Enemy Agents Meet Ellery Queen (Columbia, 1942)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The movie my husband Charles and I crowded into our schedule and ran after he came home from work unusually early was a 1942 Columbia “B” called Enemy Agents Meet Ellery Queen. Ellery Queen began as the lead character in a series of mystery novels co-written by Frederick Dannay and Manfred Remington Lee, and though those names were themselves pseudonyms (“Dannay” was really Daniel Nathan and “Lee” was Emmanuel Benjamin Napofsky), they started writing Ellery Queen stories in 1928 and even offered “Ellery Queen” as the named author as well as the lead character. The series also spawned a pulp paper called Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, which Dannay originally edited and which (unlike most 1930’s pulps) still exists. Ellery Queen made his film debut in 1935 in a Republic production called The Spanish Cape Mystery, but in 1939 Columbia acquired the rights and launched a series with Ralph Bellamy as Ellery Queen and Margaret Lindsay as his long-suffering secretary and sort-of girlfriend, Nikki Porter. The schtick of Ellery Queen was that he was a private detective and his father was a real cop, Inspector Richard Queen of the New York Police Department, and they often worked as unofficial partners even though the writers Columbia assigned to the films usually turned Richard Queen into the traditional dumb cop (with an even dumber cop sidekick!) shown up by the smart private eye.

Enemy Agents Meet Ellery Queen was the 12th and last in the Columbia Queen cycle, and by then Bellamy had left the series after the first seven entries and William Gargan (who was quite good as a police detective posing as a theatrical producer in the 1939 film The House of Fear) had taken over as Ellery Queen, though Margaret Lindsay was still on board and Inspector Queen was played by Charley Grapewin. Referencing Grapewin’s most famous credit as Uncle Henry in The Wizard of Oz, at one point I joked, “He just hasn’t been the same since his niece had that crazy dream in which she got flown out of Kansas by a cyclone and had to desi with wicked witches, winged monkeys and talking trees.” The script for Enemy Agents Meet Ellery Queen was by Eric Taylor and the direction by James Hogan, who died the next year at the relatively young age of 53 right after finishing one of Universal’s worst horror movies, The Mad Ghoul. Taylor deserves credit for pulling a few neat surprises that make his film different from the “B” mystery norm – especially “B” mysteries made during World War II and incorporating the war into their plots. The film starts inside a German submarine hunting for U.S. and British cargo ships in the North Atlantic, though the lead officer on board, Heinrich (Sig Ruman), orders the sub’s captain not to torpedo a particular cargo ship.

It turns out that that ship is carrying a shipment of a 3,000-year-old Egyptian mummy to a New York art gallery, where it’s supposed to be protected against possible war damage and exhibited to the public (actually Egypt was in World War II on the Nazis’ side – which led to the bizarre situation of one of John Lennon’s aunts being forced to register as an enemy alien during the war because, while she was born in Britain, she’d married an Egyptian man and taken Egyptian citizenship). As I joked, had this been a Universal movie the mummy would have been brought to life by a sinister cult of Egyptian expatriates, but since this was Columbia the mummy is irrelevant (we never actually see it, it disappears from its coffin midway through and we never learn what happened to it) and what’s really important is a large cache of diamonds secreted inside its case by a Dutchman named Van Dorn, whose wife (Gale Sondergaard) runs a smaller gallery in New York. Also involved in the smuggling plot is one Paul Gillette (Gilbert Roland), who the moment we see him, hear his vaguely foreign accent and see his “roo” moustache we’re convinced he must be a Nazi agent up to no good. Our suspicions are especially reinforced when he runs into Nikki Porter at a counter at a train station, and when the clerk tells him that the item he wants to purchase costs “five and a quarter” he doesn’t know what that means and Nikki has to explain, “He means five dollars and twenty-five cents.”

Later Gillette takes Nikki hostage in a car and accuses her of being a Gestapo agent, and we ultimately learn that he’s actually a good guy, part of a ring of Dutch resistance agents smuggling the diamonds into the U.S. to sell them and raise money for the partisans back home. Mrs. Van Dorn is also part of the operation (offhand I can’t think of another movie in which Gale Sondergaard was on the side of good!), only the Nazis are also tracing the diamonds and Ellery Queen, his father and dumb cop Sgt. Velie (James Burke), who let a captured Nazi spy escape on the train bringing the principals in to New York City and got suspended from the force and threatened with being fired, are trying to figure out how the Nazi spies knew about the diamonds. Paul Gillette is found murdered in a cemetery – his body has been stuffed into the mummy case (ya remember the mummy case? Ya remember the mummy?) – and Ellery Queen tells Velie to report it to headquarters and get credit for discovering Gillette’s body, only meanwhile enemy agents crash the cemetery, make off with Gillette’s body and stuff the incapacitated Ellery Queen into the mummy case instead. The principals all converge on an establishment called the Lido Club, which is not a nightclub (as one might think from the name) but a health spa, though it’s really a front for the Nazi spies, who are getting all sorts of secret information by offering a “valet service” where they hold the customers’ valuables while they work out – and then rifling through their letters and papers looking for dirt on the Allied war effort. The film ends with a big fight scene in which the Nazis are subdued, Ellery and Nikki reunited, everyone saved from peril and the diamonds rescued from the fate Heinrich had in mind for them – which was to be cut down and used to make precision tools for Nazi war production.

Charles liked Enemy Agents Meet Ellery Queen considerably less than I did – after it was over he joked, “At the top of movie detectives there’s Sam Spade, in the middle there’s the Saint and the Falcon, and at the bottom there’s Ellery Queen” – but I enjoyed the movie even though it’s held together with spit and baling wire and it changes tone so often the film takes on an unintentionally surrealistic air. It starts out as a pretty straightforward thriller, then throws off a few hints of film noir (notably in some nice chiaroscuro compositions by cinematographer James S. Brown, Jr.) and ends up almost camp. Part of the problem is that it’s hard to take Sig Ruman as a serious Nazi menace when his best-known films star the Marx Brothers and Jack Benny. It also doesn’t help that director Hogan decided to shoot the final action climax in fast-motion, an effect that these days seems pretty much reserved for comedy. And I got very annoyed by all the snide sexism Ellery aimed at Nikki. Still, Enemy Agents Meet Ellery Queen is a reasonably entertaining vest-pocket mystery, with some genuine surprises in the plotting and the casting, though I’ve never seen any other entries in the Ellery Queen series and apparently the war theme made this one quite different from its predecessors.