Fred Sauer gets a letter that his brother has committed suicide, so he goes to Rotterdam to deal with that. There he discovers that the suicide appears to have been unmotivated, and that he had an insurance policy made out to actor-director Joseph Delmont. With the aid of Ilse Bois, who lives with an orangutan, he investigates, and discovers "The Mysterious Club", of which he becomes a member. When he loses the draw of the cards his first day, he is told off to kill himself.
It's the second screen version of Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Suicide Club" and as you might conclude from that precis, there are a few holes in the plot as it appears in the version I saw. There's a goodly amount of location shooting about Rotterdom and Scheveningen, a slow-motion boat chase, and an obviously carefully planned fall into the water. At just under forty minutes, this qualifies as a substantial feature for 1913, but so much has been cut out, that I kept getting jolting out of the movie.
It's the second screen version of Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Suicide Club" and as you might conclude from that precis, there are a few holes in the plot as it appears in the version I saw. There's a goodly amount of location shooting about Rotterdom and Scheveningen, a slow-motion boat chase, and an obviously carefully planned fall into the water. At just under forty minutes, this qualifies as a substantial feature for 1913, but so much has been cut out, that I kept getting jolting out of the movie.
