The Mandarin Mystery (1936)

I love this movie so much

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

The film never slows down or bores, plunging from one harrowing sequence to the next.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

This has to be the most juvenile version of a private detective I've ever seen on screen. Imagine younger versions of Philo Vance, Nick Charles, Boston Blackie, Nick Carter or Dick Tracy, chasing girls and gangsters at the same time, and stopping off to ogle some innocent beauty while en route. That's what happens here, with Ellery Queen at his most collegiate. As played by Eddie Quillan, he's a far cry from what Ralph Bellamy or Jim Hutton would later play. Like those later incarnations of the famous detective, Ellery Queen has his king, and that's his dad Wade Boteler who is tough on him, not just because that's dad's personality (as was the case in the later film and TV series) but because Ellery's got a lot to learn and a lot of toning down to do. That weakens this entry which concerns two murders and a theft, with Charlotte Henry as the heroine whose finances are at risk and who is tied to the murders and the theft. As juvenile as he seems, the methods Ellery uses are smart, more thanks to the script than reality. Franklin Pangborn is amusing as the continuously fainting hotel clerk who can't bear all the dead bodies. Bad editing (over 10 minutes cut out for TV viewing) makes this choppy, but that's the fault of whoever over at Republic pictures decides that their films needed a reel chopped out for TV viewing.

The Mandarin Mystery is the second of two Ellery Queen films done by Columbia Pictures and it features Eddie Quillan as the amateur sleuth and son of a professional one. Instead of the shy bookish Ellery as realized best by Jim Hutton on a shortlived television series, we get a Smart Aleck punk who lives to show up the police department, especially Inspector Queen played here by Wade Boteler. No wonder fans of the series were up in arms.The Mandarin referred to here is a Chinese stamp which was a rare misprint edition because the Mandarin portrayed on the postage stamp had his clothes on backwards. Charlotte Henry is going to sell the stamp to collector George Irving, but the stamp is stolen and the thief killed.Unfortunately several minutes were eliminated from this film by YouTube so I had to piece it together in my mind. Not a bad story, but Quillan really kills this film.

The second film appearance of detective Ellery Queen marks a step down from the first, "The Spanish Cape Mystery". Queen is played this time by Eddie Quillan, who is a little too jokey to be very convincing as a crime-solving genius. However, Wade Boteler (who might have been THE most prolific actor ever - IMDb lists him with 444(!) credits) is perfectly cast as his gruff Inspector father, and Charlotte Henry is quite the sweetheart as the innocent (?) girl he falls in love with. The plot is kind of muddled and the poor existing prints don't help the viewer's comprehension much, but it does have some clever bits (like the explanation for the missing fruit from the room where the dead body is discovered). This one is recommended mostly for hardcore genre fans. ** out of 4.

The literary work on which this film was based--THE Chinese ORANGE MYSTERY--is a locked-room murder mystery that is light on characterization but heavy on the puzzle aspect of the murder, where no one knows who the victim is, the victim's clothes have all been turned inside out, and everything in the murder room has been turned backward. To do a faithful film adaptation of the book would probably be difficult, especially for a 55-minute b-movie which needs to be fast-moving and witty. In the Ellery Queen film made the year before, THE Spanish CAPE MYSTERY, which was an OK film, the filmmakers basically streamlined the plot, but were unable to give much depth or interest to any of the characters (other than Ellery and Inspector Queen). THE MANDARIN MYSTERY takes elements of the book THE Chinese ORANGE MYSTERY--a rare stamp, a murder in a locked room, some of the character names--and basically creates a new story around them. I had just re-read the novel before seeing this film, but they have little in common. If you can forget the book and just treat the film as an entity of its own, it's not that bad. Eddie Quillan is a charming screen presence, and he tries to restrain his comic mugging somewhat, but the script does not allow him to show much analytical prowess, and he spends far more effort romantically chasing the girl who is the main suspect than he does working on the crime. Wade Boteler plays Inspector Queen well--professional, but with a warm heart--and he and Ellery do show glimpses of the rapport they have in the books (and in the Jim Hutton/David Wayne TV series). On the whole, though, this film is an average 30s murder mystery, played with a light touch by a charming comic actor, but it has little to do with either the novel on which it was supposedly based or with the Ellery Queen series in general.