User reviews

Johnny Strange of Action Incorporated is interrupted by a beautiful woman while placing an ad for a secretary. She hangs up on the newspaper and takes the job. When a mysterious call comes in not long after Johnny finds himself knocked out and framed for the murder of a sleazy radio show announcer (ala Walter Winchell). Johnny must now try to solve the case before he ends up behind bars for the murder.

This is a fast moving mystery thriller with a smart ass attitude and a never ending stream of one liners. Running around 55 minutes this movie starts from the first frame and zips right on by to the last. To be certain the film shows signs of a reduced budget, there are only so many sets, but the film over comes the limitations by being very witty. The cast which includes William Frawley as a cop, Ricardo Cortez as suspect William Douglas as Johnny and first (?) billed Adele Mara as the secretary is first rate. The rest of the cast is filled out with many familiar faces and they all come together to make what could have and should have been a less than sterling little mystery into something that is actually quite enjoyable.

Definitely worth a bowl of popcorn and a soda (especially on a multi feature evening on a rainy night)

Warren Douglas, with his B-movie leading-man good looks, appeared in a string of low budget murder yarns. Although regular commercial TV was still a few years away, this film seems to have a 'look' similar to television's detective shows of the 1950's. In fact, a number of this film's supporting cast members would be commonly seen in supporting roles on television, less than ten years hence.

In this particular outing Warren Douglas plays a private eye named 'Johnny Strange' (no kidding), who runs a detective agency called (get ready--) "Action Incorporated".

The story line is somewhat commonplace, starting with the murder of a well known radio personality, and involving a strange "Spanish woman" (that's how the other characters refer to her), some skulking house servants, a missing diamond, a duplicate beautiful blonde, and--of course-- a blustery, mis-guided police detective (William Frawley, who could play these roles in his sleep).

This poverty row feature might turn up on TV, but more likely than not, you'll have to rent or buy a copy of this film from a dealer of video obscurities. Although typical of it's genre, it's an enjoyable watch, nonetheless.

Recommended.

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.

...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.

A detective's new secretary become vital to his next case where a "Madame X" has seemingly committed murder of a radio gossip-columnist. Wise-cracking lines and comedic turns make this a very light-hearted and frivolous affair but all the parts are played with vim and pep, making the time spent with these characters a breeze. Just as in an Agatha Christie novel, many red herrings abound, and the final dénouement is very Poirot-like as all the suspects (inexplicably) gather in a room to be eliminated one by one till the killer is revealed. Almost a parody of a noir, there are plenty of witty lines right from the start and some surprises here and there that hold one's interest during its 55-min runtime.

--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

There clearly wasn't much cash for this, but Adele Mara ("Gerry") and Warren Douglas ("Johnny Strange") do their best to make up for that with a quickly-paced crime drama that punches quite a bit above it's weight. He is a PI on the lookout for a new secretary. She volunteers for the role, and soon the pair are caught up in the murder of a radio gossip columnist. Next thing, he's been thumped over the head and has to convince the police he had nothing to do with the killing. There is no absence of suspects for the crime, indeed there might well have been folks in the front row of the cinema who might have killed this, as it turns out, rather scurrilous man. I enjoyed this - it's cheap and cheerful, but builds nicely to an uncomplicated conclusion.

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.

A film is worth watching if you don't fall asleep. If you fall asleep you will find it was not worth watching. Then you will argue that it maybe was worth watching while you missed the point, but you don't care to start it all over again from the beginning, not even if it is conveniently short, like this one. Someone is murdered, someone in mysterious disguise brings you to the murder to have you solve it, she knocks you down and disappears, she calls the police, the police arrives and arrest you for the murder, since she put the gun he was murdered with in your unconscious hand. All you got to know about her is that she was his wife. A cheerful start of a regular mess. It doesn't get any better, so you fall asleep. The brilliant repartees don't help, and there is no music to speak of. It's all indoors, and there is no star in the feature, only B-stars of no consequence. The mystery is solved, you are released from any suspicion, and you may kiss the bride, that is, the secretary. That is all, a regular mess about a murder of a man who obviously deserved nothing less, and so you don't have to watch it all over again.

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.

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.

Stars adele mara and warren douglas. When someone gets bumped off, investigator johnny strange and his brand new secretary take on the case. When johnny is knocked out cold, the cops are standing over him, asking lots of questions. And there's a long list of suspects! You'll see bill frawley, about ten years before "lucy". Also hollywood regulars ricardo cortez and will wright. It's okay. Not the tightest story, not the best acting. Directed by phil ford. It's a "b" shortie from republic, at only 57 minutes. Mara had started in show biz singing for xavier cugat. I've seen her in a couple other things, but nothing too memorable.

The story begins with a pretty blonde lady barging into a PI's office and taking a job before he has a chance to say anything. From this point on the guy should have been suspicious of her motives. But barging in is what she does and that's it. He becomes the victim of a frame-up and goes along with everything. His buddy Fred Mertz (I mean William Frawley) probably would have just looked the other way if he had been asked, but he gets steered away. The whole thing is so lightweight as to be inconsequential. There is a guy killed, but he was an extortionist jerk anyway and got what was coming to him. Everyone plays around, despite the potential seriousness that would exist under real circumstances. The characters mug and fool around and we just know that no-one is going to hang for their crimes. It has a nice quality to it but no real substance.

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

Republic Pictures gave the movie-going public The Inner Circle back in 1946. It's a lightweight mystery about a gossip columnist who was shot to death and private detective Warren Douglas is near framed and unframed for the deed. Truth be told not too many people liked the columnist who had a sideline in blackmail.

Doing the framing on Douglas is Adele Mara who gets hired as Douglas's secretary, frames him and the alibis Douglas all in a day. She's beautiful and quite an operator and has a sister in Martha Montgomery who was a victim of the columnist's blackmail.

The columnist operated out of Ricardo Cortez's nightclub where he has the sultry Virginia Christine as his regular singer. There are also a pair of household help the victim had, maid Dorothy Adams who was also Gene Tierney's maid in Laura and gardener Will Wright. Both of them are looking to pocket what they can from an employer neither was crazy about.

Trying to figure it all out is homicide detective William Frawley and from the beginning the guilty party was rather obvious. What took everyone so long?

Not the best murder mystery out there.

Strictly lightweight entertainment, the sort that would soon end up on TV. Breezy detective Mike Strange (Douglas) is set up to take the fall for the murder of a gossip columnist. Was it his new secretary Gerry (Mara) who set him up. She's one fast-talking cutie who seemingly can work her way out of anything. Plus, she's rather mysterious with a hazy past. Mike better figure things out or Detective Webb (Frawley) will have him in the slammer in a flash. In this edition, being a 1940's private eye is not much fun.

This is Mara's movie. She plays the lively secretary in sparkling style. Too bad she never had an A-picture career. She was good enough. Douglas is handsome and a passable performer, but little more. Director Ford's visual style shows some atmosphere, but noir is unfortunately a year or two away. Good to see such familiar faces as Will Wright (the gardener) and Dorothy Adams (forever a maid) picking up paydays, along with Fred Mertz, oops!, I mean Bill Frawley in a familiar cop role. And catch a sexy young Virginia Christine as Rhoda. I guess that was before all the Folgers coffee gave her a TV make-over. Anyhow, it's the cast that carries the brief run-time, while the whodunit part meanders in not very involving fashion. All in all, the movie amounts to a standard 40's programmer and little more.

Sorry noir fans. This one is "for the birds" as they say. There is a seductive blond. There is a murder. There is a persistent detective and dark moody cinematography. But the progression of this plot is so implausible and so hum drum, you will kick yourself for watching it all the way through. That's what I did when the credits rolled. Waste of a good hour of viewing.

***SPOILERS*** It's handsome and hot shot private eye Johnny Strange, Warren Douglas, who gets to the bottom of this very strange and confusing murder case by having all the suspects, five in all, attend a radio show where he'll expos the killer live and on the air. Thats's, since it's 1946 and before the Miranda Decision, without informing the killer of his rights to keep quite and get an attorney and if he can afford one a shyster, lawyer, will be provided to him for on taxpayers expense. This all stems from the murder of newspaper gossip columnist Tony Fitch's who has the goods on a number of big shots in the city that if exposed may well embarrass them.

It's no big surprise to who exactly did Fitch is since everyone of the five had a motive to murder him. It's just that his eventual killer was the last, like in most of these whodunit flicks, person you would have suspected to have murder the guy. Not too convincing of an ending with with Fitch's killer suddenly grabbing a policeman'a revolver and thus admitting his or her guilt. It was more of a reason that the killer finally decided to end this very boring detective movie and finally, for those of us who are condemned to watch or review it, put and end to our suffering.

There's of course pretty blond secretary Gerry Smith, Adele Mara, who's boss Johnny Strange at first tries to hit on and later accuse her of murdering Fitch just to draw his real murderer out into the open. There's also former 1920's and early 1930's Latin lover, who's actually Jewish, Ricardo Cortez as gangster and part time night club owner Duke York who claims throughout the movie that he knows who Fitch's killer is but keeps his mouth shut on his identity. And at the end of the film, if your still awake, you'll find out why!

A private detective hires a new secretary. When a gossip columnist is murdered, she may be too good to be true.

Run of the mill crime film with a weak script. Warren Douglas as the investigator just goes through the motions but Adele Mara gives a lively performance as the secretary.