Impulsively, she packs her bags for New York and tracks down Wally Stuart, who – now sober – is horrified though, asked for his advice, he tells Marian frankly that there is only one way a girl like her can get what she wants-but he won’t help her. When she arrives home late, a little the worse for the champagne, a visiting Al is enraged at her behaviour while his assumption of control over her is, for Marian, the final straw. One passenger, Wallace Stuart (Richard “Skeets” Gallagher), is drinking champagne on the rear platform: a little drunk but rather charming, he invites Marian to join him and listens sympathetically to her woes-and tells her to look him up if she’s ever in New York. On the way home, Marian stops by the railway tracks, where a cross-country train is coming to a halt: she gazes enviously through the lighted windows at the first-class passengers in their private cars. In a small town, factory girl Marian Martin (Joan Crawford) tells her construction-worker boyfriend, Al Manning (Wallace Ford), that while she cares for him, she won’t marry him: that she wants more than he and the town can give. (Barbed wire and creeping acid, really…?)īased upon the play The Mirage by Edgar Selwyn. The terseness of these paragraphs begins to suggest an entirely justified exasperation with Locke and Eva for their relentless determination to keep walking into obvious traps, or alternatively with the Bad Guys for not just killing Locke-if that’s actually what they want to do. But alas, as soon as he lays eyes on it, Quentin Locke declares the Automaton to be no more than a man in a suit-but who could it be? We’re destined not to know via the surviving prints of The Master Mystery, which have chunks of the serial missing-including the last episode wherein all is explained! A restoration of sorts has been undertaken, with titles inserted to explain the missing footage. Most commentators seem to focus on its cartoonish eyes, but I was entranced by the small oil-drum that represents its hinder-parts (I like big robot butts, I cannot lie). The exception is the hilariously designed Automaton, which makes the robots in The Phantom Empire look menacing. Unfortunately, nearly everything else is just filler and despite criminal gangs, mysterious Orientals, underground hideouts, secret passages and “Madagascar” becoming a touch-phrase for all sorts of strange and nefarious doings, pretty dull filler at that, particularly over fifteen chapters. The confusing plot is merely an excuse to have Quentin Locke tied up, handcuffed, boxed or otherwise confined in some sort of death-trap at the end of each episode, in order to begin the next episode with Locke / Houdini escaping on camera-without, we must acknowledge, any cutting away or other kinds of cinematic assistance. Meanwhile, lurking in the shadows is a dangerous gang headed by a mysterious Automaton… The Master Mystery was conceived as a vehicle for Harry Houdini and on that basis it works admirably. ![]() However, Eva is secretly in love with Locke while Balcom is involved with an underworld figure, “De Luxe Dora” (Edna Britton). Peter Brent (Jack Burns) is beginning to suffer remorse, but his partner, Herbert Balcom (Charles Graham), is determined to keep the scheme going: he plants his own spy, Zita Dane (Ruth Stonehouse), as Brent’s secretary and he blackmails Brent into agreeing to a marriage between his daughter, Eva (Marguerite Marsh), and Paul Balcom (William Pike), which will give Balcom control of the company and Eva’s money. The company’s testing laboratory is managed by Quentin Locke (Harry Houdini), who is actually an agent for the Department of Justice, working undercover to expose the fraud. is a company that makes its profits by buying patents on the promise of marketing products for their inventors, but then suppressing them for the benefit of those products’ competitors.
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