Ellery Queen and the Perfect Crime

Ralph Bellamy as Ellery Queen is given some really snappy dialog with girl Friday Margaret Lindsay in Ellery Queen And The Perfect Crime. If the film had some MGM like production values this could have passed for a Thin Man film.

The deceased here is Douglass Dumbrille a rather ruthless businessman who sold some bad stock to a lot of investors and then sold short, making a pile while others went bankrupt. One of those H.B. Warner who is the father of Linda Hayes and who is engaged to Dumbrille's son John Beal.

The Queen family gets involved when Beal uses his friend Bellamy to help the Warner family out financially at an estate sale when the family goes bust. Of course Inspector Queen gets involved when Dumbrille is found dead.

Besides those already mentioned, in the cast also are Warner's sister Spring Byington and her shyster boyfriend lawyer Sidney Blackmer and her pet monkey. The monkey dies as well and that finally unravels the mystery.

This is a different Spring Byington than you are used to. She and Blackmer are all kinds of concerned about the disappearance of the family fortune and the downgraded lifestyle Spring will have to live.

As for the solution all I can say is that a certain truism that has grown up around mystery novels is actually followed here.

Bellamy and Lindsay turn in some nice performances as junior league Nick and Nora Charles and that's worth seeing.