Ellery Queen, Master Detective is the first new Ellery Queen movie in 4 years, it came out in 1940 and the franchise had moved from Republic Pictures to Columbia Pictures. The story is loosely based on The Door Between by Ellery Queen, the screenplay is by Eric Taylor, the director is Kurt Neumann. Eric has quite a nice number of interesting films under his belt, he would write the rest of the EQ films at Columbia, as well as The Black Cat, The Ghost Of Frankenstein, Phantom Of The Opera, Son Of Dracula, The Whistler and Dick Tracy. Kurt directed over 70 features and I've only seen a few of them. Highlights for me are Tarzan And The Amazons, Tarzan And The Leopard Woman, Tarzan And The Huntress, Rocketship X-M, Tarzan And The She-Devil, Kronos and The Fly.
Ralph Bellamy is Ellery Queen, Margaret Lindsay is Nikki Porter, Charley Grapewin is Inspector Queen and James Burke is Sergeant Velle. A fitness guru is apparently dying, he changes his will to cut out his relatives and winds up with his throat cut. The new will has disappeared.
Ellery helps on the case and mistakes Nikki Porter for the daughter of the fitness guru. He takes her to the house and drops her off. She winds up in the next office to the fitness guru just before he's killed. The Inspector suspects her and Ellery helps keep her away from the crooks and his father.
There's plenty of the usual detecting chatter as Ellery works the people at the house. The dead guy disappears and re-appears in a closet. Eventually the killer is uncovered. I've never been a big fan of Ralph Bellamy, I don't seek out his movies much, here he's OK. The script is fairly good, there's a few jokes and such. I got a laugh or two out of it. There doesn't seem to be a copy on YouTube right now. Someone had posted this and the rest of the Columbia series, I downloaded them a couple of weeks ago, now they're gone. You can see the movie in two parts at dailymotion, Part 1 and Part 2.
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