ELLERY QUEEN'S PENTHOUSE MYSTERY

US, 1942, 69 minutes, Black and white.
Ralph Bellamy, Margaret Lindsay, Charley Grapewin, Anna May Wong, James Burke, Eduardo Cianelli, Frank Albertson, Ann Doran, Noel Madison, Russell Hicks, Manton Moreland.
Directed by James Hogan.

Writers Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee combined talents to create their nom de plume, Ellery Queen, keeping the name for their central character. Over the decades there were films as well as television series.

This is the second of four films with Ralph Bellamy as Ellery Queen. In 1942, there were three more with some of the same cast but William Gargan as Ellery Queen.

The film serves as the equivalent of a television episode, the setting up of a complicated plot, the plight of the Chinese during the 1930s and 40s, the smuggling of jewels collected by patriots to help buy food for starving Chinese, taken to the United States by boat by a famous ventriloquist. He is then found murdered.

Ellery Queen becomes involved when the daughter of the ventriloquist goes to consult her friend, Queen’s typist and assistant, Nikki (Margaret Lindsay). Ellery Queen’s father is a police Inspector (Charley Grapewin), James Burke provides comic touches as his associate, Anna May Wong appears as the ventriloquist Chinese connection, Russell Hicks is his manager, Eduardo Cianelli as a killer.

Ellery Queen himself is not the most adept as a detective, experiencing number of pratfalls, getting his novel typed by his assistant, her continually popping up, investigating and tangling matters.

An average kind of entertainment but interesting in its early 1940s interpretation of Ellery Queen.