Monday, March 17, 2014

Classic TV: The Adventures of Ellery Queen (1950)

Earlier, I posted the first part of my contribution to Movies Silently's "Sleuthathon", with Philip Marlowe. I meant to do this next one yesterday, but had a brain cramp and forgot.

A while back, we'd looked at the last TV incarnation of Ellery Queen, from 1975. Now, let's go back further in time, to the early 1950's, and a live broadcast of The Adventures of Ellery Queen.

I first discovered this series, as I did with Philip Marlowe, via a DVD compilation from Radio Spirits, which I'd acquired a while back. It plays as any crime drama of the day would, but it doesn't hold up quite as well as it should, perhaps because it was live and recorded on kinescope. Judge for yourselves in "Murder To Music", starring Lee Bowman as Ellery.



To me, the last version, with Jim Hutton as Ellery, because it was the first version I'd seen, was better, but your opinion may be different from mine. Bear in mind that this was a half-hour series, the norm at the time. Today, they would again go with a hour-long format, but it'd get lost in all the procedurals that are already out there.

Rating: B.

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