The Walls Came Tumbling Down (1946)

This is really all about the last ten minutes as we quite entertainingly finish off this otherwise unremarkable drama. "Gilbert" (Lee Bowman) is a red-top journalist who loves nothing more than a good old dose of salacious rumour-mongering. His life takes a more serious turn when his friend is murdered. The man was a priest, and the mystery deepens when we discover that his two bibles are being sought by the menacing "Stoker" (George Macready). Why? Well one of them contains a code that will lead to the secret hiding place of a priceless Da Vinci painting. The police suspect that maybe "Pat" aka "Laura" (Marguerite Chapman) is somehow involved, so she and our gossip-pedlar join forces hoping to find it (and some romance) first, or at least to stay alive! It's a bit better than your standard afternoon feature this and that's almost entirely down to the sparingly featured Macready and to Edgar Buchanan's contributions as "Bradford" - and I did quite like the carefully choreographed cellar-denouement. Nope, you'll never remember it, and it could probably lose twenty minutes of waffly preamble, but it's not bad.