Ellery Queen and the Perfect Crime (Columbia,. 1941)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

At 9 p.m. yesterday I ran my husband Charles and I a movie off YouTube, a 1941 film called Ellery Queen and the Perfect Crime, which starred Ralph Bellamy as Ellery Queen and Margaret Lindsay as his long-suffering secretary and sort-of fiancée, Nikki Porter. It begins with what would today be called an insider-trading scandal: John Matthews (Douglass Dumbrille) receives word that the South Valley Power Company is about to be put out of business by a raging flood (represented in this “B”-movie by stock footage of the 1927 Mississippi River floods). Rather than level with his investors that the power company is about to go under, he instructs his broker to sell off his own holdings and short the stock so he’ll be able to keep his own fortune while all his investors will lose completely. John Williams’ son Walter (John Beal, who looks enough like Dumbrille they’re believable as father and son; one of my pet peeves in filmmaking is when actors who look nothing like each other are cast as biological relatives) wants no part of the fortune John has made and kept through such unfair and illegal means, and he tells his dad he should give the money to the people who lost everything in the collapse of the company. John accuses Walter of being a sentimental idealist who doesn’t realize how the world really works, and he plans to disinherit his son and has his lawyer draft a new will that leaves his fortune instead to his sister-in-law Carlotta Emerson (Spring Byington at her ditziest).

Then John Williams gets murdered, apparently stabbed witn a dagger in his study, and the principal suspects are Walter Williams and Ray Jardin (H. B. Warner), an investor in South Valley Power who handles the loss of his whole fortune with the same noble stoicism he used to face the trauma of being crucified in his most famous previous role as Jesus Christ in Cecil B. DeMille’s 1927 silent blockbuster The King of Kings. There’s a noble scene in which he tells his butler Henry (Walter Kingsford) that he can no longer afford to keep him on – he and everyone else on the household staff will need to find other positions, Jardin (whose name is pronounced much like “Jordan,” rather appropriate considering the actor’s past) explains – and Henry laments that at his age it’ll be hard for him to find something else. It also turns out that Jardin’s daughter Marian (Linda Hayes) is in love with Walter Williams, though the two get estranged when Marian becomes convinced that Walter is going to hang her father out to dry because her dad and her boyfriend are the prime suspects. Carlotta Emerson has an obnoxious pet monkey and also a nasty boyfriend, attorney Anthony Rhodes (Sidney Blackmer), who offers to defend Walter in court but (like a similarly corrupt attorney in another Columbia film, Orson Welles’ noir masterpiece The Lady from Shanghai, seven years later) he really means to throw the case, ensure that Walter is found guilty and sentenced to death, so Carlotta will get John Williams’ money.

There’s a long scene in which Ellery Queen (Ralph Bellamy), who shows up at the estate sale of Ray Jardin’s belongings armed with a checkbook and a determination to bid on every item for sale, is planning to do just that while both Nikki Porter (Margaret Lindsay, who switched to Columbia after she got tired of playing the “good girl” to Bette Davis’s “bad girl” in innumerable Warner Bros. melodramas), Ellery Queen’s secretary and sort-of fiancée, and the people running the auction think he’s crazy. Two guys in white coats show up, ostensibly from an asylum where Ellery is a patient but actually from a moving company to haul away Ellery’s purchases. Nikki grabs a check for one-quarter of the purchase prices Ellery has just written the incredibly queeny auctioneer, Rufus Smith (Charles Halton, whose hair is topped by one of the worst comb-overs in movie history; obviously he was allowing his availability for the “pansy” roles Franklin Pangborn was too busy to take). She’s sure he has no way of covering the check, especially since Ellery Queen’s publisher hasn’t yet paid him for his latest novel (the conceit of the Ellery Queen series is that the two writers who actually created him, Frederick Dannay and Manfred Lee, not only signed the books “Ellery Queen” but made him the central character), but Ellery assures her that he has the money because Walter Williams has given it to her as a way of repaying him for his losses on South Valley Power without offering him an outright handout which he’d be too proud to accept.

For a while I was guessing that Carlotta would turn out to be the murderer, since it would have been a good dramatic twist for writers Dannay, Lee and Eric Taylor (who did the screenplay) to have the apparent ditz actually turn out to be guilty. But though they hinted at that outcome with a scene in which her pet monkey throws a dagger similar to the one that supposedly killed John Williams, in the meantime Ellery Queen has deduced that Williams was not killed in the study where the body was found. Instead he was killed outside and his body dragged into the house, and an autopsy revealed that the dagger wound was too shallow to have been fatal and instead John Williams was killed by poison. In the end this turns out to be one mystery in which the butler really did it: Henry shot Williams with a poison-tipped arrow (though his motive remains a mystery since, unlike some of the other characters, he didn’t have anything to gain financially by Willilams’ death), dragged his body into the study and clubbed Walter Williams so he could come to next to the body of his dead dad.

Ellery Queen and the Perfect Crime was the sort of light-hearted comedy-mystery film that would disappear almost overnight from American screens after the success of the 1941 version of The Maltese Falcon made murder serions business again. The by-play between Ellery Queen, amateur sleuth, and his father, New York Police Department Inspector Queen (Charley Grapewin – well, other Columbia mystery series cast William Frawley as a police detective, and if you can believe Fred Mertz as a cop you should be able to believe in Dorothy’s Uncle Henry as a cop as well), anticipates the by-play between several generations of cops in the current TV series Blue Bloods even though Grapewin’s character is your typical Inspector Lestrade type who’s there only to get outwitted by his amateur-sleuth detective who in this reading also happens to be his son. Charles asked me if I had any idea who the most popular character in mystery fiction who’s an actual sworn police officer instead of a private detective (official or otherwise), and after I thought about that for a while my answer would be Steve Carella of the Ed McBain 87th Precinct novels.