The Inner Circle (1946)

Surprisingly incoherent and boring

I like Black Panther, but I didn't like this movie.

Entertaining from beginning to end, it maintains the spirit of the franchise while establishing it's own seal with a fun cast

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

This is the ad Johnny Strange (Warren Douglas) places for a secretary: "Wanted: secretary to human dynamo. Exclamation point. Must be blonde, beautiful, between 22 and 28, unmarried, with a skin you love to touch and a heart you can't." Before he can finish, Gerry Smtih (Adele Mara) interrupts and takes the position. Her first function is to take a call form a mysterious woman looking for help. Johnny arrives at the appointed place at the appointed time to find a heavily veiled woman with a Spanish accent. She takes him to a house where Johnny finds a dead man on the floor. What has Johnny gotten himself into? I've read the reviews on IMDb and see that opinions are pretty much split on The Inner Circle. Personally, I loved it. It's fast paced, has some interesting characters played by an above average cast for this kind of movie, an interesting plot, nice cinematography, witty and sharp dialogue, and just about everything else. Other than the final scene where the mystery is solved, it all works for me. Even with the ridiculous ending, it's still a joy to watch everything before that unfold. What fun! The Inner Circle looks and feels like much more than the 40s B movie it is.I mentioned the cast and what a cast it is. Warren Douglas, William Frawley, Ricardo Cortez, Will Wright, and Dorothy Adams are all outstanding. But to me (and most everyone else), it's Adele Mara who really stands out. She's a real delight.Overall, I'm going to give this breezy, fun film a 7/10.

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.

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.

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.