The Lone Wold Returns (Columbia, 1938)

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

After the movie my husband Charles and I got together and watched another YouTube upload, a 1938 film from Columbia called The Lone Wolf Returns. The Lone Wolf was one of those good-bad guys popular around the turn of the last century, and like E. W. Hornung’s Raffles, Leslie Charteris’s The Saint, and Jack Boyle’s Boston Blackie, he’s an ex-crook who’s trying to reform but has a hard time convincing law enforcement of that. The Lose Wolf also has a normal name, Michael Lanyard, though the various police departments all over the world (including one in Constantinople – there’s an opening montage in which writers Joseph Krumgold, Bruce Manning and Lionel Houser didn’t seem aware that since 445 years before this film was made that city had been called Istanbul) still think he’s a jewel thief and are looking for him. Lanyard is played by Melvyn Douglas, a much greater “name” than you expect to see in a “B”-movie – especially since the same year he played a very similar character in an MGM programmer called Arsène Lupin Returns (a good movie, though the original Arsène Lupin from 1932 with John Barrymore as Lupin and his brother Lionel as the Javert-like cop trying to catch him, is much better).

In this one, taken directly from one of Vance’s stories rather than a screen original (and previously filmed as a 1917 silent with Bert Lytell as the Lone Wolf), Michael Lanyard tries to stake out the home of Marcia Stewart (Gail Patrick) to figure out how to steal the fabulous jewelry collection she inherited from her late mother, only he falls in love with her and determines to give up his life of crime to be with her. Only he spots a gang of real jewel thieves headed by Morphew (Douglass Dumbrille, doing oily, who villainy as well as usual), who offer him a 25 percent share of the take if he’ll go in with them. They have an interesting plan in which they’ll disguise themselves as police officers raiding an illicit casino (the casino is on the level, held at the Stewarts’ apartment and presumably run within the law) to create confusion so they can steal Michael’s jewels. Instead Michael steals the jewels from the crooks and replaces them in Marcia Stewart’s vault, and eventually the cops bust the real criminals and Michael proposes marriage to Marcia, explaining to her that he used to be a jewel thief but has decided to give all that up because he’s so much in love with her.

The Lone Wolf Returns is a competent film, well acted by Douglas, Patrick and Dumbrille (though the typical dumb-servant character Michael has in tow is bothersome as usual) and quite vividly directed by Roy William Neill. Neill’s career was in transition at the time; he was running out his contract at Columbia (where he’d directed the abominably racist voodoo tale Black Moon in 1934 and a quite good period thriller, The Black Room, a year later (it cast Boris Karloff ini two roles, good and evil twins, and evil twin murders good one and tries to assume his identity; it was Karloff’s first starring vehicle for Columbia in 1935) and was heading to Universal, where he would make the last 11 of the 14 films with Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes and Nigel Broce as Dr. Watson. Neill also was the originally assigned director on the 1938 British film The Lady Vanishes, but his permit to work in Britain ran out before shooting started and Alfred Hitchcock replaced him (and made one of his most memorable early films).

His final movie was Black Angel (I didn’t realize until this what a penchant Neill had for films with the word “Black” in their titles!), based on a Cornell Woolrich novel and a story in which Dan Duryea plays a nightclub pianist who believes he’s been wrongly convicted of murdering a singer, but it turns out [spoiler alert!] that he really committed the murder under an alcoholic haze and then forgot about it. Neill died on December 14, 1946 and Rathbone, already tired of playing Sherlock Holmes, refused to make any more Holmes films with another director. (He tried playing Holmes again in a 1953 stage play, but Nigel Bruce died just before the play’s premiere, Rathbone was not satisfied with the replacement – British singer-actor Martyn Green, famous for his Gilbert and Sullivan roles – and the play closed quickly.In ) The Lone Wolf Returns Neill gets some nicely atmospheric compositions that add life to what’s otherwise a pretty dull story with little else to redeem it but the coolly professional quality of Melvyn Douglas’s performance, and even that was hardly a patch on what he was doing in better films for MGM and others at the time.