Ellery Queen and the Murder Ring (Columbia, 1941)

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

My husband Charles and I fished through the YouTube collection of “B” mysteries last night and ended up watching the film Ellery Queen and the Murder Ring, which was O.K. but not on the level of the other Ellery Queen movies we’d been watching lately. This film was part of a “B” series at Columbia with Ralph Bellamy as Ellery Queen (later replaced by William Gargan); Charley “Uncle Henry” Grapewin as Ellery’s father, Inspector Queen of the New York Police Department (I seem to recall from somewhere that his first name was “Richard” but was never so referred to in these movies); and Margaret Lindsay freed from her former contract at Warner Bros., where she was usually cast as the “good girl” to Bette Davis’s “bad girl.” (Alas, her most famous post-Warners credit would be in Universal’s 1942 version of Rex Beach’s The Spoilers, in which she was once again the “good girl,” this time to Marlene Dietrich, wno not only played the “bad girl” but got the film’s male lead, John Wayne.)

This time around the “murder ring” isn’t what you might think – a sort of Murder, Incorporated gang of killers who would “off” anybody for a fee – but the dysfunctional Stack family: matriarch Augusta Stack (Blanche Yurka, a major stage star who made surprisingly few films; she seems to have been the next “name” producers and casting directors called if they couldn’t get Maria Ouspenskaya) and her two adult children, John (Leon Ames, surprisingly good as suave villainy just three years before he played Judy Garland’s father in Meet Me in St. Louis) and Alicia (Jean Fenwick). Thropgh the opening third of the film Augusta bullies tier kids mercilessly – Alicia in particular, whom she treats like an unpaid housemaid with such ferocity Cinderella probably had it easy by comparison. Augusta has endowed a hospital and got her name on it; she also has a love-hate relationship with the facility’s medical director, Dr. Edwin Janney (George Zucco, whose presence in this film was quite a surprise). At first she says she doesn’t trust him, to the point of demanding another surgeon for her own operation, largely because he has a way of disappearing on her during so-called “medical emergencies” which, we learn later, he stages via a secret button on his desk that activates a record player containing an authentic-sounding call summoning him to the E.R. He’s also having a dispute over intellectual property: he claims rights to a new formula he’s invented, but Augusta’s attorney quotes the contract he signed with her giving her the rights to any new treatments he invented. And yet it also turns out that Augusta has willed Dr. Janney almost all her entire fortune!

Augusta Stark wants Inspector Queen to infiltrate someone into the hospital, but she doesn’t want anybody who “looks like a detective,” so Inspector Queen sends his son Ellery to pose as a patient, and Ellery in turn asks his faithful secretary and fiancée, Nikki Porter (Margaret Lindsay), to dress as a nurse. Ellery shows up at the Stark home dressed in a suit and tie rather than anything one would expect to see a gardener (which is supposed to be his cover identity) wearing, then or now. His idea of posing as a patient is to speak in a hoarse tone and say he’s losing his voice – though of course there are plenty of times when Ellery forgets he’s supposed to be speaking in whispery tones and uses his normal voice. John Stark is in hock to a comic-relief gangster named Lou Thomas (Tom Dugan), who agrees to knock off Augusta in exchange for forgiving the debt. Only the way he tries to do that is by running Augusta’s car off the road, which results in both of them becoming injured and taken to Stark Hospital. Augusta dies on the operating table, and the death is originally ruled accidental, but a police-ordered autopsy reveals her hyoid bone was broken, and therefore she must have been strangled. Later a nurse named Miss Fox (Charlotte Wynters) is also found dead, and still later John Stark hangs himself after he realizes the real murderer is [spoiler alert!] his secret girlfriend on the nursing staff, Marian Tracy (Mona Barrie), who killed Augusta in hopes that her son would inherit her estate (which he won’t) and also killed Miss Fox because she’d stumbled on her secret.

Ellery Queen and the Murder Ring isn’t a particularly interesting film – the title promised a considerably better movie than the one we got – and it didn’t help that we were watching it in a wretched transfer on YouTube where the image so frequently swayed back and forth on screen it started looking like they had shot the fim on an ocean liner sailing through a heavy storm. The writers are Eric Taylor and Gertrude Purcell, adapting one of the “Ellery Queen” books (real-life writers Frederick Dannay and Manfred Lee signed the books “Ellery Queen” to make it seem as if he were not only the “sleuth” character of the books but their author as well), and the director is James P. Hogan, an old hand at this sort of film but one who seemed to be pretty much going through the motions here.