Ellery Queen

Back in the 1930s and 1940s, B movie series with various detectives were fairly common; I've mentioned several of the series before. I don't think, however, that I'd ever actually seen an Ellery Queen movie until I popped in my DVD of The Spanish Cape Mystery.

Donald Cook plays Ellery Queen, a detective created by a pair of mystery writers who used the pseudonym "Ellery Queen" both for the author of the books, and the name of the detective. Ellery the detective has a police detective father, played here only in the opening segment which has Ellery solving a mystery that has no bearing to the rest of the movie. Ellery, together with his friend Judge Macklin (Berton Churchill), are planning to go for a vacation out on the California coast, where the plan is to have nothing whatsoever to do with murder mysteries.

Yeah right. Just before Ellery and the judge get to their seaside cottage, we go next door to the Spanish Cape mansion. There, the Godfreys are gathered, together with the people who are going to be heirs to a great-aunt's fortune. Young Stella Godfrey (Helen Twelvetrees) is there to provide the requisite love interest, and in addition to a bunch of bickering people we see somebody kidnapping both her and her uncle!

So when Ellery arrives at the cottage, he finds Stella tied up there, the uncle not to be found. They take her back to Spanish Cape, and Ellery falls for her even though she's got a fiancé in Leslie Court. However, as they get back, they find that another man, Marco, has been killed, wearing nothing but a pair of swimming trunks and a cape around his shoulders. Anybody at Spanish Cape could be the murderer. Well, except for the dead guy and, we presume, Stella.

The police are brought in in the form of Sheriff Moley, who proceeds to make one wrong assumption after another about the case. Ellery himself insists that he's not going to try to solve the case because that's the police's job, and besides, he came here not to get involved in any murder mysteries. But of course, more people get killed, with the same odd conceit that the men are found in swimming trunks.

The Spanish Cape Mystery is nothing more than a B mystery, but in that niche it does quite well. The characters are interesting enough, the mystery itself is diverting, and there's also the requisite humor. As an example, the Sheriff keeps calling Ellery by a different detective name, such as "Sherlock" or "Mr. Chan" instead of Ellery. It's nothing too taxing, but then, these B mysteries weren't supposed to be anything other than throwaway entertainment. Two decades on this stuff would have been perfect for an episode of one or another of the TV detective shows, but at the time the movie was made we didn't have TV series yet.

TCM has run several of the mystery series in the Saturday matinee programming block, and if they had the rights to The Spanish Cape Mystery, it would be perfect for them to show there.