PHILO VANCE'S SECRET MISSION
US, 1947, 48 minutes, Black-and-white.
Alan Curtis, Sheila Ryan, Tala Birrell, Frank Jenks, James Bell, Frank Fenton, Kenneth Farrell, Toni Todd.
Directed by Reginald Le Borg.
After the war, there were three Philo Vance films, all released in 1947. Besides this film there was Philo Vance Returns and Philo Vance and his Secret Mission (this one running for only 48 minutes).
While William Wright was the star of Philo Vance Returns, the other two films featured Alan Curtis. He was a successful choice for Philo Vance, not the suave manner of William Powell, but a solid down-to-earth approach to his character, the touch of the wisecrack, the touch of the flirtatious. (Alan Curtis was to die several years later in his early 40s.)
Frank Jenks is Ernie, Philo Vance’s associate, providing some comic touches, double takes, bad pronunciations, touches of vanity when boasting to his friends…
The plot is quite complicated, even for 48 minutes. Vance and his associate, Ernie, are invited to a publishing company, noted for its horror stories, Vance mistaking the scream of the assistant who is being photographed for covers to be the real thing. One of the proprietors wants the company to start publishing true stories and wants the story of the death and disappearance of a former owner to be written up by Vance.
At the meeting is the co-director, the widow of the dead man who is very upset, two ghost writers of the stories, the assistant and the photographer.
The assistant is attracted to Vance and, as in the other films, he is flirtatious.
However, when they go to the house of the proprietor who proposed the story, they find that he is dead, then his body disappears. Vance and the assistant drive away, a policeman on motorcycle pursues because she has left behind her handbag. When they open the boot of the car, the dead man is in it.
The issue of insurance is raised, especially since the body has not been discovered after seven years, and payment is to be made. The widow has decided to marry the legal adviser of the company about to leave by boat for South America.
At the meeting, Vance sets up the situation, to the assistant’s shock, and is that she did it and he makes a plausible account. Then he reassures her that that was just too flush out the real criminal.
It emerges that the man had not died seven years earlier but had disappeared, conniving with his wife to get the money, to get rid of the legal associate she was about to marry and then disappear themselves.
Quite a neat little Philo Vance story – the equivalent of a television episode in later series.
