THE INNER CIRCLE
US, 1946, 57 minutes, Black and white.
Warren Douglas, Adele Mara, William Frawley, Ricardo Cortez, Virginia Christine.
Directed by Paul Ford.
A murder mystery with quite a lot of plot stirred into a running time of under one hour. It was based on a radio play. It is surprisingly brief for a supporting fit feature of 1946.
The film opens with a private eye in his office, ringing about an advertisement, when a very forward young woman arrives, says that she fulfils all the requirements and immediately starts working for the private eye to his astonishment, answering his phone and setting him up in a case – and he is not happy because he has lost control. He is to meet someone outside a hotel, a mysterious woman, veiled – and gets a ticket for parking! When he goes to an apartment, he finds a dead body, the woman knocking him out and unveiling, turning out to be a blonde – with the maid lurking outside as well as a nosy gardener and neighbour.
The dead man is a radio celebrity who actually collects dirty secrets about people and publicises them if they do not pay blackmail money.
The woman with the veil, who actually did murder him, in league with a nightclub owner, is a singer. But there is a complication that the new secretary’s sister, father a politician, with husband a politician, has been paying money to the dead man – and the secretary thinks that her sister might have done it and so covers up.
The way that the private eye solves the case is one of those assemblies of all the suspects but this time in a radio studio where four scenes are to be played out, using the words from the actual characters who then mouth them to the radio public themselves. This gives the opportunity for the audience to go back over what they have seen – the maid was after some money, as was the gardener. The sister is saved when the private eye has been arrested but released because of self-defence, something engineered by the secretary.
It finally emerges that the singer admits that she is the murderer…
Always interesting to spend an hour or so on a complicated whodunnit.
