The Mandarin Mystery (1936)

A Brilliant Conflict

Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

I haven't seen many of Eddie Quillan's movies but it wouldn't be the first time that the characters in a film fail to resemble their bookish originals.Josephine Temple (Charlotte Henry) arrives in New York with the world's most valuable stamp - the Chinese Mandarin. For something so precious it is carelessly handled - she shows it to various people at the wharf and then carries it around in her purse. Of course it is stolen but the thief winds up dead and the stamp ends up with Josephine. This is one of those locked room mysteries. There is no end of suspects apart from Josephine. There is Donald Trent (George Walcott), who knew the dead man and owed him money. Irene (Kay Hughes) and Martha Kirk (Rita La Roy), sisters, who can't live on the allowance their uncle provides. Martha is just about to tell all she knows when she is killed by an unknown assassin. Ellery Queen (Eddie Quillan) solves the mystery with a re-creation of the crime. I quite liked him in the role. The rapport between him and his father was good. Franklin Pangborn does his turn as a harassed hotel manager.Charlotte Henry made a very lovely heroine. Her career was scuttled in 1933 when she won the coveted role of Alice in "Alice in Wonderland". After that, she said, people could only see her in those type of roles. It is very nice to see her portray a modern young woman.Recommended.

If one can simply forget the literary Ellery Queen, this is an OK murder mystery (locked room murder, etc. etc. ). the problem, for Ellery Queen fans is that the whole thing, on that basis, is WAY off the mark. Queen is an analytical detective, and his father and the Police are not dolts. The books are written with more twists and turns and excellence that most others on the mystery shelf (with the possible exceptions of S.S. Van Dyne (Philo Vance) and, of course, Agatha Christie.)Dropping the comparison, one must note the ridiculousness of some of the plot e.g. the whole world knows the value of the stamp - it even appears on the Times Square news bulletin - yet the girl carries the stamp in an envelope in her open pocketbook. Despite all of this, Quillan is a fun actor, definitely not Ellery but giving the film the spunk it desperately needs. Charlotte Henry does not have a 'clue' and thus cannot handle the idiocy of what her character says and does. Still, on a chilly night, with the rain on the window, and curled up on a comfortable chair, this passes the time quickly.

As a reader of EQ mysteries, and a collector of his films, I have to say that this is the absolute WORST in the entire series!EQ, far from being a "master detective", is portrayed as a bumbling fool who continually gets in his father's way.Not only that, but the background music in this film is totally UNRELATED to the action....it's as if someone off-screen turned on a radio and let it play while the movie was being shot.Pass on this one!

Nice little mystery, with a good deal of comedy mixed in. Eddie Quillan is not my favorite Ellery Queen, but he has an interesting twist to the character. I though Wade Boteler did a great job as Inspector Queen and Franklin Pangborn did a great job as comic relief as Mellish, the hotel manager.Overall, a nice film, I was quite pleased with it.