Ellery Queen: Meurtres à New York

I like Peter Lawford, and I like David Wayne, and I liked this movie.

The main reason I remember it so fondly was that many, many years ago there was a snowstorm in Frazee, Minnesota, and our local tv channel was down, so they spent the entire day rerunning this movie! I saw it five times!

This is clearly a pilot intended for the NBC MYSTERY MOVIE series, which began 2 months earlier in late 1971. While the first season had 3 shows on Wednesdays, the second season moved those to Sundays and added a 4th, while adding 3 new ones on Wednesdays. (Yes, unless you're a fanatic about them like me, chances are you need a scorecard to keep track.) "But it didn't sell". And watching the first 5 minutes, I could tell you WHY.

Barry Shear, who did a ton of TV (starting out in comedy & variety shows) just had too much "style" and "gimmicks" before and during the opening credits, with still shots, B&W, short clips, and what I personally found was an intensely-annoying animated cartoon thing involving a many-headed snake. I found myself yelling at my computer screen, "When does the STORY start?"

I've been watching every Ellery Queen movie I can find online; some are fun, some are terrific, some are just annoying. Between the various movies in the 1930s & 40s, plus no less than 4 separate TV series in the 1950s, Peter Lawford was actually the 9th actor to play Ellery on-screen! And while they most definitely hit paydirt with #10, just this moment, all I want to say is, Lawford is NO Ralph Bellamy. HE was too old, also, but not this old, NOT this smug, over-confident and aloof, and NOT this... English. Seriously, what was anybody thinking when they decided to change the relationship between Inspector Queen and his SON, and make it a questionable uncle-nephew thing? (I have to assume someone cast Lawford first and then everything else flowed from that.)

Harry Morgan is PERFECT as Inspector Queen. I can easily see him and Charlye Grapewin-- or David Wayne-- as being the SAME character.

Once past the annoying style & casting problems, the rest of the film isn't bad. But-- and I must stress this-- it suffers from a problem MANY of the NBC Mystery Movies did in the 70s-- being too long. When they started, a 90-minute format (with about 75 minutes of film and 15 of commercials) was not unique, but was still unusual. And on repeatedly re-watching the 2nd season of "McCLOUD" (1971-72), I've noted that maybe half of those feel like they were written for a one-hour format-- then, PAINFULLY padded out for the 90-minute slot. Later, when some fool at NBC decided "all" the movies would be in 2-hour slots, you had the same problem amplified, with 75-minute scripts suddenly having to be padded out to 100 minutes. Well, THIS Ellery Queen movie felt REALLY padded out to me! I kept seeing all number of things that could have (should have) easily been CUT, which would have improved the film in the process. (Usually, episodes butchered for syndication murder the flow of the stories-- but this one, it would have helped.)

Among the highlights for me were the cast (E. G. Marshall, Skye Aubrey, Bill Zuckert, Bob Hastings). And then of course there was Stephanie Powers. No surprise, Barry Shear directed her in 7 episodes of "THE GIRL FROM UNCLE", and, one of my all-time favorite episodes of "McCLOUD"-- "Butch Cassidy Rides Again"-- one of the longer ones that DID NOT feel padded out! Funny enough, that one also involved computer analysis. Maybe Shear was really into that?

I recognized Jerry Fielding doing the music, as some of his jazz riffs sounded identical to ones he used in the Dirty Harry movie "THE ENFORCER".

I also recognized the observation platform of The Empire State Building, where that really-suspenseful scene was shot. (I've been up there twice.)

All in all, the Jim Hutton-David Wayne "ELLERY QUEEN" was way better than this, DID go to a series (albeit a regular, one-hour format), and DID deserve to go on a lot longer than it did.

I caught this on Youtube last night. I am a devotee of giallo and 70s horror and 60s/70s stylish detective/mystery films. The cast in particular intrigued me: Peter Lawford, Stefanie Powers, EG Marshall, Harry Morgan. The film itself is about a serial murderer in NYC, and there are scenes of public demonstrations as the entire city bunkers down to avoid being slain by the Hydra, who mysteriously strangles people based upon their age.

Stylistically, this is the pinnacle of 70s coolness. There are all of the decor elements (lamps with huge shades, shag carpeting, everyone with luxurious hair, groovy overcoats) and 1970 NYC is filmed beautifully, with its parks and sidewalks and traffic creating a very iconic backdrop for the acting.

The acting. Stefanie Powers can give a line reading like almost no one else. She really is in command of every dimension of the craft of acting, from microexpressions to posture to movement to speaking. She drops her voice down and uses a hushed girl-next-door tone when she speaks alone with Peter Lawford, and it's unbelievably warm and compelling. I found myself wishing that there were more scenes with her.

Lawford plays an annoying narcissistic juvenile of sixty whose only interests are substance abuse and promiscuity, and although I raised my eyebrow and was repulsed at first, I was won over quite soon. Harry Morgan is funny, and EG Marshall is a pompous and cold psychiatrist who makes me think of every TV psychiatrist I've ever seen.

The story is fun. They reveal the killer far earlier than I expected, and the rest of the film is a cat-and-mouse caper. There is one scene on the World Trade Center roof that suddenly becomes a Hitchcock-styled surrealist fantasy. NYC was beautiful in 1971, and the film uses the city for maximum effect.

I recommend this movie for fans of stylish and hip comedic murder mystery films.

In this adaption of an Ellery Queen novel obviously meant to be a TV pilot for a series, Peter Lawford essays the part of the famed mystery writer Criminologist. The case that he solves for the NYPD involves the seemingly random strangulations of certain men and women who have no apparent connection to each other. They're strangled with ribbons, blue for the men and pink for the women. And the press has given the serial killer the name of the Hydra.

The colors of the ribbons might give you a clue to what common denominator the victims have. And the motive is a twisted one from a very twisted mind.

Harry Morgan was a very good choice to play the part of Inspector Queen of the NYPD. Given their relative ages I thought that Peter Lawford was too old to be believable as Morgan's son. But fans of Ellery Queen must have been shocked when Morgan becomes Ellery's uncle and only a half brother at that to his father.

That helped the believability in ages, but Lawford turns out to be quite the swinger, something the cerebral Ellery Queen never was in the novels. Purists must have been aghast. Later on in the Seventies, Jim Hutton was perfect as the cerebral intellectual Ellery with David Wayne as his detective father. Too bad that series didn't have a longer life as well as it star should have.

E.G. Marshall plays a consulting psychiatrist who has an agenda himself and Coleen Gray his wife. Possible suspects and victims include Stefanie Powers and Skye Aubrey.

The film is all right, but Ellery Queen fans no doubt were disappointed.

Peter Lawford as Ellery Queen is called in by his half-uncle, Harry Morgan as Inspector Queen, to investigate a serial killer dubbed 'the Hydra' who is terrorizing New York City.

It's based on the Ellery Queen novel Cat of Many Tails. Published in 1949, it may have been the first mystery novel to deal seriously with serial killers, and it made use of several novelties in telling its tale, including lengthy vignettes of the victims to begin the book. By 1971, serial killers were much more a commonplace of the world and fiction, and this TV movie soon gets bogged down in cliches. Lawford in a ridiculous toupee is poorly cast. While there was extensive shooting in Manhattan to provide atmosphere, the pieces are put together in a way that is clearly wrong; a commonplace of movie geography, alas. Finally, the solution to the mystery of who the murderer was turned out not to be too difficult. I had it figured out by the 40-minute mark. Well in advance of the intrepid crime novelist. With E. G. Marshall and Stefanie Power.

When NBC began the television series in 1975, they wisely used Jim Hutton as Ellery, and David Wayne as the Inspector.