The Lone Wolf Strikes (Columbia, 1940)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Monday, March 10) my husband Charles and I watched a 1940 “B” movie from Columbia called The Lone Wolf Strikes, the fourth in a series of Columbia “B”’s featuring the character of a good-bad reformed jewel thief, Michael Lanyard a.k.a. The Lone Wolf. and the second with Warren William as Lanyard after Columbia tried Melvyn Douglas in the first film in the series, The Lone Wolf Returns, and Francis Lederer in the second, The Lone Wolf in Paris. The third film, and the first with Warren William, was The Lone Wolf’s Spy Hunt, and it co-starred Ida Lupino with Rita Hayworth in a small supporting role much like her part in Homicide Bureau. The Lone Wolf Strikes was their fourth, made in 1940 and co-starring Joan Perry (true name: Elizabeth Rosiland Miller), who retired from acting in 1941 to marry Columbia Pictures president Harry Cohn. (One wonders how she handled Cohn’s great penchant for womanizing.) It begins with a homely middle-aged banker type, Phillip Jordan (Roy Gordon), romancing a younger beauty named Binnie Weldon (Astrid Allwyn, who played the “other woman” in the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musical Follow the Fleet) and showing her his priceless pearl necklace. Phillip offers Binnie the chance to wear it to a gala event the two are attending, only what he doesn’t realize – though we soon learn – is that Binnie is part of a gang of jewel thieves after the necklace. Her (real) boyfriend Jim Ryder (Alan Baxter) is also part of the gang, as is Ralph Bolton (Robert Wilcox), who’s romanced Phillip’s daughter, Delia Jordan (Joan Perry), on board a ship taking her from Europe to America. She’s in love with him and is prepared to marry him, but he’s only dating her as part of his responsibilities to the gang. Phillip discovers when the clasp on the necklace breaks and he takes it to a legitimate jeweler to have it mended that it’s a worthless imitation; Binnie pocketed the real necklace and substituted a fake during her night out with Phillip.

Worried that Phillip will report them to the police, the gang members kill him and fake it to look like an accident. Michael Lanyard and his valet, Jamison (Eric Blore – so two people from the Astaire-Rogers films were in this one!), get involved when Delia Jordan hires them to get back her late father’s necklace, which she was supposed to get on the day she got married. The gangsters plan to profit from their crime by selling the necklace to international jewel dealer Emil Gorelick (Montagu Love, speaking in a bizarre mishmash of accents – he’s supposed to be Dutch, but what comes out of his mouth sounds like the natural voice of no human on earth), who just happens to be an old friend of Lanyard’s from his days as a jewel thief himself. Lanyard goes to see Gorelick on the afternoon before a big party where Gorelick is supposed to connect with the thieves, but the evening ends with Gorelick bound and tied to a chair by Lanyard. Lanyard proceeds to go to the party, impersonating Gorelick and contacting the gang, only the cops go to Lanyard’s apartment and release the real Gorelick. From then on the rest of the movie consists of a not very engaging round-robin as to who has the real necklace and who has the copy, but in the end Lanyard ends up not only with the real necklace, which he turns over to Delia as its rightful owner, but with at least a perfunctory display of affection for Delia herself.

What makes The Lone Wolf Strikes unusually interesting is that, though it’s nothing more plot-wise than a standard-issue romantic thriller, director Sidney Salkow (a filmmaker named after a figure-skating jump?) and cinematographer Henry Freulich give it a look close to all-out film noir, all dark shadows and sinister angles. The Lone Wolf Strikes could have come even closer to film noir if Binnie had been made more of a femme fatale; as it is, she’s just a stick-figure villainess and she also is genuinely devoted to her lover and partner in crime, Jim Ryder, in ways most femmes fatales weren’t. Still, it’s an engaging movie even though it’s hardly one of Warren William’s great performances; he was at his best either at Warner Bros. before this (including his four quite good films as Perry Mason) or at PRC and Monogram later, including playing the Claudius equivalent in Edgar G. Ulmer’s and Adele Commandini’s fascinating modern-dress rewrite of Hamlet as Strange Illusion, a.k.a. Out of the Dark (and playing him quite well). There’s an intriguing name on the screenplay credits, Dalton Trumbo, though this time he only wrote the original story and two other scribes, Harry Segall and Albert Duffy, cranked out the actual script.