Say It Ain't So, El! The Final Four Episodes of Ellery Queen; Plus, My Top Ten EQ Episodes!

I watched all these Ellery Queen series episodes with my 91-year-old father (who started humming the theme song for a while afterwards).  It's appropriate because when this series premiered over 46 years ago in 1975, I watched it with my parents, at least until we moved to Mexico in 1976 and I kind of lost track of it (like a lot of other people did apparently).  

It's a great show to watch with a father because its central relationship is between a father and son: Inspector Queen and his precocious son, Ellery. (Can a 42-year-old man be precocious?)  Their relationship is brought out really nicely in a couple of the final four episodes.  

Ellery realizing his series has been canceled? 
No, it's Jim Hutton in The Twilight Zone

First, kudos once again to David Wayne and Jim Hutton, who excelled in these roles.  I have already talked a bit about David Wayne, but Jim Hutton had an interesting, and perhaps insufficiently realized, acting career too.  He was about three years younger than my Dad and was in the army in Berlin for a couple of years about the same time my Dad was.  Maybe they met!  

As an actor one of his early roles was in the esteemed Twilight Zone episode "And When the Sky Was Opened," which is one of the comparatively few Jim Hutton (as opposed to Tim Hutton) performances I have actually seen.  His mounting hysteria in that episode is quite impressive.  He must have been 24 years old at the time, and he looks a lot like his son Timothy Hutton.

JH actually starred or co-starred in quite a few films in the Sixties, including Walk Don't Run with Cary Grant and The Green Berets with John Wayne, but he ended up doing mostly television in the Seventies.  Not a single one of his films have I seen, however!  He strikes me as a charming "leading man type" who should have had a bigger film career, but I don't believe it was really the era of the wholesome hero type anymore.  

As for television, aside from EQ I remember seeing JH as the husband in the 1973 horror film Don't Be Afraid of the Dark, which made quite an impression on me in the day, and as the older man romantically interested in perpetual problem child McKenzie Phillips on the Norman Lear sitcom One Day at a Time (an even more problematic story line considering the actress' later molestation charges against her father).  

JH died from liver cancer at the age of 45, just a month after being diagnosed with the disease (which, in metastasized form, killed my mother as well), and just a little over a year before the premier of the film which launched his then nineteen-year-old son Timothy to stardom, Ordinary People.  How sad JH didn't get to see his son in that film, for which the young man won an Oscar.  (You can see him thanking his late father at the Oscars in the clip below.)  I have a feeling there might have been some joint film appearances in store for the father and son at some point!

How sad too that the EQ series was canceled after just one year.  It really deserved at least two years, like Tim Hutton's own Nero Wolfe series, in which he performed most ably as Nero's assistant Archie Goodwin. I get the impression that Jim Hutton quite enjoyed playing Ellery and he was really coming into his own in the role, as less of an absent-minded writer type and more of a serious sleuth.  But at least we have one year of the series, which, if far from perfect, deserves the praise it gets from fans.

On the Radio: Ken Barry in Tyrant

Episode 19, The Adventure of the Tyrant of Tin Pan Alley, is a solid episode in my eyes, even though a key clue drops with rather a thud.  Still, there are some nice murder bits, as it were.

It's also an entertaining milieu, involving a radio station and a famous crooner, played by famous crooner Rudy Vallee, an improbable sex symbol with young ladies back in the Twenties.  Guess you had to be there!

Vallee plays the murderee and spends the first few minutes of the episode being nasty to everyone; he's in fine form, too.  

"Act terrified, Mr. Vallee!"

My only knowledge of Vallee when I was kid came from the series Batman (much beloved by me in syndication, when I was six or so), where he played wicked Lord Marmaduke Ffogg in several episodes from Season 3, when they introduced Batgirl, played by the late Yvonne Craig, who recalled that Vallee was something of a right bastard to everyone on the set.  So his character on EQ may not have been much of a stretch!

Also praiseworthy is light comedy actor Ken Barry (F Troop, Mama's Family), who was more than capable of more dramatic turns, as he gives here.  And the last appearance of John Hillerman as Simon Brimmer is certainly noteworthy.  Make sure you stick around for his deadpan account about his childhood teddy bear, a perfect sendoff to this brilliant character.

The dying clue concept, which as Scott Ratner has pointed out is inherently absurd, is enjoyably played around with here too.

Ellery gets angry in Caesar

However, Episode 20, The Adventure of Caesar's Last Sleep, surpasses 19; indeed it's one of the best in the series.  It's a genuine locked room mystery and a cunningly devised one indeed.  Additionally there's a good story arc, one of the best of the series as well, involving a cynical politician wanting to go after gangsters for publicity and not caring if he unfairly defames cops like Inspector Queen along the way.  

Mobster Ralph Caesar is going to testify before the pol's committee and, after a hit man attempts his life, narrowly missing killing him, he goes in hiding at a hotel, guarded by two of New York's finest, including Sergeant Velie, where of course he dies anyway.  Poisoned!  It's a very neat trick.  

There are some notable performers in this one, including Borscht Belt comedian and actor Jan Murray as the titular Caesar; Stuart Whitman--yet another familiar television presence, who was also a Best Actor Oscar nominee once upon a time (I had no idea)--as the pol; handsome Edward Albert, son of Eddie Albert and the blind guy who canoodled with Goldie Hawn in Butterflies are Free, as the pol's conscientious assistant; Michael Gazzo, another Oscar nominee, who specialized in gangsters, as, well, a gangster; weirdo cult actor Timothy Carey as the scary hitman (he looks like Christopher Lee); and Emmy nominated actress Bibi Besch in a comparative bit part as a voluble neighbor of Ceasar's.  (It's impressive how she manages to make her small part memorable.) 

Also Tom Reese as Sergeant Velie finally gets to do a bit more than stand around looking imposing and call Ellery "Maestro."  And David Wayne actually gets to solve the case! (Well, Ellery lets him do it.)  This would have made a great season finale (and series finale, as things turned out), but the actual series finale was pretty good too.

Timothy Carey going totally Christopher Lee as the hitman in Caesar

Episode 21, The Hardhearted Huckster, was the weakest in the bunch by far I thought.  It concerns a murder in the advertising industry, so we're in Madmen territory, which should have been interesting, but it really isn't, much.  You know the murder is going to have something to do with that lunch the murderee was eating in his office and I didn't think it was particularly clever.  

Forties film star Eddie Bracken does give his role some gusto, however, as does the wonderful Carolyn Jones, an Oscar-nominated actress known today for having played Morticia on the television Addams Family series.  I always thought she deserved bigger stardom.  She died too young at 53.  

Speaking of untimely deaths, this episode also has Bob Crane of Hogan's Heroes fame ("Hogan!!"), who was himself infamously murdered at age 49 in 1978.  (It turned out he had quite a tawdry sex life.)  I was in Washington, D. C. with my parents when the news broke; and, being a fan of Hogan's Heroes in syndication as well as of murder mysteries, I was quite interested.  His murder remains officially unsolved today, although I think we know who did it.  This EQ appearance was one of his last on television.

Ellery and his Dad get some shocking news
in The Adventure of the Disappearing Dagger

Finally, EQ bid us adieu with episode 22, The Case of the Disappearing Dagger.  I thought this episode was rather clever.  It's about an elderly detective who gets bumped off after he announces that he has solved an unsolved locked room murder from five years ago.  Had he gotten too close to the truth?  

The "locked room" here is a small plane, the murder, that of a wartime munitions manufacturer, having taken place during the flight, while the innocent passengers were drugged.*  

*(There are actually parallels here with a famous real murder, incidentally.)  

So all the suspects are people who were on the flight.  A good group they are too, including Mel Ferrer, Audrey Hepburn's ex who had long specialized in silky villains; Gary Burghoff, sweet little "Radar" from the lauded TV series MASH, who plays a real stinker here; elegant Dana Wynter, who plays the last of the series ungrieving widows; and Ronny Cox as the pilot, early in his career here, a great actor who would play opposite Timothy Hutton in the film Taps incidentally, though unfortunately here his character, meant to be sympathetic, is incredibly irritating.  

A frail-looking Walter Pidgeon--he retired from acting the next year, his last role being in Mae West's embarrassing sex face Sextette--plays the detective, who was a mentor, we learn, of Inspector Queen's.  There's also a droll cameo as a thief turned magician (and perhaps still a thief) from Tom Brown, whose career in film went back to 1924!  I really have to credit the casting of these episodes.

Father and son share a triumphant moment in
The Adventure of Caesar's Last Sleep
Who was Ellery's mother, by the way,
The Fifty Foot Woman?

I thought the plot was engaging, if not quite as ingenious as the one in Caesar's Last Sleep.  From this episode there's no reason to think there would not have been more clever ones to come, but, alas, it was not to be.  

So what are my favorite episodes from the series?  You don't have to deduce it, for I shall list them below!

My Favorite Ellerys

1. The Adventure of Caesar's Last Sleep

2. The Adventure of the Wary Witness (Frank Flanigan)

3. The Adventure of the Sinister Scenario

4. The Adventure of the Mad Tea Party

5. The Adventure of Veronica's Veils (Simon Brimmer)

6. The Adventure of the Chinese Dog

7. The Adventure of the Pharaoh's Curse (Simon Brimmer)

8. The Adventure of Miss Aggie's Farewell Performance (Simon Brimmer)

9. The Adventure of the Disappearing Dagger

10. The Adventure of the Tyrant of Tin Pan Alley (Simon Brimmer)

What are yours?