The Inner Circle

Warren Douglas is Johnny Strange of Action Incorporated. In fact, he seems to be all of it. He's calling the newspaper to advertise for a beautiful blonde to be his secretary when Adele Mara cancels the ad -- she fits his description and she can be blonder. Immediately, there's a case: meet a woman, who turns out to be a woman wearing a veil, with a Spanish accent. When the job turns out to be hiding a corpse, Douglas balks. So she knocks him out, calls the cops and heads outside, to remove her wrappings. It's Adele Mara! After she alibis Douglas, he wants to figure out what happened.

It's a movie derived from a radio detective show, but I can't be sure which one. If, as another PI remarked, the cheaper the crook, the gaudier the patter the script must have been dirt cheap. Nonetheless, it's an interestingly tangled mystery with the usual random choice of murderer among the suspects to match its random title. It's fun in an overblown way, but it's no surprise that there were no Oscar nominations for this one.

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.

--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

...On Michael Keaton in the 80's noir spoof Johnny Dangerously???? The inner circle even had a bit of tongue-in-cheek itself, though in much more of a 1940's innocence.

William Frawley's in top form and

Adele Mara really shines in a part that seems tailor made for her

The cinematography is surprisingly top-notch, though you wouldn't notice if you turned it off after the first 15 minutes. It gets a bit more impressive as it goes along.

Though not finest quality direction, it does move well with some snappy dialogue and interesting staging.

Don't expect academy award performances, but it's still worth a watch, just for a few chuckles and to see it's influence on much later noir spoofs.

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