THE LONE WOLF SPY HUNT
US, 1939, 71 minutes, Black-and-white.
Warren William, Ida Lupino, Rita Hayworth, Virginia Weidler, Ralph Morgan.
Directed by Peter Godfrey.
This was the first of a series of film nine films featuring Warren William as Michael Lanyard, the Lone Wolf. William could be a suave villain but also a suave hero as he is here. He had made two films as Philo Vance and was the first Perry Mason on screen in the 1930s.
Michael Lanyard had a reputation as a safe breaker and was in trouble with the law as well as criminals that he had helped to undermine. At the opening of this film, he is summoned by one, played by Ralph Morgan, who proposes that he should rob a safe, get aircraft plans from the war department and hand them over. When he refuses, the businessman gets his thugs to do the job and leaves the particular kind of cigarette that Lanyard smoked at the scene of the break-in.
Lanyard is the typical professional bachelor but is being pursued by the daughter of a senator, Val, played by a very young Ida Lupino. She is determined to get him despite his putting at every opportunity. At home, he is looking after his young niece, Patricia, played vigorously by Virginia Weidler, who has a gun and like playing gang games with the butler.
When only half the plans have been discovered, the inventor shrewdly keeping the other half for himself, the businessman uses another means to lure Lanyard to the safe, and she is in the form of Rita Hayworth in an early role. While Lanyard seems to go along with the plan, he is very shrewd, pretends to along with the plan, escape, return, substitute plans for a pram instead of the aircraft plans.
The police, who also have a grudge against Lanyard, pursue him.
There are all kinds of hijinks, especially with Val and her pursuit, and Lanyard going to a fancy dress party, a surrealist party, with a few branches posing as natural forest! He gets into the room to steal the alternate part of the plans, takes them, is caught up in some comedy with a man at the party whose identity he has taken and is able to escape.
The villains are in pursuit, Patricia Hines in the boot of a car to help with the investigation, Lanyard goes to rescue her, persuades her to pretend to cry and he upsets the criminals, urging her to take the plans and escape. And then Val arrives with her father and the police.
And another eight episodes, filmed at Columbia which gives the film a higher professionalism and gloss than many similar small-budget series of the 1930s and 1940s.
