A deadly secret from the past returns to haunt a young woman and her loved ones in Secret of the Blue Room. Irene von Helldorf’s twenty-first birthday celebration is eclipsed when her father shares the dark details of his estate’s guest room: twenty years earlier, three people were killed there and their murders remain unsolved. Hoping to prove their own bravery and win Irene’s love, each of her three suitors agrees to spend a night in the room… and a new string of deadly mysteries is set into motion.

***

This tight little melodrama opens with a group of wealthy people staying at a luxurious European mansion. According to legend, the mansion's "blue room" is cursed--everyone who has ever spent the night in that room has met with an untimely end. The three suitors of the heroine (Gloria Stuart) wager that each can survive a night in the forbidding blue room. The first to brave the room is a callow young man (William Janney) in whom the heroine has no real interest. A scream is heard in the middle of the night; when the other guests investigate, the young man has vanished, and the available clues suggest that he has met with foul play. Within the next several months, more murders occur in the blue room, prompting the lord of the manor (Lionel Atwill) to belatedly summon the authorities. A police inspector (Edward Arnold) solves both the mystery of the missing guest and the series of murders. Veteran moviegoers will be able to guess the outcome without even trying, but somehow Mystery in the Blue Room was deemed worthy of two remakes: The Missing Guest (38) and Murder in the Blue Room (44) (a musical!) Though not publicized at the time, Murder in the Blue Room was Universal's least expensive non-western feature film of 1933,