Jeanskynebu the audience applauded

Majorthebys Charming and brutal

Comwayon A Disappointing Continuation

Darin One of the film's great tricks is that, for a time, you think it will go down a rabbit hole of unrealistic glorification.

csteidler The dominant matron of a wealthy southern family prevents her daughter Rachel (Karen Morley) from running off with the man (Robert Wilcox) she has secretly married. There's an argument; there's a struggle for a revolver; the girl's father is accidentally killed; the groom flees and the girl is stuck—to spend the next many years alone in the decaying mansion with her mother, her two bitter brothers, and a butler whose devotion to the mother runs dark and deep. So begins The Unknown—in a lengthy introductory scene narrated years later in ghostly tones by the finally deceased mother.Jumping to the present day, we see Jim Bannon and Barton Yarborough arriving on the scene with another young woman—Jeff Donnell as Nita, the now grown daughter of the cruelly separated couple of the opening scene. Bannon and Yarborough are, of course, Jack Packard and Doc Long, back for a third and final appearance as the detectives from I Love a Mystery.The mystery this time around involves strange baby cries from behind the walls, the unbalanced Rachel (played by a sufficiently disturbed Morley), a family crypt and house full of busy secret passages, and our detectives' efforts to present Nita as a legitimate heir to the place—efforts that are quickly expanded to include keeping her safe and sane.The suspense develops nicely; the atmosphere crawls with sinister shadows and inscrutable, furtive glances and creepy noises; suspicion is cast cleverly over an assortment of possible villains.Short and sweet, The Unknown is hardly nightmare-inducing, but it's certainly a fast-moving and entertaining little picture. –Call me a sucker, but I'll admit to goose bumps running up my spine in at least one scene.

matthewwave-1 Very odd to see someone state that Jeff Donnell is the biggest-name draw here, given that the star is Karen Morley. Granted, Morley wasn't the biggest movie star ever, but, I'd think that Dinner at Eight and Scarface alone would provide her a bigger profile than Donnell. And she also managed to appear in a few other special, noteworthy flicks, such as The Mask of Fu Manchu, Gabriel over the White House and Vidor's great, if flawed, Our Daily Bread. Even The Sin of Madelon Claudet and Mata Hari.Plus, Morley's pretty boss in this film. She really anchors it and makes her character quite a sympathetic one. It really is her film.As for the rest -- it's a fun, minor little B-mystery with nice horror touches. As are the other I Love a Mystery flicks. Nothing great, but certainly fun for mystery, horror and B-movie fans, the kind of small, old, and old-fashioned movie that deservedly endears itself to certain kinds fans (I'm one of them).Plus, this one had really nice Southern Gothic atmosphere. I love it when a cheap film can effectively create and define a relatively small space and generate a real (especially spooky) atmosphere. (Can you tell that I'm a big-ass Val Lewton fan? Or that Horror Hotel/City of the Dead is one of my very favorite horror movies?)I just saw all three of the ILaM flicks on TCM the other early AM and enjoyed the other two similarly. Fairly ambitious in ideas and plot twists, far less so in their makers' ability to turn those thoughts into fully-realized cinema – and fun, old-fashioned treats, all in all. Bannon is hardly a great actor, but he sure as heck is nice to look at, and Yarborough has his moments. And each film has a few special bonuses in its "case-specific" cast: I Love a Mystery has the great Nina (My Name is Julia Ross) Foch and legendary screen creep George Macready; The Devil's Mask has Anita ("Ginger's Mom") Louise and Frank Mayo, an actor who intrigued me greatly just a while back on TCM with his terrific starring performance in Vidor's keen silent melodrama, Wild Oranges (talk about creating and defining a small, atmospheric space!), making me wish he'd been given so much more to do in his career; The Unknown has not only has Morley and Donnell but also, for the Val Lewton fan, The Leopard Man's James Bell!Matthew

sol1218 (Spoilers) In this the third and last of the "I Love a Mystery" movies no one ends up losing their head like in the two previous one's, "The Decapitation of Jefferson Monk" and "The Devil's Mask", but we do have Rachel Martin, Karen Morley, lose her mind in it.Rachel was secretly married to Richard Aronld, Robert Wilcox, which had her outraged father Capt. Selby Martin, Boyd Davis, throw a fit when he found out about it! With Selby pulling out his revolver he and Richard struggled until it went off and blew the captain away. That if anything annulled the marriage between Richard & Rachal with him being accused by the dead captain's wife Phoebe, Helen Freeman, of murdering him! Now 20 years later there's a will to be read to the surviving Martin clan in what Phoebe, who passed away the week before, wants to be done with the Martin Mansion, and everything thats goes along with it, in the Kentucky Blue Grass country.It's when private eyes Jack Packard and Doc Long, Jim Bannon & Barton Yarborough, are hired by this mysterious Adam Franklin to see that the mentally challenged Rachel Martin's 20 year old daughter that she had with the on the lamb Richard Arnold Nina, Jeff Donnell, gets her share of the Martin fortune. That has Phoebe's two reclusive sons Eddie & Ralphie,James Bell & Wilton Graff, go on the warpath in them wanting the mansion and everything in it including Joshua the butler, played by J. Louis Johnson, all for themselves!Things get really complicated later on when Phoebe's last will & testament that to be read the next morning is somehow lost from the Martin family lawyer's Reed Cawthorne, Mark Roberts, briefcase! The biggest surprise of all is the unexpected arrival of Richard Arnold, whom Phoebe Martin hated like poison, showing up for the reading at the late Phoebe's written request! ***SPOILERS*** Someone out there in Blue Grass country doesn't want Phoebe's lost will to be found or read in that whoever he or she is wants to keep things the way there were all these years. And with both Nina and her estranged father Richard, who was lost at sea for the last 20 years, about to get part of the Martin estate that person was willing to go so far as murder! In he or she keeping them from getting anything that Phoebe was to leave to them in her will! It's no big surprise who this mystery man really is and by the time he's exposed by Jack Packard & Doc Long you just about lost interest, together with the cast of characters that's in it, in the movie. That's unless your willing to suffer through the films final torturous confusing and not making any kind of sense at all ten minutes!

GManfred Pretty good Gothic mystery, although it's been done before. Lots of bodies and screaming women and neurotic family members with axes to grind - and, of course, you have to guess which one is the murderer. The picture moves along at breakneck speed, so fast that many important pieces of the plot are skimmed over and without leaving time to create much mood or tension.I thought the main problem with this film was that the actors weren't very good. The picture is filled with actors who never made it big in Hollywood, mainly because they lacked talent and charisma, and they were a drag on a fairly good storyline. This was not a 'cheapie', as production values were good, but the only recognizable star worth a mention is Jeff Donnell.Nevertheless, it is worth your time (only 70 minutes worth here) but you can't help thinking it could have been better. This was on TCM the other morning, an invaluable source of older and hard-to-find movies.