A Desperate Chance for Ellery Queen

With William Gargan as Ellery Queen, the audience gets led through a confusing maze of John Litel being wanted for embezzlement, a murder, and a search for whodunnit, because in this sort of mystery, it's never the first suspect who's the bad guy. In fact, usually he's the second to die, unless it's a Perry Mason mystery.

It's the last Ellery Queen movie produced by Larry Darmour. In no small part that's because Darmour died the year this was produced -- which didn't end his producing credits for another three years -- but because by this point the series had become tired, with Margaret Lindsay as Nikki Porter complaining about blondes, and Charley Grapewin pulling off his belt to give Gargan a thrashing for being a ba-a-a-d boy. This doesn't mean there's not a real mystery going on here, it's just that director James Hogan seems more intent on giving comics some time on screen, like Johnny Arthur, Jimmy Aubrey, Arthur Q. Bryan, Billy Bletcher, and Bernard Gorcey. It's a way of keeping the audience from the real answer by distraction, but then the mystery winds up being a distraction.

Once more Ellery takes on a seemingly harmless case for a charming lady: to find her husband, who was presumed dead until recently, in San Francisco. He takes Nikki as a decoy with him to take the wife's place, and very soon the husband turns up - but... so does Ellery's father, sent by the New York police after a big-scale bank robbery combined with murder; and the main suspect is none other than the husband Ellery just found... And so, since he believes the man is innocent, he hides him from his own father!

Now a kind of hide-and-seek game ensues, accompanied by more murders; and the key to the whole affair seems to be the famous-infamous entertainer Adele - Lillian Bond, the cute, funny girl we all loved 10 years before in "The Old Dark House", and who's grown into a reckless blonde femme fatale now...

Again, William Gargan's 'Ellery Queen' is pretty serious, just like the whole movie, which at times reminds us of the old 30s' gangster movies or an early Film Noir; one thing's for sure, though: it doesn't look at all like a mere part of a crime movie series, it's got something more to it, even if we know all the regular characters and they sometimes throw in a joke or two. This is certainly not an assembly-line series production, it's a crime film (almost a crime drama) in its own right.

Donald Cook, Eddie Quillan, Ralph Bellamy, Hugh Marlowe, Carleton G. Young, Sydney Smith, William Gargan, Lawrence Dobkin, Howard Culver, Richard Hart, Lee Bowman, George Nader, Lee Philips, Bill Owen, Peter Lawford, and Jim Hutton...all men who have played Ellery Queen on TV and in films!* I mention this because a major failing of the Ellery Queen character is that he never had a consistent actor playing him....particularly in movies. Because of this, the series never met with the same success of ones such as Boston Blackie, Charlie Chan, the Saint or the Lone Wolf. These and many other series might have had more than one actor playing the lead, at least one or more of them had a chance to play the character in many movies and establish a consistent character. This is already a knock against "A Desperate Chance for Ellery Queen" in which William Gargan played Queen.

Shortly after the story begins, there is a murder and Ellery's father, Police Inspector Queen is investigating it. Like several other films, Ellery tags along and soon finds the case interesting and then he begins investigating on his own.

Ellery is a relatively minor character in this story compared to most other B-detective films. Instead, it focuses on the many characters in the story as well as the police. This isn't a complaint...more an observation.

So is it any good? Well, in some ways, yes. The usual cliches are sometimes in the film, but mostly it's cliche-free....not the usual formula you'd expect. Additionally, William Gargan is easy to overlook. He looks much like a couple other characters in the film and he definitely underplays the role of Ellery. Again...not necessarily bad but odd. And, by the way, HOW did that bullet miss Ellery at the end of the story????

By the way, I think the most interesting thing about the movie are the uncredited actors, such as Marie Blake (Grandmama from "The Addams Family" and Jeanette MacDonald's sister), Arthur Q. Bryant (the voice and physical inspiration for Elmer Fudd) and Billy Bletcher (voiced cartoon characters, such as Pete in the Disney films).

*This list is from Wikipedia. I knew quite a few of the actors who played Ellery Queen but was surprosed that even more actors played the famed detective.

Queen is off to San Francisco to get material for a book when a woman asks him to look for her husband (John Litel), thought dead, but seen by a friend a few weeks before. Queen and Porter set up a little trap for him that he walks into but it is more complicated than they thought. Money from a company that he worked for was embezzled for $100,000 and he is the fall guy. So he faked his death and skipped out. The real thief shows up in SF and murder is ahead. Queen has to untangle the mess which involves gangsters and guns and a femme fatale

This is more a gangster/crime film centred around missing man, a dead husband of a burlesque girl and embezzlement. It's not a mystery, and far from the concept of Ellery Queen mysteries, however it's entertaining enough and has some neat scenes featuring Margaret Lindsey and Ellery Queen moving the missing man from hotel to another. Action on the finale is good.

Two investigations involving stealing a large sum of money from a banking house end up in San Francisco where the suspected John Litel has fled and the real thief Noel Madison winds up murdered. Both Inspector Queen and Ellery are serving different clients, but both want to see justice done.

Noel Madison was smart enough to frame Litel, but dumb enough to marry gold digging nightclub singer Lillian Bond who is the outstanding player in the cast. She goes west to, to work for club owner Morgan Conway and locate her husband the dough he was carrying.

There was something else that Madison did wrong. He took money with consecutive serial numbers, easily traced and hot. That's the crux of the whole story, he or whomever winds up with the loot, needs a really good fence.

Ellery Queen's client is Litel's wife Charlotte Wynters who retains William Gargan on a missing persons case. On the other hand Gargan's father Charley Grapewin is looking for robbery suspect and ends up with sidekick James Burke helping the SFPD on Madison's murder.

Helping Gargan of course is Margaret Lindsay and she's certainly more fun to be around than Burke is.

This was one of the best Ellery Queen films going even though it's not anywhere near the Ellery Queen in the novels. It's also not terribly mysterious as we know pretty well who the culprit will be. But it has an action climax and shooting you normally see in westerns.

And it has Arthur Q. Bryan who was the voice of Elmer Fudd over at Warner Brothers. Harry Cohn must have forked over some bucks to not just get Bryan's services, but Elmer's voice as well. You hate to think of anyone talking that way in weal life. He has a scene with a friend in the nightclub where Bond clips the poor schnook as easily as Bugs Bunny ever did. Worth seeing the film for that alone.