Once more Ellery takes on a seemingly harmless case for a charming lady: to find her husband, who was presumed dead until recently, in San Francisco. He takes Nikki as a decoy with him to take the wife's place, and very soon the husband turns up - but... so does Ellery's father, sent by the New York police after a big-scale bank robbery combined with murder; and the main suspect is none other than the husband Ellery just found... And so, since he believes the man is innocent, he hides him from his own father! Now a kind of hide-and-seek game ensues, accompanied by more murders; and the key to the whole affair seems to be the famous-infamous entertainer Adele - Lillian Bond, the cute, funny girl we all loved 10 years before in "The Old Dark House", and who's grown into a reckless blonde femme fatale now...Again, William Gargan's 'Ellery Queen' is pretty serious, just like the whole movie, which at times reminds us of the old 30s' gangster movies or an early Film Noir; one thing's for sure, though: it doesn't look at all like a mere part of a crime movie series, it's got something more to it, even if we know all the regular characters and they sometimes throw in a joke or two. This is certainly not an assembly-line series production, it's a crime film (almost a crime drama) in its own right.

Two investigations involving stealing a large sum of money from a banking house end up in San Francisco where the suspected John Litel has fled and the real thief Noel Madison winds up murdered. Both Inspector Queen and Ellery are serving different clients, but both want to see justice done.Noel Madison was smart enough to frame Litel, but dumb enough to marry gold digging nightclub singer Lillian Bond who is the outstanding player in the cast. She goes west to, to work for club owner Morgan Conway and locate her husband the dough he was carrying.There was something else that Madison did wrong. He took money with consecutive serial numbers, easily traced and hot. That's the crux of the whole story, he or whomever winds up with the loot, needs a really good fence.Ellery Queen's client is Litel's wife Charlotte Wynters who retains William Gargan on a missing persons case. On the other hand Gargan's father Charley Grapewin is looking for robbery suspect and ends up with sidekick James Burke helping the SFPD on Madison's murder.Helping Gargan of course is Margaret Lindsay and she's certainly more fun to be around than Burke is.This was one of the best Ellery Queen films going even though it's not anywhere near the Ellery Queen in the novels. It's also not terribly mysterious as we know pretty well who the culprit will be. But it has an action climax and shooting you normally see in westerns.And it has Arthur Q. Bryan who was the voice of Elmer Fudd over at Warner Brothers. Harry Cohn must have forked over some bucks to not just get Bryan's services, but Elmer's voice as well. You hate to think of anyone talking that way in weal life. He has a scene with a friend in the nightclub where Bond clips the poor schnook as easily as Bugs Bunny ever did. Worth seeing the film for that alone.

Ellery Queen is about to leave for San Francisco, where his new book will be set, when he is visited by a woman who asks him to find out if her husband is alive or dead; supposedly he drowned in a boat accident a few years ago, but someone who looks a lot like him was recently seen in SF. Ellery takes Nikki Porter with him and has her impersonating the missing man's wife, to bring him out into the open. The plan works, but a case of embezzlement and a murder bring Inspector Queen to SF as well, and guess who the chief suspect for both crimes is: the man Ellery was looking for! "A Desperate Chance For Ellery Queen" had the potential to be one of the best entries in the series, but it's a little too messily put together to achieve that. Kudos, however, to Lilian Bond for her sexy femme fatale. I think it's the first time in the series where another woman steals the show from Margaret Lindsay. ** out of 4.