The Inner Circle

This is a romantic, comic mystery. Warner Brothers turned out a lot of these in the thirties and early forties. Jane Wyman was often the girl.

Here, we have several girls. We have the secretary who appears out of nowhere. She works for a private investigator, Johnny Strange. (Was there another noun that could be added to Johnny to make a name for a movie character in that decade?) Then there's the mysterious veiled woman who calls for his services. Then there's Virginia Christine (Mrs. Olson of the coffee commercials a few decades later.) She sings in a club. Then there's ... OK: No more about the plot.

That excellent and durable actor Ricardo Cortez somehow found himself at Republic. He turns in a variation on his usual cynical, suave performance. It's not his worst, either. But he is fourth-billed, below William Frawley, who plays a cop. And Adele Mara gets top billing.

It's fun to watch. It could very easily have been better but it isn't terrible.

The beginning of "The Inner Circle" demonstrates why you have to watch and appreciate films by accepting them in the time they were made, not by today's things were different. Detective Johnny Strange (Warren Douglas) needs a new secretary. Forget typing and dictation - he wants touchable skin and good looks.

Strange runs "Action Incorporated," a detective agency, and it turns out he hasn't chosen a secretary - one (Adele Mara) has chosen him and takes over the office immediately.

The fun begins with the appearance of a veiled "Spanish woman," the murder of a radio star, Johnny receiving a couple of knocks in the head, and a police detective played by William Frawley.

The actors make the story fun. Warren Douglas was handsome and had a varied career as a screen writer and actor. Adele Mara is delightful as the take-charge secretary. In real life she married producer Roy Huggins and retired, appearing occasionally on his TV shows. William Frawley, I Love Lucy's Fred Mertz, was very good and less volatile than Fred.

Okay Poverty Row B.

Before he can finish placing his help-wanted ad over the phone, the perfect candidate shows up at the office of Johnny Strange and fills the position of secretary without even giving Johnny a chance to say yes. She immediately takes the call from a new client, a mysterious woman with a Spanish accent. When Johnny meets her, the client is dressed all in black and wearing a heavy veil that conceals her face. She takes him to a house with a corpse lying in it, and asks him to take care of it. Before Johnny can call the police she knocks him unconscious with a bookend. He wakes up to see Det. Lt. Webb, who tells him the dead man is a notorious gossip columnist with a popular radio program. A nightclub manager, a singer, a housekeeper, a hard-of-hearing groundskeeper and two beautiful blondes are among the whos who may have done it.

"The Inner Circle" moves fast and gives away its surprises in the right places, helping us to ignore the strained humor and a silly twist on the usual gathering-the-suspects-into-a-room ending. Adele Mara and Warren Douglas are okay as the leads, but they're outshone by the supporting cast, especially William Frawley as the tough but even-tempered lieutenant and Will Wright as the old sneak who is probably pretending to be more deaf than he is.

--Are you troubled...frightened...suspicious...or merely curious?

--Your problem is my problem.

--Contact Johnny Strange, Private Investigator

And when the camera pans away from a gloved female finger on this Yellow Pages ad, we see on the floor a dead body. This is going to be a case that involves Johnny Strange (Warren Douglas), of Action, Inc.

It's also going to be a case with three beautiful blondes, gruff police lieutenant Webb (William Frawley), smooth, lethal hood Duke York (Ricardo Cortez) and, of course, the corpse. He was Anthony Fitch, a famous radio personality whose specialty was scandal.

For Johnny, it all started when one of those blondes, Gerry Smith (Adele Mara) walks into his office just as he was phoning in an ad for a secretary..."blonde, beautiful, between 22 and 28, and with the skin you love to touch and a heart you can't." Gerry disconnects him, claims the job for herself, and shortly is fielding a call for Johnny to meet a woman with a problem at 7 p.m. The woman turns out to be wearing a heavy veil and sporting a Spanish accent. She takes him to the home of Fitch, where Fitch's body is cooling. It's not long before Johnny is knocked on the head and set up for murder. Even when he's cleared, and trailed by Webb as well as by Gerry, he narrowly escapes a one-way dive off a cliff at the hands of Duke York. Then there is the suspicious reaction to several questions by a nightclub singer who is one of the other blondes. It's not long (for a second time; the movie only runs 57 minutes) before we learn Fitch also dabbled in blackmail and that he was just about to blow the lid off some high society secrets. Johnny figures out why his secretary has been so helpful and who the murderer is. But, of course, he can't prove it. So he gathers all the suspects, plus Webb, to recreate some key scenes in a live radio broadcast coming from the dead man's home. You guessed it...the killer panics in front of a nation-wide radio audience. Johnny gets some free publicity for Action, Inc. And it looks like Gerry is going to sign up for a permanent job.

The Inner Circle is strictly a bottom-of-the-bill programmer, but it does no harm. It combines light-hearted murder with romance, which almost always is a pleasant way to waste a little time. The gathering of the suspects for a radio broadcast where they recreate their roles is so odd and awkwardly written that it has a great deal of weird charm. I wouldn't go out of my way to buy this movie. If the price were more than $5.00 I wouldn't buy it at all. Still, one of the pleasures is Will Wright, a grand character actor, who plays the gardener on the dead man's estate. Wright was a lanky, elderly man who could be counted on to play friendly, slow-speaking old coots. He was at his best, however, as corrupt, aging, defensive whiners. When he showed us mankind's unreliable lower nature, he could give any movie he was in a kind of grubby quality. He's one of my favorites

The mystery is easy to solve, I'm sure everyone who watched this film knew who the killer was right from the start of movie. Way to easy. They did try to throw suspicions another way a couple of times but it didn't hold water so it was easy to hold on to your first and correct guess.

If I were Johnny Strange: I would have been upset if someone came into my office and started taking it over the way the new secretary did. Even worse when she would not let me answer my own calls when I told/asked her to hand me the phone and she refused. Then I would have been furious when she told the police that I shot the man when I did not. On and on with this girl... I would not have liked her from the start even if she (or he in some cases) had a pretty face.

Yea Johnny "Angel" (as I'm calling him) really is Strange, about as strange as his strange secretary.

Not a bad film - kinda cute.

5/10