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However his best lm was not adapted from the classics, but rather from a potboiler by the man who had written the popular Scar/ace, one Armitage Trail. Prior to the gangster epic, Trail had done a simple but effective whodunit that Hoffman bought for production and turned into The Thirteenth Guest (1932). It was handled not by Allied, but by Monogram Pictures, and became one of the few independent productions to receive overwhelmingly good notices from the crities—not of award caliber naturally, but in general concensus, far above average.

The plot would have it that Dix is to pose as a blind man, and the scenes where he faces the dangers of falling n distance, saved only by the untried watehfulness of a seeing-eye dog and simi- I » S0 lar nailbiting sequences, are very well managed by Lander! and Dix. Like Blind Alibi a 1938 release, Smashing the Racket: tells its story in the title, but tells it onscreen with a generous amount of punch under the direction of Lauders. Chester Morris is the racketbuster, giving the role his usual authority.

And the double feature changed the quantity and quality of product from the major studios. The majors wanted to make bigger pictures. Now they could. Big pictures were made all right, but so were small pictures calling for small budgets. The middle of the road program lm which at one time constituted the bulk of a studio's output was now somewhat curtailed. There were still some hybrids made, balanced between “A” and "B" categories, and so much the better, for they 36 could be used in either situation as the case presented itself.