The Price of a Song – 1935 | 67 mins | Drama | B&W

Plot Synopsis

Refused a loan by his songwriter son-in-law Nevern, Arnold Grierson murders Nervern as he is playing his latest composition. Michael Hardwick discovers the body and is accused of the murder. At the reading of the will, Grierson, is revealed as the murderer when he whistles Nevern’s new, unpublished composition which he could only have heard on the night of the murder.

After the full-scale British feature The Phantom Light, The Price of a Song was again a return to a modest thriller, ‘When a thriller’s too ingenious it becomes a little picture’, he said later. ‘When it’s simple it’s got a chance of being big. It was a beautifully worked out thriller, almost Henry Jamesian… but in quota quickie terms’. The Price of a Song is a murder mystery of the type Columbo would solve on television some 40 years later by means of an apparently insignificant string of clues. Sadly, this intriguing little picture is another ‘missing’ item in the Powell catalogue.