A prosecuting attorney treats every homicide case as first degree murder and uses miniature replicas of human skulls to tally the death sentences that he garners. Then he himself is beset by the urge to murder. An above-average public domain film from Universal Pictures.

Philo Vance investigates one of his most famous locked-room murders.

The failure of the original copyright holder to renew the film's copyright resulted in it falling into public domain, meaning that virtually anyone could duplicate and sell a VHS/DVD copy of the film. Therefore, many of the versions of this film available on the market are either severely (and usually badly) edited and/or of extremely poor quality, having been duped from second- or third-generation (or more) copies of the film.