The Lone Wolf's Spy Hunt (Columbia, 1939)

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

Last night (Wednesday, March 12) my husband Charles and I watched a YouTube post of the 1939 film The Lone Wolf’s Spy Hunt, third in the late 1930’s/early 1940’s series of Lone Wolf “B” movies at Columbia and the first that featured Warren William (a bit long in the tooth for this sort of romantic lead; he was 40 but the script referred to him as 35, and Charles chuckled at that) as Michael Lanyard, a.k.a. The Lone Wolf, reformed jewel thief turned amateur detective. I was interested in this one mainly because both Ida Lupino and Rita Hayworth were in it. Lupino plays Val Carson, daughter of Senator Carson (Brandon Tynan) – if the Senator has a first name, we never learn what it is. Val is Lanyard’s long-suffering girlfriend, and at least twice during the film he abandons her in the middle of a date to meet another woman and sticks her with the check. Rita plays Karen, a mystery woman (and one of the ones Lanyard abandons Val to be with) who’s part of a spy ring after the plans for a new anti-aircraft weapon. Aside from the fact that the MacGuffin is a set of plans for a high-tech weapon well before the U.S. entered World War II, it’s really not much of a movie, and compared to The Lone Wolf Strikes it falls short. It has a less interesting director (Peter Godfrey, who’d later decamp to Warner Bros. and make a few genuinely good movies like the first Christmas in Connecticut with Barbara Stanwyck and the remake of Escape Me Never with Errol Flynn, as well as total bombs like The Two Mrs. Carrolls with Stanwyck and Humphrey Bogart and That Hagen Girl and The Girl from Jones Beach with Ronald Reagan), writer (Jonathan Latimer, a veteran of the pulps), and cinematographer (Allen G. Siegler). It also had a far less interesting actor, Leonard Carey, playing Lanyard’s manservant Jameson; in The Lone Wolf Strikes and for most of the rest of the series Jameson was played by the marvelously droll Eric Blore.

What The Lone Wolf Spy Hunt has going for it is mainly the salty performances by the three women: Lupino, Hayworth (considerably sexier than she was in Homicide Bureau and giving us a glimpse of the sultry attractiveness she’d portray in her best films), and Virginia Weidler, the child actress who enlivened film after film, including such classics as The Great Man Votes and The Philadelphia Story (in which she played Katharine Hepburn’s younger sister and does a brilliant impression of Hepburn in one unforgettable scene). Just why Weidler didn’t have a major career as an adult is a mystery; as she grew up she quit films and did stage work until she retired after she got married and died tragically young at age 41 from heart disease. Here Weidler is playing a young orphan relative of Lanyard’s; Lanyard is trying to raise her as best he can but she keeps testing the rules he imposes on her and making up new ones of her own, including posing as FBI agent “G-7” and repeatedly shooting Jameson with her cap pistol and insisting that he pantomime death at least three times a day. But one of the big things The Lone Wolf Strikes had to offer that The Lone Wolf’s Spy Hunt didn’t is an almost noir visual look. The Lone Wolf’s Spy Hunt is a pretty straightforward comedy-mystery in which the comedic elements are both stronger and more memorable than the mystery ones; we don’t get much of an idea of who the villains are, much less their motivations, and we presume they’re interested in selling the plans for the anti-aircraft gun to a sinister foreign power but Latimer doesn’t make that all that clear in the film itself. Despite excellent performances by the three women in the cast, The Lone Wolf’s Spy Hunt is a pretty lame movie whose defects are shown in a scene towards the end in which the inventor of the anti-aircraft gun turns up a kidnapping victim of the villains and we see this doddering old man and wonder, “Who the hell is he?”