Ellery Queen

Jim Hutton is one of the best actors to come out of Hollywood. His performance in the Green Berets with John Wayne is memorable and you come to connect with his character in a very intimate way. As Ellery Queen, Jim Hutton really became the character he played. His boyish good looks, mannerism, and characterizations where beyond measure. The show itself was very well written and the guest actors where also exceptional. I remember waiting in anticipation each week to watch the show. Every show was riveting and the plot superb. The series became the measuring stick I used to judge the quality of other mystery movies and series ever since. It was a great loss to the industry when he died from liver cancer.

Ellery Queen, written and produced by the same people who brought us "Murder, She Wrote" nine years later, was ahead of its time with its 1940s atmosphere and mystery plots, older casting and older guest stars.

By the time the mid-'80s came around, the demographics had changed enough to make "Murder, She Wrote" a breakout hit -- but in the '70s, that audience wasn't there yet. It's a shame because Ellery Queen was a superior show in every way to the Angela Lansbury series.

Hutton and Wayne were perfect as Ellery and the Inspector. John Hillerman, in the beginning episodes, was a radio detective and was preferable to the later budinsky, a newspaper man played by Ken Swofford. The pilot for this series, guest-starring Ray Milland, was one of the best ever made, complete with a radio show that had makeshift sound effects.

Guest stars in the series included Tab Hunter, Signe Hasso, Howard Duff, Ida Lupino, Susan Sarandon, Anne Francis, Donald O'Connor, many others. A pity it wasn't a hit - though, done any later, Hutton would not have been alive to play Queen, a role that fit him like a glove.

I just watched this show for the very time today on cable's TV Land (Sunday box set special), and I, too, agree with everyone else about how excellent a show this was. I happened to catch the episode with Eve Arden as a radio soap opera actress murdered, and through it's good writing as well as acting, I was immediately sucked in. Other guest cast members were Betty White and John Hillerman.

I look forward to seeing this show again and hope that someone out there gets the smarts to make this available on home video.

Whoever chose the cast for this series knew what they were doing! No one could have filled Ellery Queens shoes better than Jim Hutton. He WAS Ellery.....Jim was taken from us much to soon. He was a great actor. David Wayne as Ellery's father was again a great choice. David & Jim made it seem real. Like they were really father & son. I heard rumor that Timothy Hutton (obviously Jim's son) would do a remake of Ellery Queen. Who better to fill his fathers shoes???? It's sad that Jim could not be here to be cast as the father! What a show that would be!

And thus we approach the wrap-up for another Ellery Queen mystery. This direct audience involvement was just one of the great touches in this all-to-brief series. "You have all the clues..." Well - yes and no. For example, it might have helped to know that, in 1940's Manhattan, telephone numbers were 6 digits long, not the 7 digits we knew in the 70's, so the victim was REALLY dialing...(I won't give it away). OTOH, I had to stop reading TV Guide when I watched this show. This was back in the days when TV Guide had to stretch to fill pages, so they not only gave story synopses, they printed Guest Cast lists for network series. But unfortunately it seemed that The Killer was always listed first in the Guest Cast (or second if the victim was first.) And that was a clue that even dear Ellery lacked!