The Moonstone

The diamond disappears from a country house on the night of a birthday, and Scotland Yard's Inspector Cuff sorts through the guests. Wilkie Collins's novel moved to the present day and cut to an hour, staged as an old-dark-house picture with the laudanum sleepwalking kept from the book; what survives of Collins is the plot, and what is lost is everything else. Useful as a sample of how the thirties treated the Victorian novel, as a mystery with the furniture removed. David Manners, Phyllis Barry, Charles Irwin. Reginald Barker, who had directed for Ince twenty years earlier, for Monogram, 1934.