Ellery Queen: "The Adventure of the Sinister Scenario" (Levinson-Link Productions, Universal, NBCX-TV, 1976)

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

My husband Charles was willing to stay up late last night long enough to watch a reasonably short movie – about an hour or so – so I ran us an episode of the 1975-1976 Ellery Queen TV show, “The Adventure of the Sinister Scenario.” As I’ve noted before in my previous posts on the 1930’s and 1940’s movies featuring him, “Ellery Queen” was the fictional creation of writers Frederick Dannay and Manfred Lee, who not only wrote stories about a fictional detective named “Ellery Queen” but made himself the nominal author as well – though I was startled to find while looking up my old moviemagg posts on the character that “Frederick Dnnnay” and “Manfred Lee” were themselves pseudonyms. “Dannay’s” real name was Daniel Nathan and “Lee’s” was Emmanuel Benjamin Napofsky. This series was produced by Richard Levinson and William Link, whose huge success with the series (and the character) Columbo led to their becoming the go-to guys for TV mystery series at Universal in the 1970’s. Among their bright ideas was a series about Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe (with Willian Conrad playing him) and one on Ellery Queen, set in the late 1940’s (you can tell from the great blunderbusses of cars the people drive around in, the women’s fashions and the movie stars, including Dorothy Lamour and Alice Faye, Ellery Queen (Jim Hutton) and his father, New York City police inspector Richard Queen (David Wayne, who has the interesting distinction of having been in more movies with Marilyn Monroe – five – than any other of her co-stars), are hoping to meet on their visit to Hollywood.

They’re there to watch the making of a new movie based on one of Ellery Queen’s novels, with an egomaniac, philandering actor named Gilbert Mallory (an aging Troy Donahue, considerably older and less attractive than Jim Hutton!) as Ellery and Lionel Briggs (Noah Beery, Jr., considerably older and less attractive than he’d been in The Crimson Canary and other vest-pocket thrillers and comedies for Universal 30 years earlier) as his dad. For some reason the “real” Ellery Queen doesn’t resent being played by a long-in-the-tooth actor who’s visibly older than he, but the real Richard Queen does. During the first act we see Mrs. Gilbert Mallory (her first name is Claire and she’s played quite authoritatively by Barbara Rush) confront her husband’s latest girlfriend de jour, Pamela Courtney (Susan Damante) in his dressing room. I was amused that Charles and I had just seen that particular scene – a confrontation between an actor’s wife and his paramour in his dressing room – in the 1929 Paramount film The Studio Murder Mystery. It all becomes academic, though, since at the end of act one Gilbert Mallory is shot dead in a scene in which he was supposed to shoot at with a blank-loaded gun but into which someone sneaked live rounds instead.

There’ve been all too many recent incidents in which that’s happened for real, from the death of Brandon Lee (Bruce Lee’s son) in 1993 while filming what was hoped would be his star-making movie, The Crow, to the recent contretemps in New Mexico in October 2021 when a prop gun fired a live round on the set of Rust, a cheap Western starring Alec Baldwin, and killed the film’s cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins. As usual in this type of movie, there are plenty of suspects – Gil Mallory was one of those characters beloved of mystery writers who gives plenty of people reasons to hate his guts – including the film’s director, Michael Raynor (Vincent Price), as well as the wife, the girlfriend, prop department head Al Garvin (Jack Murdock), Gil’s stunt double Mike Hewitt (James Sikking) and the film’s publicist, Dave Pierce (Don DeFore). Vincent Price serves the same purpose in this film as George Zucco did in the 1941 Columbia “B” Ellery Queen and the Murder Ring: he offers suave villainy and turns in a reliably professional performance even though his character is just a red herring. Raynor is in career trouble because he’s coming off three flops and, when he chews out Gil in front of the rest of the cast and crew,Gil serves notice that he put up his own money to make the film and therefore he owns half the picture and can fire Raynor any time he wants to. Even after Gil’s death, his widow Claire makes the same threat to Raynor.

Then stunt double Mike Hewitt also gets killed when the brakes go out on the car he’s supposed to drive as Gil’s double, and the ensuing crash is fatal. As in the very first Ellery Queen movie, The Spanish Cape Mystery (1935) – also set in California via a vacation Ellery is supposedly taking in the Golden State – the response of the official L.A. police detectives in charge of the case, Captain Benjamin Blake (Paul Fix, yet another veteran character actor from Hollywood’s golden age) and Lt. Braden (Paul Carr). Is to arrest all the suspects, one after the other, in the apparent hope one of them will turn out to be the guilty party. Ellery Queen deduces that [spoiler alert!] the real target of the murder was Mike Hewitt, not Gil Mallory, and the killer was Dave Pierce, who was being blackmailed by Hewitt (thoiugh if we were ever told what Hewitt had on him, it sailed over my head) and wanted to eliminate him in a wayu that would look like an accident – only Mallory turned down a double for the sequence in which he was supposed to be “shot” and thereby took the bullet intended for his double.

The most interesting aspect of this download, published by an outfit called “Fuzzy Memories” that obviously was dubbed from someone’s VHS (or maybe Beta) recording of the show as it was aired in Chicago on August 8, 1976 (actually a rerun from the original air date of February 8, 1976), is that it included all the original commercials. In fact, there was an oddly schizoid effect in that YouTube was also cutting in with modern commercials, and the dichotomy only proved that the more commercials have changed, the more they have stayed the same. Towards the end there was a cut-in from NBC’s news department, with Edwin Newman delivering information about the just-completed Democratic convention and the yet-to-occur Republican one – and the most fascinating part of the story was that President Gerald Ford had spoken to a Roman Catholic church audience and stressed his commitment to “the sanctity of life” – which was code word for opposition to abortion. So just 3 ½ years after Roe v. Wade opposition to abortion was already a bedrock position of the Republican Party in Presidential politics!