The Spanish Cape Mystery (Republic, 1935)

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

After the National Memorial Day Concert KPBS announced that they would re-run it and then show a Great Performances episode on the recent revival of Stephen Sondheim’s classic 1970 musical Company, which left a gap in our TV-watching last night that I filled with a YouTube viewing of The Spanish Cape Mystery. Made by Republic Studios in 1935, this was the first film ever made to feature Ellery Queen, the fictional detective invented by authors Frederick Dannay and Manfred Lee. To add to the verisimilitude of the stories, they used “Ellery Queen” not only as the name of their sleuth character but their joint pen-name for the books. The stars of this film are Donald Cook as Ellery Queen (he’s a reasonably attractive and personable leading man who’s quite effective in a role later played by Ralph Bellamy and William Gargan in a series of “B”’s for Columbia) and Helen Twelvetrees, an incredibly underrated performer, in the lead role of Stella Godfrey, heiress to a major fortune whose father is understandably wary of every man who pays her attention, suspecting them all of being gold-diggers.

It’s an attempt to do the sort of comedy-mystery MGM had just scored big with in The Thin Man the year before. It begins with Ellery Queen strutting his stuff and managing to nail a jewel thief who’s been detained by Ellery’s father, Inspector Queen of the New York Police Department (if Dannay and Lee ever gave him a first name, I don’t know what it is). A family friend, Supreme Court Judge named Macklin (Berton Churchill), is determined to take Ellery Queen on a vacation from New York to Spanish Cape, California and is determined to make sure he doesn’t get involved in any murder investigations while he’s on vacation. Needless to say, as soon as he gets to Spanish Cape the bodies start dropping, and eventually the culprit is found: a man who faked his own kidnapping to divert suspicion. He’s one of the potential heirs to a fortune left behind by Stella’s recently deceased aunt,and though the aunt left all her money to her “companion” (that’s the word used in the script, and I’m presuming it meant the sort of person Joan Fontaine was playing in the opening scenes of Rebecca: a woman paid to accompany an older, richer woman on her travels and help keep her amused), the Godfreys are confident of being able to break the will.

There’s also a local police official, Sheriff Moley (Harry Stubbs), who’s even dumber than the usual foils for the brilliant outside detective in films like these. Throughout the investigation he keeps fastening on the most obvious suspect and threatening to arrest him or her on the spoit – until the man or woman Moley is threatening conveniently exonerates himself by becoming the murderer’s next victim. The Spanish Cape Mystery is a reasonably competent thriller, directed by Lewis D. Collins – who doesn’t have any particular flair for this sort of film but at least keeps it moving – and adapted by Albert DeMond from one of the “Ellery Queen” books. The revelation of the murderer stretches credibility but at least doesn’t do the sort of taffy-pull with it a lot of the denouements of 1930’s mystery films did, and The Spanish Cape Mystery holds up as unpretentious entertainment even though it’s hardly a patch on The Thin Man, which had a better story source (Dashiell Hammett instead of Frederick Dannay and Manfred Lee), a better director (W. S. Van Dyke) and a much better cast: as good as Helen Twelvetrees and Donald Cook are, Myrna Loy and William Powell they are not.