Opened by Mistake
| Opened by Mistake | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | George Archainbaud |
| Produced by | Stuart Walker |
| Written by | Kenneth Earl Hal Hudson Louis S. Kaye Stuart Palmer Garnett Weston |
| Starring |
Charles Ruggles Janice Logan Robert Paige William Frawley Florence Shirley |
| Music by | John Leipold |
| Cinematography | Theodor Sparkuhl |
| Edited by | Arthur P. Schmidt |
| Distributed by | Paramount Pictures |
|
Release date
|
1940 |
|
Running time
|
67 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
Opened by Mistake is a 1940 film starring Charles Ruggles and Janice Logan.
Journalist buddies Jimmie Daniels and Buzz Nelson have decided to spend their vacation together at the Latonia horse race track on Yucatán, Mexico. Their plans are seemingly spoiled when their publisher Kingsley orders Jimmie, who is the newspaper's most prominent reporter, to do a story on missing banker Martin James, who stole one million dollars from his bank before disappearing.
Buzz comes up with an idea that Jimmie tell the publisher that intelligence places the banker in Yucatán. The publisher buys this argument and the two buddies leave for Mexico, with a thousand dollars in cash to cover the expenses. They quickly lose most of the money on the track, without even so much as lift their eyes to find the missibg banker.
Somehow Kingley sniffs the scam the two men are pulling, and orders Jimmie back to the office immediately. Kingsley plans to meet Jimmie at the boat and disclose the plot. But Jimmie finds out about the plan from Kingsley's secretary, Elizabeth Stiles, and tries to intercept Kingley, flying home with Buzz and then sneaking onto the ship he was supposed to arrive on. Buzz buys a second hand trunk in a riff-raff store to look like he has traveled on his own.
Jimmie's plan fails as Kingsley finds the two original tickets for Jimmie and Buzz, and Jimmie is fired right away. When the two men come home and open Buzz's trunk it turns out there is a dead woman's body in it. Soon after their doscovery, a mysterious woman named Margaret Nicholls arrive and offers to buy the trunk from them. When the woman leaves, Jimmie follows her and later contemplates alertibg the police, when he hears a radio broadcast announcing himself and a female accomplice as supected murderers.
Jimmy acts with the belief that Margaret is innocent, and together they team up to try to find the real killer. Buzz tells them he bought the trunk at Sam Peter's warehouse. When they go there they find Sam Peter dead. They manage to flee the scene and get Peters' orderbook and get three names to check up on.
The first name turn out to be dead ends, but the second leads to the address of a pair of newly-weds. The brand new Mrs. De Borest becomes suspicious and opens up the trunk her husband has, finding out from the contents that he is a traveling salesman and not a count as he has led her to believe.
When Jimmie and Margaret arrives at the last address, they meet perfumer Jarvis Woodruff. He offers Margaret to try his latest creation, but sees a picture of Jimmie and Margaret in the paper and alerts the police. Jimmie and Margaret still manage to flee to a nearby diner. Margaret confesses that she is an insurance investigator on the lookout for the banker's stolen money. Using a handkerchief to wipe Jimmies face, she notices that it's not hers but the dead woman's, and that it smells just like the perfume she tried at Woodruff's apartment.
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