"Charles Dickens collapsed and died in the midst of writing The Mystery of Edwin Drood. Ever since then adapters have been finishing it for him, most democratically in the recent audience-participation stage musical. Providing yet another solution to Mr. Drood's disappearance is this lone sound-era film version, a great vehicle for Claude Rains. He plays Drood's uncle, John Jasper, by day a respected choirmaster but revealed as an opium addict who lurks, cloaked in black, behind cathedral pillars. His obsessive object is Rosa Bud, Drood's fiancée since childhood, who also attracts the hotheaded Neville Landless (Douglass Montgomery). Dickens' last novel is hardly his typical Christmas cheer-Christmas Eve brings a strangulation-but it found an ideal adapter in Universal Studios, which knew how to infuse the British costume drama with such gothic horror as is on display in the studio's Frankenstein, Dracula, and Claude Rains' debut film, The Invisible Man." Scott Simmon