The Argyle Secrets (Eronel Productions, Film Classics, 1948)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger's Newsmagazine • All rights reserved

After The Show I wanted to run my husband Charles The Argyle Secrets because, even though I’d seen it myself over a year ago on the TCM “Noir Alley” series hosted by Eddle Muller (who apparently co-produced a major restoration of this film), I’d been reminded of it again by reading Rachel Maddow’s book Prequel. When I’d seen The Argyle Secrets I had pretty much written it off as an inferior, though still intriguing, knockoff of The Maltese Falcon. What I hadn’t realized was that the film’s MacGuffin, “The Argyle Album,” really existed – or at least something like it did. It was a legal report written by O. John Rogge, the prosecutor who took over the 1942 sedition case in New York City against over 30 Nazi and fascist sympathizers after the first prosecutor, William Maloney, was fired under pressure from secretly pro-Nazi members of Congress. The sedition trial lasted over a year, partly because the 33 defendants and their attorneys did everything they could to slow down the proceedings, and finally ended in a mistrial after the judge presiding over the case suddenly died. By then it was 1944 and the government decided not to pursue a retrial, figuring that by then World War II was pretty much over, but Rogge was permitted to write a report. Alas, President Harry Truman and his attorney general, Tom Clark (Ramsey Clark’s father), decided to suppress the report, and when Rogge gave lectures about the case to various college political science classes, they threatened Rogge with prosecution himself for leaking government secrets. Despite one major lapse – in the Rosenberg espionage case, Rogge represented Ethel Rosenberg’s brother, David Greenglass, and arranged the plea deal with the government that led to the death sentence against Julius and Ethel Rosenberg – for the most part Rogge post-war was an effective advocate against Red-baiting and for civil rights, including representing African-American clients on appeals after white prosecutors, judges and juries had railroaded them. In 1946 Rogge gave a speech in which he reflected on the extent to which the American “line” had changed from anti-fascism to anti-Communism; he said, “The removal of Hitler and Mussolini and a few of their collaborators does not mean that fascism is dead. Now the fascists can take a more subtle disguise; they can come forward and simply say, 'I am anti-Communist.’”

Written and directed by Cy Endfield, a victim of the Hollywood blacklist who was forced to continue his career in Britain to escape the House Un-American Activities Committee and its inquisition-like tactics against Left-leaning filmmakers, The Argyle Secrets is a quite effective action melodrama in which the titular “Argyle Papers” are encased in an elaborately bound book with a red leather cover and an insignia of a two-headed eagle (also the emblem of Tsarist Russia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, by the way). The central character of The Argyle Secrets is Los Angeles Herald reporter Harry Mitchell (William Gargan, considerably more heavy-set than he’d been a decade earlier in Universal’s The House of Fear (1939) and the later Columbia Ellery Queen movies), who learns of the existence of the Argyle Papers from fellow reporter Allen Pierce (George Anderson), whom Mitchell encounters when he visits the dying Pierce in the hospital. Later Pierce is found dead – he was stabbed with a scalpel but only after his death, which was faked to look like heart failure but was really poison fed him by a phony doctor who really meant to kill him – and Mitchell realizes that the cops suspect him of killing Pierce. So he launches his own investigation to find the Argyle Papers and also clear his name. One of the ironies about The Argyle Secrets is that at least two women in the cast went on to achieve at least minor stardom in 1950’s TV sitcoms: Marjorie Lord, who was Danny Thomas’s wife on the series Make Room for Daddy, plays Pierce’s secretary (who turns out to have had the Argyle Album in her possession all along after all the violent goings-on between the various criminal organizations seeking to recover it); and the femme fatale role of “Merle” (essentially the Brigid O’Shaughnessy of this tale) is Barbara Billingsley, June Cleaver in Leave It to Beaver. And the first time I saw this film it seemed so much like The Maltese Falcon that I expected the Argyle Album to be just that – blank pieces of paper in an elaborately bound notebook!