Contrabando de Guerra

The Ellery Queen series for Columbia Pictures concluded with Enemy Agents Meet Ellery Queen and I will say that it was much to their regret. The famed writer detective catches some Nazi spies operating out of a health club in Manhattan. Must have been in the Yorkville area.

It all starts with James Burke escorting prisoner Louis Donath on a train where William Gargan and Margaret Lindsay are also returning from a vacation. He locks Donath in the drawing room handcuffed and gets slugged and then finds a dead prisoner. Someone was afraid Donath would squeal for a deal in custody.

Donath had a lot to squeal about. There was a shipment of diamonds to be smuggled with an Egyptian mummy consigned to a gallery owned by Gale Sondergaard and her late husband who got late courtesy of Donath. It all leads to a health club managed by Sig Ruman in his best Teutonic accent and manner.

In the end the Marines save the day. Nice to know they're around to be sent for.

Patriotic in its time, the climax now looks quite a bit silly and very dated. Still the mystery itself was nicely put together.

William Gargan is Ellery, Margaret Lindsay is Nikki Porter, and Charley Grapewin is Inspector Queen in the last of Columbia's 1940s series. In this one, their confronted with Sig Ruman running a fat farm as a front for spies, Gilbert Roland winding up dead in a mummy, and similar goings on.

It's very much a movie for the moment, and there are a few minor gags; Ruman doesn't get his joke in until the end. James Hogan, the director, entered films in the early 1920s as a writer. and director After a miscellaneous career that included camera work and set design, he died in 1943, age 53.

This was pretty bad.

OMG. William Gargan in this installment is Ellery. I already am blanking on the plot. A person of interest dies at the same time a mummy case is stolen from a museum.

For some reason, Ellery thinks the body is in the cemetery. He and Margaret Lindsay go to a cemetery - don't ask me how they know which one - not only that, but they go directly to a mausoleum where they find the body.

This is a wartime film, so it turns out there's a group of Nazi spies running a health club, and they're after gold which is supposed to help the Dutch Resistance. Gilbert Roland has a miniscule part. I think he's the one who is killed.

Odd. I call it odd.

Nazi agents in the United States learn of diamonds smuggled out of Amsterdam to this country, kill the smuggler, gain possession of the ' diamonds. Ellery Queen finds the spyring, smashes it, with a little help from his blundering secretary.

An acceptable mystery fare centred around a search for a mummy, diamonds and a spy ring - William Gargan is competent as Ellery Queen, but it's Margaret Lindsay as his secretary who steals the scene with her spirited and blundering ways. It's a fun mystery, the last Ellery Queen of the 1940's. Gilbert Roland has a smallish role, but not any less important- he plays the smuggler Paul Gilette who is murdered upon arriving in the US with the diamonds.