New York City Police Commissioner Thatcher Colt, despite his official position, falls squarely into the intellectual mastersleuth tradition of his best-selling forerunners, Philo Vance and Ellery Queen. Columbia Pictures brought Colt to the screen in The Night Club Lady, in which the dapper Commissioner (played by debonair Adolphe Menjou) tries to save a cabaret owner from an anonymous prophecy that she will die at one minute after midnight. It's a neat, fast-paced mystery, with unusually mobile camerawork by Ted Tetzlaff, who directed some fine thrillers himself in the forties. The murderer is not hard to guess, but director Irving Cummings and his cohorts play fair, scattering suspicion evenly around the suspects and keeping the clues more or less in plain sight. And the murderer's curtain speech is a classic; a cliché today, obviously, but possibly in 1932, this was the first outing for its great highlight line! William K. Everson (with F. M. Nevins, Jr.)