The Falcon and the Co-Eds

The Falcon is summoned to a women’s college where a teacher has died and the death has been recorded as suicide. He has barely arrived when a second body turns up. The seventh film in the series steps outside its usual lightness into something gothic, and the reason is the writer. Ardel Wray came from Val Lewton’s unit and had written I Walked with a Zombie and The Leopard Man. Alongside Tom Conway, both Jean Brooks and Isabel Jewell are faces familiar from Lewton pictures. The result is a mystery darker than the series called for, folded into sixty-seven minutes. Conway keeps the lightness he brought to the role, and the film keeps putting him into rooms that will not lighten with him.