Burstup Homes' Murder Case (1913)

• 51%
• 1913
• Comedy
• Crime
• Alice Guy-Blaché
• Fraunie Fraunholz
• Darwin Karr
• Blanche Cornwall

Mrs. Reggie Jellybone has her husband completely under control. She places a reflector on her sewing table in such a position that every movement and expression and manifest desire of her husband become known to her. She is, therefore, able to anticipate his movements and interfere in his plans. He seldom gets a chance to go to the club on the pretense of sitting up with a sick member. One night the boys at the club need a fifth hand very badly, and when they call up Jellybone, Mrs. Jellybone answers the phone, but they are not daunted. Mr. Resourceful is sent to get Jellybone in spite of his wife. A scheme is concocted and Jellybone goes to the club leaving a dummy on his side of the bed. When Mrs. Jellybone comes up to the room to retire, she finds blood-stains on the bed-clothes and grows excited. She shakes the dummy and the head is severed from the body and rolls under the bed. She excitedly concludes that her husband had been murdered, and immediately she calls for Burstup Homes, the renowned private detective. Burstup Homes arrives puffed up with importance, makes a very ceremonious investigation and deduces that the man is really dead. Furthermore, he deduces that a man wearing a ten size shoe is the criminal. In the examination Burstup Homes forgets essentials and takes up his time with details. He follows the blood-stain clue and a foot print clue. The visible stains on the improvised bed-sheet ladder which Jellybone used as a means to effect his escape also attracts the detective's attention and gives him strong evidence of an entrance and an exit from the house through the window. In fact, there are clues galore and Burstup Homes feverishly goes to work. Everyone he meets is a suspect. Deacon Stronghead, whom he meets on the way from the knife grinder where he had a knife sharpened for his wife, offers the strongest causes for suspicion, because he carries a concealed weapon, and the story is more complicated when Mrs. Jellybones plays a trick on her husband. Off she goes to the club, and here comes the big surprise, she does not pounce on her husband, as one would expect, but is so delighted that he is alive that she embraces him most rapturously. Jellybone begins to think that his wife will soon be stricken with an attack from over-indulgence and suffer untold agony. The farce ends up in the police station where Burstup Homes' failure is provocative of much laughter, but he is not at all dismayed and retorts that the police are jealous of him.