The Inner Circle

Plot synopsis:
Shortly after his marriage to Anastasia, Ivan Sanchin, who works as a projectionist at the headquarters of the state security service (called KGB in the film), is summoned urgently to the Kremlin. Having proved his skill, he is appointed private projectionist to Stalin and his inner circle, including the head of state security Beria. This makes him proud and happy, for he venerates the dictator as if he were a god.
When a Jewish couple in his cramped apartment house are arrested, their little daughter Katya is left behind. Though Anastasia wants to adopt the child, Ivan forbids it because her parents are "enemies of the people”. However she secretly visits Katya at a state orphanage.
As German troops approach Moscow in 1941, Ivan and Anastasia are put on a train to a safe town. Also on the train is Beria, who gets Anastasia drunk and seduces her, sending Ivan back to Moscow. For a long time he hears nothing of her until she turns up one day, pregnant and abandoned. Her experiences have unhinged her and she commits suicide.
In 1953 the lonely Ivan is visited by Katya, now an attractive teenager, who treasures the memory of Anastasia's affection. Ivan offers help, but she says she wants to go her own way. Then Stalin dies and Ivan, on duty to control the crowds waiting to view the corpse, sees Katya being jostled in the crush. He rushes in to rescue her and, this time, she is ready to accept his protection.

Tags: murder

Review:
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.
Witty fast moving mystery is better than you think it should be thanks to a good cast delivering great lines.
Johnny Strange of Action Incorporated is interrupted by a beautiful woman while placing an ad for a secretary.
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.
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).
--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.
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.
It's not long before Johnny is knocked on the head and set up for murder.
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.
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.
Johnny gets some free publicity for Action, Inc. And it looks like Gerry is going to sign up for a permanent job.
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.
Still, one of the pleasures is Will Wright, a grand character actor, who plays the gardener on the dead man's estate.
Fast-moving murder mystery that gives its surprises away in the right places; but the humor is strained and the ending is silly.
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.
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 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 andAdele Mara really shines in a part that seems tailor made for herThe 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..
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.
But he is fourth-billed, below William Frawley, who plays a cop.
And Adele Mara gets top billing.It's fun to watch.
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.
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.
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.
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..
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.
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.
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.
All in all, the movie amounts to a standard 40's programmer and little more..
A Light Mystery - Weird Ending.
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.
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.
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.
***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.
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.
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.
The hook for me occurred right in the opening scene introducing Johnny Strange of Action Incorporated in unusual fashion utilizing his business ad in the local phone directory.
But it got better, when beautiful blonde Geraldine Smith (Adele Mara) answers a want-ad in progress from Johnny Strange himself (Warren Douglas), hanging up the phone and hiring herself on the spot.
What Miss Smith was soon to learn was that "A secretary to Johnny Strange is no picnic...".For a film coming in at under an hour, this one sure has a lot of characters, understandable given the nature of the story.
You had to spread the murder suspects around to keep the viewer guessing, and it isn't until half way into the picture that we learn that the murder victim, a gossip personality on radio, had a blackmail sideline going for him to supplement his income.
The other likely suspects include a torch singer (Virginia Christine), a housekeeper (Dorothy Adams), the gardener (Will Wright), and secretary extraordinaire, Miss Smith herself.In order to solve the case, Johnny Strange pulls a page out of the Charlie Chan play book, and brings all the suspects together for a live radio broadcast to smoke out the killer.
Even with Johnny's explanation of how he was able to put it all together, it doesn't ring quite true, but beyond that, the flick winds up a nifty little time filler with an entertaining cast of characters.
Oh yeah, can't forget William Frawley as the luckless detective, exhibiting some of the traits that would make him the Ricardo's favorite neighbor a few more years down the road..
Adele Mara had a very healthy career and she was a very lovely adornment to the many movies she appeared in, even if they were only programmers.Johnny Strange (Warren Douglas)of Action Incorporated, is a private investigator, who is thinking of hiring a private secretary, when a mysterious Miss Smith (Adele Mara) breezes in and takes over in a very efficient but nice way.
He accepts a job from another mysterious lady and finds he is set up for the murder of Anthony Fitch, a well known radio personality, who has many enemies.
The mysterious lady and Miss Smith are the same - she is trying to protect her sister, who is wanted for the murder.
William Frawley, long before his "I Love Lucy" days, plays Detective Webb, who is called in to investigate.
Miss Smith, who just happens to be around, concocts a story that is not true but gets Johnny off.Johnny goes back to the scene of the crime to find out the truth and finds a record in the rubbish bin.
When Johnny plays the record, he recognises the singer as Rhoda (Virgina Christine) a girl he used to know when she was a singer south of the border.
Ricardo Cortez makes an always welcome appearance as Duke York, the owner of the Penguin Club and also an old friend of Johnnys.Miss Smith's sister, Anne (Martha Montgomery) enters the scene and tells how she was involved with Fitch - he was blackmailing her.
How the murderer is found out is achieved as a radio broadcast with everyone in the film playing their parts in front of microphones.
It is an interesting ending to a very recommended film..
"Hello, this is Johnny Strange of Action Incorporated.".
This is the ad Johnny Strange (Warren Douglas) places for a secretary: "Wanted: secretary to human dynamo.
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.
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.
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.
She's a real delight.Overall, I'm going to give this breezy, fun film a 7/10..
In the case of "The Inner Circle", you'll stick with it just to see how far down the road of absurdity it will go.The plot deals with a private investigator (Warren Douglas) in need of an assistant who gets one that instant when all of a sudden a mysterious blonde (Adele Mara) walks in and announces that he's just hired her.
Then, she takes a mysterious phone call from a "client" whom Douglas agrees to meet which results him stumbling onto a dead body and the veiled brunette client proceeds to conk him over the head.
You won't be surprised to find out who she really is, and then the ridiculousness continues at a break-neck speed with a line-up of other suspects and Mara getting Douglas off for a murder he didn't commit on a self-defense charge.Cantankerous William Frawley plays a police investigator who trails both Mara and Douglas and always shows up at the most inconveniently obvious times.
There's a grizzled old handyman (Will Wright) and housekeeper (Dorothy Adams) who worked for the victim (a radio columnist), as well as a nightclub singer (Virginia Christine, best known for the Folgers commercials years later) and the nightclub owner (veteran actor Ricardo Cortez).
To top off the less than one hour of absurd story-telling, Douglas has Mara named as the killer and re-enacts the crime on a live radio show with everybody present with scripts in hand for the final denouncement.In spite of all the downright atrocious plot twists and developments, you might find yourself engrossed with ironic laughter at it all.
The film begins with Johnny Strange looking to place an ad for Action Incorporated.
He's a fast-talking private eye sort of fellow and I really liked the first ten minutes or so when he met up with a new (and quite bewildering) secretary.
He soon gets a case involving a very mysterious woman—a woman who wants him to dump a body.
The inspector (William Frawley) eventually is ready to arrest Strange when his odd secretary manages to save his skin.
But who is this mysterious lady and how can Strange get to the bottom of this?
Tune in to this B-movie.if you are interested.This low-budget B-mystery isn't great, but it is enjoyable.
In addition, old movie nuts (like me) will enjoy seeing Ricardo Cortez in one of his last movie roles.
A radio gossip columnist is murdered and Johnny Strange of Action Incorporated (yes, indeed...) eventually solves the crime after being helped and hindered by a new secretary, a police lieutenant , a gangster, a gardener,a housekeeper and a night club singer.
It aspires to be Raymond Chandleresque but falls short.Johnny Strange is played routinely by Warren Douglas.
Adele Mara as the secretary and William Frawley as the cop are much better.
Ricardo Cortez is the gangster and puts in a polished performance but unfortunately isn't in it much.
The ubiquitous Edward Gargan plays 'Parking Ticket Cop.' And why the film is called 'The Inner Circle' certainly escaped me.