Queen of Burlesque (1946)

Reporter Steve Hurley is happy when he hears that Crystal McCoy, star of the burlesque show, is to be replaced by her predecessor, Dolly Devoe. Steve hopes Crystal will marry him and give up the stage. But Crystal is unhappy about it, as is show manager Joe Nolan, for he also likes her. It is obvious that he is being forced to put Dolly back in the show. And there is also Blossom Terraine who wants the star role and is using her suitor Chick Malloy, the comedian of the show to back her. Dolly arrives in a snit and immediately starts a quarrel with Crystal. And Dolly's day gets worse when Lola Cassell shows up and accuses Dolly of having driven to suicide the man they both loved. Dolly's bad day ends when Annie, the wardrobe woman who idolizes Crystal, finds her strangled body in a dressing room trunk. The first person Inspector Crowley suspects is Chick, for he had been overheard in an incriminating conversation with Blossom. Then he turns to Crystal, as the result of a threat she had made, plus he learns that a story Steve is writing revolves around the finding of a strangled body in a trunk. To complete the Inspector's own bad day, albeit somewhat better than Dolly's, he finds out that Lola had visited Dolly in her dressing room, and that Chick is blackmailing Nolan into putting Blossom in the starring role and has evidence that Nolan had also been in Dolly's dressing room in between the other traffic. THEN, Annie, fearing that Crystal will be arrested, confesses to the murder. The police do not believe her, and give orders that nobody is to leave the theatre until the murderer is found which, based on the number of suspects, gives no indication of happening anytime soon. The list is narrowed when Lola is found dead in a phone booth, with a knife thrust in her back. And while he is questioning the rest of the group in Nolan's office, the lights go out, and Blossom exits stage left by being murdered. Chick accuses Nolan, who admits he was also in Dolly's dressing room - who wasn't - only because she was blackmailing him but she was alive when he left. A shot rings out in Crystal's dressing room, where they find Annie in a faint, but unharmed by the bullet. An inspection of the room shows that Annie fired the bullet at herself, and Steve's adroit questioning tricks Annie into confessing that she was the killer, the crimes being committed as the result of a homicidal mania induced by Annie's intense love for Crystal, who she mistakenly believes to be her daughter.