"Studio One" was one the finest series of its type during the early years of television. In the late 40s and through the 50s, some of the best writing occurred not in movies but for TV. Several different series of teleplays were popular during this time--and the programs were essentially live plays! Yes...live. To make them even more amazing is that in most cases, there was only a week or so between productions--and hundreds and hundreds of original scripts were created. Several of them were simply marvelous--teleplays that were soon remade into sensational Hollywood films. "Marty", "Days of Wine and Roses", "Requiem For a Heavyweight" and "Patterns" were among these awesome productions--and I try as hard as I can to scour up copies of whatever teleplays I can find. Rarely, VERY rarely, are they bad--and the standards they set were very high. However....I must point out that "There Was a Crooked Man" was one of these rare exceptions--a very bad production. Most of the problem seemed to be the director, Paul Nickell--though the writing wasn't especially good, either. Too many of the characters in the play simply overacted--delivering bombastic lines of poorly written dialog in the most ridiculously effusive manner. In particular, the Professor, his friend and the landlady were simply terrible and the director should have pushed them to deliver more subtle performances. Subtle they certainly weren't!! As for the rest of the cast, though they were better, they, too, should have been directed to act more realistically.
If you care, "There Was a Crooked Man" is a bad mystery film. There is a murder, some letters that are being used as blackmail and a lot of other subplots that NEVER seem the least bit realistic. Frankly, I got very bored with all this after a while and think the average Charlie Chan film is MUCH more realistic and enjoyable. Don't waste your time with this one unless you simply want to see them all...or at least try.