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

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

Two nights ago I had watched a TCM screening of a quirky and fascinating movie called The Argyle Secrets, a dorky title for what turned out to be a really good film. It was made in eight days for $125,000 by a filmmaker named Cy Endfield (his full name was Cyril Raker Endfield), who was driven out of Hollywood by the blacklist and fled to Britain, where he worked for years and because of the grandiloquence of his name aq lot of people just assumed he was a native Brit. Written as well as directed by Endfield, and adapted by him from a play he’d already done on radio, The Argyle Secrets is at once a knock-off of The Maltese Falcon and a spoof of it. This time the MacGuffin is the so-called “Argyle Papers,” a notebook with an elaborate cover showing a two-headed eagle, which supposedly lists all the American politicians and business leaders who were secretly in the payroll of Nazi Germany and continued to do their German masters’ bidding even after the U.S. entered World War II. The central character is reporter Harry Mitchell (William Gargan, older and considerably stouter than he was when he starred as a police detective in Universal’s 1939 film The House of Fear and then played Ellery Queen in the second run of Queen films at Columbia), who goes to a Washington, D.C. hospital to visit his old friend and mentor, Allen Pierce (George Anderson). Only Pierce, who claims to have the Argyle papers and is announcing that he was going to start a series exposing the Nazis’ secret network of American agents, dies in his hospital bed, and it turns out he’s the victim of a fake doctor who murdered him by giving him a drug that induced a heart attack. He was also stabbed with a scalpel, but only after he was already dead. Mitchell gives himself 24 hours to find Pierce’s killer and keep police lieutenant Samuel Samson (Ralph Byrd, who’d played Dick Tracy in four Republic serials and two RKO “B”’s but here is a much less capable and gifted lawman) from arresting him for the crime.

He’s set upon by a wide variety of crooks, including femme fatale Maria (Marjorie Lord, who would later play Danny Thomas’s wife on Make Room for Daddy); Winter (John Banner), an effeminate thug who invades Mitchell’s office and tries to stick him up, only to be easily overpowered by the much more butch Mitchell, in yet another ripoff of the great confrontation between Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre in The Maltese Falcon; Scanlon (Peter Brocco), the muscle behind the gang; Jor McBrod (Alex Frazer), who briefly got the Argyle papers in his capacity as a fence, with a supposedly legitimate salvage business as his cover; and a number of other assorted lowlifes. Mitchell eventually deduces that there are two different gangs after the Argyle papers, each working on behalf of a prominent individual or group named as Nazi collaborators in the papers. After over an hour’s worth of running time it turns out that the Argyle papers have all along been in the possession of Pierce’s secretary, Elizabeth Court (Barbara Billingsley – later Mrs. Cleaver on Leave It to Beaver, so both she and her on-screen husband on that show, Hugh Beaumont, played in films noir, or in Beaumont’s case at least films gris, my joking term for movies that attempt film noir but don’t quite achieve it), and after a final attempt by one of the crooks to grab the briefcase containing them, Mitchell walks off with the Argyle papers, seemingly about to write the stories based on them that Pierce was planning when he died. The film is so close to The Maltese Falcon I was frankly expecting a scene in which Mitchell would open the briefcase supposedly containing the papers and they’d turn out to be blank pages bound in a fancy cover, but Endfield didn’t go there. The film is narrated throughout by William Gargan’s character – probably reflecting its origins in a radio play – and as TCM’s “Noir Alley” host Eddie Muller said, the narration itself is so convoluted and surreal it only hints at any degree of sense. Muller was part of a team that did a major restoration on The Argyle Secrets, and it’s a welcome rediscovery of a film that has real charm and manages the difficult feat of exploiting the conventions of a genre and lampooning them at the same time.