Bette Davis had one of her earliest roles in THE MENACE, a minor Edgar Wallace mystery, which boasts what is quite possibly the first use of a now familiar plot device: an innocent man breaking out of jail and having plastic surgery as part of a scheme to avenge himself.
After being framed for his father's murder, Englishman Ronald Quayle (Walter Byron) escapes from prison and goes to America, where his face is badly burned while working in an oil field. Following plastic surgery, Ronald reads that his family mansion has been seized for debts, and he returns to
England. Using an alias, he poses as an American oil millionaire who wants to buy the mansion, in an attempt to discover who really killed his father. His prime suspects are his young stepmother Caroline (Natalie Moorhead) whose testimony helped convict him, her lover Jack Utterson (William B.
Davidson), who's posing as her brother, and a criminal cohort named Sam Lewis (Crauford Kent). During a chance meeting with Ronald, Scotland Yard Inspector Tracy (H.B. Warner) becomes suspicious about his identity and assigns a detective named Carr (Murray Kinnell) to go to the mansion and pose as
an assistant to the bailiff in charge of taking possession of the house.
Also posing as an assistant is Ronald's former fiancee Peggy Lowell (Bette Davis), who's trying to keep an eye on Caroline, but she doesn't recognize Ronald. Ronald begins to flirt with Caroline, causing Utterson to become jealous, and makes Lewis suspicious of Caroline's loyalty by telling him
that they're planning to elope. Ronald then buys Caroline an engagement necklace, and during a Halloween costume party, steals it, plants it on Lewis, and tells Utterson that he saw Lewis take it. An enraged Utterson strangles Lewis, and Inspector Tracy arrives at the mansion. Ronald admits to
Peggy who he really is, but Caroline overhears him and tells Utterson. Ronald discovers Lewis's corpse and hides it in a sarcophagus in the mansion's museum. Utterson attacks him when he shows him the body. During their fight, the statue of a large feathered serpent falls on Utterson, and before
dying, he admits that he and Caroline killed Ronald's father. Caroline is arrested and Ronald takes possession of the mansion.
THE MENACE is a slow and extremely old-fashioned early talkie, exhibiting surprisingly little of the stylish flair and adept blend of chills and droll humor which director Roy William Neill demonstrated on his later series of Basil Rathbone "Sherlock Holmes" films. It would have undoubtedly been
more exciting if it had actually shown the murder of Ronald's father and Ronald's subsequent imprisonment, jail break, and injury in the oil field, rather than beginning the film with his plastic surgery and merely mentioning these events. Still, the story manages to hold one's interest due to
Edgar Wallace's clever, if far-fetched, plotting as Ronald carries out his revenge.
The cast is enjoyable, although those who want to see Bette Davis in her early blonde ingenue phase will probably be disappointed with the relatively brief screen time she has here, as well as her callow performance. The film did, however, have a fortuitous bearing on her career: during the
filming, she befriended character actor Murray Kinnell (who plays Detective Carr), and he reportedly introduced her to his close friend George Arliss, who was then a huge star at Warner Bros. This led to Davis being cast in her next film, Arliss's THE MAN WHO PLAYED GOD (1932), which resulted in a
Warner contract that eventually lasted for almost 20 years and some 53 films. (Violence.) leave a comment --Michael Scheinfeld