Pre Code Hollywood Season: FD Cinematheque

The Thirteenth Guest (1932) AKA Lady Beware

Director: Albert Ray

Cast: Ginger Rogers, Lyle Talbot, J Farrell MacDonald, Paul Hurst, Erville Anderson, Ethel Wales, James Eagles, Eddie Phillips

69 min

The Thirteenth Guest is a 1932 American pre-Code mystery comedy thriller film, released on August 9, 1932. The film is also known as Lady Beware in the United Kingdom.

It is based on the 1929 novel by crime fiction writer Armitage Trail^[1] best known for writing the novel Scarface,^[2] on which the 1932 movie was based. The novel was again brought to the silver in screen in 1943 as Mystery of the 13th Guest.^[3]

Plot summary

Marie Morgan (Ginger Rogers) has been lured to an old abandoned house by a false note from a friend, and is in jeopardy although she doesn’t yet realize it. As she sits at the table inside, she thinks back to the banquet held there 13 years earlier, when she was a little girl.

Only 12 of 13 guests had attended, and the manor’s owner, the Morgan family patriarch, who was then dying, has since passed on. The chance to claim the bulk of the estate fortune has resulted in an ongoing campaign of murder by someone targeting the original 12 guests, whose dead bodies are being left at the table in the same seats they had occupied originally.

Cast

Complete credited cast:
	Ginger Rogers	…	Lela / Marie Morgan
	Lyle Talbot	…	Phil Winston
	J. Farrell MacDonald	…	Police Capt. Ryan
	Paul Hurst	…	Detective Grump
	Erville Alderson	…	Uncle John Adams
	Ethel Wales	…	Aunt Jane Thornton
	James Eagles	…	Harold ‘Bud’ Morgan
	Crauford Kent	…	Dr. Sherwood (as Craufurd Kent)
	Eddie Phillips	…	Thor Jensen
	Frances Rich	…	Marjorie Thornton
	Phillips Smalley	…	Uncle Dick Thornton

References

Trail, Armitage (1929). The Thirteenth Guest (First ed.). Whitman. ASIN B000KD7C8U.
Jump up^ Trail, Armitage (1930). Scarface (1ST ed.). D.J. Clode. ASIN B00085TELI.
Jump up^ The Thirteenth Guest, msnbc.com; accessed August 3, 2015.