The Mysterious Mr. Valentine (1946)

Written by CinemaSerf on February 12, 2023

"Janet" (Linda Stirling) gets a puncture and seeks the assistance of "Armstrong" (Tristram Coffin) incurring the chagrin of that man's rather jealous wife "Rita" (Barbara Wooddell). To make matters worse, she now drives off in the wife's car only to collide with another car and then find herself embroiled in a previous, and fatal, hit-and-run with the partner of the husband of the wife of the car she is driving. Still with me? Now she engages the help of PI "Morgan" (William Henry) to try to get to the bottom of an internecine mystery that involves fraud, insurance and mysterious women. It packs quite a lot of plot into an hour, but the acting and the dialogue is banal at best with very basic production values that smack more of television than cinema. It probably looked OK at a drive-in when the audience maybe had better things to do, and it really is pretty instantly forgettable fayre.