A Desperate Chance for Ellery Queen

With William Gargan as Ellery Queen, the audience gets led through a confusing maze of John Litel being wanted for embezzlement, a murder, and a search for whodunnit, because in this sort of mystery, it's never the first suspect who's the bad guy. In fact, usually he's the second to die, unless it's a Perry Mason mystery.

It's the last Ellery Queen movie produced by Larry Darmour. In no small part that's because Darmour died the year this was produced -- which didn't end his producing credits for another three years -- but because by this point the series had become tired, with Margaret Lindsay as Nikki Porter complaining about blondes, and Charley Grapewin pulling off his belt to give Gargan a thrashing for being a ba-a-a-d boy. This doesn't mean there's not a real mystery going on here, it's just that director James Hogan seems more intent on giving comics some time on screen, like Johnny Arthur, Jimmy Aubrey, Arthur Q. Bryan, Billy Bletcher, and Bernard Gorcey. It's a way of keeping the audience from the real answer by distraction, but then the mystery winds up being a distraction.