A Desperate Chance for Ellery Queen

Once more Ellery takes on a seemingly harmless case for a charming lady: to find her husband, who was presumed dead until recently, in San Francisco. He takes Nikki as a decoy with him to take the wife's place, and very soon the husband turns up - but... so does Ellery's father, sent by the New York police after a big-scale bank robbery combined with murder; and the main suspect is none other than the husband Ellery just found... And so, since he believes the man is innocent, he hides him from his own father!

Now a kind of hide-and-seek game ensues, accompanied by more murders; and the key to the whole affair seems to be the famous-infamous entertainer Adele - Lillian Bond, the cute, funny girl we all loved 10 years before in "The Old Dark House", and who's grown into a reckless blonde femme fatale now...

Again, William Gargan's 'Ellery Queen' is pretty serious, just like the whole movie, which at times reminds us of the old 30s' gangster movies or an early Film Noir; one thing's for sure, though: it doesn't look at all like a mere part of a crime movie series, it's got something more to it, even if we know all the regular characters and they sometimes throw in a joke or two. This is certainly not an assembly-line series production, it's a crime film (almost a crime drama) in its own right.