wonder if this movie was severely edited down to this length. After all, B-movies ran from 55-65 minutes on average and 44 is amazingly short...too short."The Hat Box Mystery" is from Lippert Productions. When I saw that, I knew that the film couldn't be very good as all the Lippert movies I've seen have been simply terrible. Perhaps being short is a blessing!!Surprisingly, the story does start off very well. During the opening credits, the film suddenly switches to the four leading characters who have broken character! Tom Neal introduces himself and the others and then talks to the audience...and then the credits continue. This is pretty clever. The story that follows isn't.Russ (Nea)l and his sidekick, Harvard (Allan Jenkins), run a failing detective agency. When they are out of the office, their dopey secretary takes a case all on her own...an incredibly suspicious case where a man in obvious disguise gives her a camera hidden in a hatbox and instructs her on how to use it to take a picture of his cheating wife. Not surprisingly, he then rigged it up to a gun and when the dopey lady snaps the picture, she appears to shoot the lady in question. Oops. So, it's up to Russ and Harvard to figure out what really happened.As I already said, since the production is by Lippert it was practically guaranteed to be sub-par...which it was. Fortunately, being short and having a few good moments, it's an inoffensive time-passer...albeit a seriously silly one considering the plot and occasionally bad writing.

We think of television as beginning in the '50s, but that's simply not true.This probably played in theaters as filler, but it is almost certainly a pilot for early television. There is no way else to explain the opening wherein the male lead introduces his supporting cast.There are a number of pilots for unsold TV series still available, including a Sherlock Holmes pilot from the same era. There was even a brief series shot on film along similar lines (I think it was Boston Blackie). In any event, the interesting thing here is that some studios thought they could produce television shows the way they had produced theatrical B-movies. Of course, the broadcast network owners knew better (they knew that TV audiences had a lower "lowest common denominator" than film, and that less money could be spent accordingly).AS a TV pilot, this is actually not so bad - cheap, quick with an interesting twist at the end. The actors are certainly trying their best, and - for television - it is more than competently made.

Taking a look at posts recently made on IMDb's Classic Film board for a poll that was to vote for the best film of 1947,I noticed that an IMDb'er listed,what sounded like an intriguing Film Noir in a "Would like to see" section of their post.Searching around online,I was disappointed to find hardly any info of the movie around,which led to me doing an extensive search on the internet,until I happily,by pure luck finally ended up stumbling upon the kept well-hidden hat box.The plot:Struggling to keep her co-owned detective agency going due to mounting bills,Susan Hart is thrilled when a new customer arrives,who offers to pay up front if Hart completes the simple job of taking a photo of his wife,who he wants to divorce.Agreeing to the task,Susan is told by the customer that the only condition which she must accept is to use a camera that he has specially built into a hat box,due to the high chance that his wife would run away the moment she sees someone holding a camera.Fininding the building that Marie Moreland is staying at,Susan gets set to capture Marie on film at the perfect moment.Pressing the shutter button the moment that Morland appears,Hart is horrified to discover,that the "shutter button" was actually the trigger for a gun.View on the film:Running at a short & sweet running time of 45 minutes,the screenplay by Don Martin,Maury Nunes and Carl K.Hittleman make the story fly by thanks to going in an off-beat direction,that goes from the fourth breaking opening scene, to one of the detectives being oblivious to the romantic "signals" being sent to them by a greasy spoon cook. (played by an easy going Viriginia Sale)Whilst some of director Lambert Hillyer outdoor scenes do have a sadly "stagey" feel,Hillyer shows that he is able to create a smooth Film Noir atmosphere in the scenes that show Hart's fellow detectives reconstructing the murder scene in order to get her free.Along with Hillyer's directing Tom Neal gives a good performance as Russ Ashton,the detective who suspects that someone is trying to frame Hart,Whilst Pamela Blake giving a very good performance as Susan Hart,with Blake showing Hart to be someone who is on unsteady ground,as she begins to regret not checking what the "special" hat was,in the now fatal box.

Obviously this was a programmer made to fill out a double bill in theatres. Robert Lippert, the producer, made a career of it. The film itself features the capable Tom Neal and Allen Jenkins in an otherwise no-name cast. It's a flat-footed mystery with Neal in charge of his low-rent yet financially strapped detective agency (is there EVER a movie featuring a detective agency that actually makes money?) He gets a job investigating a caper that involves killing someone with, yes you guessed it, a hat box (tricked-out with a gun inside). It's such a short film at 44 minutes that it barely qualifies as a feature and, if made a few years later, would have been an episode of a TV mystery show most likely. Aside from an opening gag involving an out-of-work phone that is funny, the only thing of note is the prologue wherein the actors introduce themselves and the characters they are about to play. An odd thing and possibly the only time it's been done on film (there has been end-of-film bits where the actors bow or are presented by a voice over, but I don't know of another where actors come out at the start to announce themselves).