Seven Keys to Baldpate
1917 · 65 min
Seven Keys to Baldpate (1917): George M. Cohan alone in a shut-up hotel, until he is not. Watch the silent old-dark-house mystery free online, no account.
A novelist bets he can write a book in twenty-four hours and shuts himself into a summer resort hotel closed for the season, holding what he has been told is the only key to the place. Then somebody else lets themselves in, and then somebody else, and the count keeps climbing. Every old-dark-house picture since is working from this blueprint, and most of them are less funny.
Cohan produced it and starred in it, playing a part he had already played on Broadway in his own 1913 stage version of Earl Derr Biggers's novel. Hugh Ford directed for Artcraft.
Biggers went on to invent Charlie Chan. Cohan went on being Cohan.
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