hwg1957-102-265704 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. Made on a small budget on a few sets it starts out lively but becomes increasingly sillier until the unconvincing climax. 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.

Rainey Dawn 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. Way to easy. 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. Even worse when she would not let me answer my own calls when I told/asked her to hand me the phone and she refused. Then I would have been furious when she told the police that I shot the man when I did not. On and on with this girl... 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

mark.waltz If movie plots are like train wrecks, this one is up there with the crash in "The Greatest Show on Earth". Every element of this film noir rings a bell of falsehood. In some films, you might be tempted to walk out of the theater or simply press stop on your VCR or DVD player. 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. Like the clown that slips on a banana peel and slides across the stage floor before landing with a thud, this movie slides through its six reels, landing on the floor, and leaving a rotten egg behind.

kapelusznik18 ***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. Thats's, since it's 1946 and before the Miranda Decision, without informing the killer of his rights to keep quite and get an attorney and if he can afford one a shyster, lawyer, will be provided to him for on taxpayers expense. This all stems from the murder of newspaper gossip columnist Tony Fitch's who has the goods on a number of big shots in the city that if exposed may well embarrass them.It's no big surprise to who exactly did Fitch is since everyone of the five had a motive to murder him. 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. Not too convincing of an ending with with Fitch's killer suddenly grabbing a policeman'a revolver and thus admitting his or her guilt. 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. And at the end of the film, if your still awake, you'll find out why!