Actuakers One of my all time favorites.

PlatinumRead Just so...so bad

Brightlyme i know i wasted 90 mins of my life.

Doomtomylo a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.

dougdoepke Strictly lightweight entertainment, the sort that would soon end up on TV. 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. She's one fast-talking cutie who seemingly can work her way out of anything. Plus, she's rather mysterious with a hazy past. 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. Too bad she never had an A-picture career. She was good enough. Douglas is handsome and a passable performer, but little more. Director Ford's visual style shows some atmosphere, but noir is unfortunately a year or two away. 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. And catch a sexy young Virginia Christine as Rhoda. I guess that was before all the Folgers coffee gave her a TV make-over. Anyhow, it's the cast that carries the brief run-time, while the whodunit part meanders in not very involving fashion. All in all, the movie amounts to a standard 40's programmer and little more.

MartinHafer 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. But, when he refuses, she klunks him on the head and calls the police to report the murder—then disappears. 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. As for the plot, it's mostly familiar stuff but the part of the secretary was wonderful and breathed life into this otherwise ordinary plot. In addition, old movie nuts (like me) will enjoy seeing Ricardo Cortez in one of his last movie roles. Despite being a suave leading man in the 1930s, his movie prospects dried up in the 1940s and he went into business—and amassed quite a fortune outside of Hollywood.

Terrell-4 --Are you troubled...frightened...suspicious...or merely curious?--Your problem is my problem. --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. He was Anthony Fitch, a famous radio personality whose specialty was scandal. 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. She takes him to the home of Fitch, where Fitch's body is cooling. It's not long before Johnny is knocked on the head and set up for murder. Even when he's cleared, and trailed by Webb as well as by Gerry, he narrowly escapes a one-way dive off a cliff at the hands of Duke York. Then there is the suspicious reaction to several questions by a nightclub singer who is one of the other blondes. 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. But, of course, he can't prove it. 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. You guessed it...the killer panics in front of a nation-wide radio audience. Johnny gets some free publicity for Action, Inc. And it looks like Gerry is going to sign up for a permanent job. The Inner Circle is strictly a bottom-of-the-bill programmer, but it does no harm. 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. If the price were more than $5.00 I wouldn't buy it at all. Still, one of the pleasures is Will Wright, a grand character actor, who plays the gardener on the dead man's estate. Wright was a lanky, elderly man who could be counted on to play friendly, slow-speaking old coots. He was at his best, however, as corrupt, aging, defensive whiners. When he showed us mankind's unreliable lower nature, he could give any movie he was in a kind of grubby quality. He's one of my favorites

Hitchcoc 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.