Ellery Queen's Penthouse Mystery
Like the first entry in Columbia's "Ellery Queen" series, Ellery Queen's Penthouse Mystery depicts its amateur-criminologist hero as an oafish ignoramus. This time around, Chinese ventriloquist Gordon Cobb (Noel Madison), is murdered by a gang of jewel thieves. Baffled by the contradictory clues, Inspector Queen (Charles Grapewin) asks his son Ellery (Ralph Bellamy) to help out.
Casts & Crew
Ralph Bellamy
Margaret Lindsay
Charley Grapewin
Anna May Wong
James Burke
Eduardo Ciannelli
Frank Albertson
Ann Doran
Noel Madison
Charles Lane
Russell Hicks
Tom Dugan
Mantan Moreland
Theodore von Eltz
Also Directed by James P. Hogan
Dr. Alfred Morris, a university chemistry professor, rediscovers an ancient Mayan formula for a gas which turns men into pliant, obedient, zombie-like ghouls. After medical student Ted Allison becomes a guinea pig for Morris, the professor imagines that Allison's fiancée, a beautiful concert singer Isabel Lewis, wants to break off the engagement because she prefers the professor as a more "mature" lover but in reality loves Eric, her accompanist. In order to bring Ted back from his trance-like states, Morris commands him to perform a cardiectomy on recently deceased or living bodies in order to use serum from their hearts as a temporary antidote. When the serial murders seem to coincide with Isabel's touring schedule, ace reporter "Scoop" McClure gets on the mad scientist's trail.
Detective Ellery Queen aids Free Dutch agents battle Nazi spies over a prize of industrial diamonds.
A man is framed for embezzlement and runs off to San Francisco. His wife hires Queen to try and track him down before the police get to him.
Captain Drummond and his girlfriend want to marry but a hidden treasure in the house in which they want to celebrate their marriage is complicating the situation involving a series of deaths and an elusive murderer.
A couple inherits a college and to generate revenue offers a thousand dollars to players for each touchdown they score.
Bob and Jim Whitely are twin brothers. Bob, an army veteran who suffered shell shock in the war, escapes from a sanitarium and holds up the Express train, for which Jim is mistakenly arrested. Jim soon escapes from jail in order to find his brother. However, his task is complicated by a crooked sheriff who pins a holdup and murder on him that the sheriff himself actually committed. To make matters worse, the murder victim was Tommy Wilkins, the brother of Jim's fiancee, who now thinks that Jim killed her brother.
Backstage comedy, starring Martha Raye and Charles Ruggles, about a theatrical producer rehearsing his new show with a temperamental leading lady. Not to be confused with the 1947 film of the same title that starred Loretta Young.
Drummond manages to save a woman from jumping in front of his car but she runs away with his car. He traces her and she asks him to help her out of a dangerous situation.
A doctor who has spent his career working on ways to revive the dead sees his chance to prove his theory by performing his procedures on a recently deceased dog.