This is the ad Johnny Strange (Warren Douglas) places for a secretary: "Wanted: secretary to human dynamo. Exclamation point. Must be blonde, beautiful, between 22 and 28, unmarried, with a skin you love to touch and a heart you can't." Before he can finish, Gerry Smtih (Adele Mara) interrupts and takes the position. Her first function is to take a call form a mysterious woman looking for help. Johnny arrives at the appointed place at the appointed time to find a heavily veiled woman with a Spanish accent. She takes him to a house where Johnny finds a dead man on the floor. What has Johnny gotten himself into? I've read the reviews on IMDb and see that opinions are pretty much split on The Inner Circle. Personally, I loved it. It's fast paced, has some interesting characters played by an above average cast for this kind of movie, an interesting plot, nice cinematography, witty and sharp dialogue, and just about everything else. Other than the final scene where the mystery is solved, it all works for me. Even with the ridiculous ending, it's still a joy to watch everything before that unfold. What fun! The Inner Circle looks and feels like much more than the 40s B movie it is.I mentioned the cast and what a cast it is. Warren Douglas, William Frawley, Ricardo Cortez, Will Wright, and Dorothy Adams are all outstanding. But to me (and most everyone else), it's Adele Mara who really stands out. She's a real delight.Overall, I'm going to give this breezy, fun film a 7/10.

This is a fast paced actioner, with a novel way to finish and nothing really too complicated. Adele Mara had a very healthy career and she was a very lovely adornment to the many movies she appeared in, even if they were only programmers.Johnny Strange (Warren Douglas)of Action Incorporated, is a private investigator, who is thinking of hiring a private secretary, when a mysterious Miss Smith (Adele Mara) breezes in and takes over in a very efficient but nice way. He accepts a job from another mysterious lady and finds he is set up for the murder of Anthony Fitch, a well known radio personality, who has many enemies. The mysterious lady and Miss Smith are the same - she is trying to protect her sister, who is wanted for the murder. William Frawley, long before his "I Love Lucy" days, plays Detective Webb, who is called in to investigate. Miss Smith, who just happens to be around, concocts a story that is not true but gets Johnny off.Johnny goes back to the scene of the crime to find out the truth and finds a record in the rubbish bin. Also the old caretaker has seen everything and pays Miss Smith a visit - he is returning her disguise he saw her put in the incinerator and wants a payment. When Johnny plays the record, he recognises the singer as Rhoda (Virgina Christine) a girl he used to know when she was a singer south of the border. Ricardo Cortez makes an always welcome appearance as Duke York, the owner of the Penguin Club and also an old friend of Johnnys.Miss Smith's sister, Anne (Martha Montgomery) enters the scene and tells how she was involved with Fitch - he was blackmailing her. She had been involved with a gangster and was now married to a politician. How the murderer is found out is achieved as a radio broadcast with everyone in the film playing their parts in front of microphones. It is an interesting ending to a very recommended film.

--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

This is a romantic, comic mystery. Warner Brothers turned out a lot of these in the thirties and early forties. Jane Wyman was often the girl.Here, we have several girls. We have the secretary who appears out of nowhere. She works for a private investigator, Johnny Strange. (Was there another noun that could be added to Johnny to make a name for a movie character in that decade?) Then there's the mysterious veiled woman who calls for his services. Then there's Virginia Christine (Mrs. Olson of the coffee commercials a few decades later.) She sings in a club. Then there's ... OK: No more about the plot.That excellent and durable actor Ricardo Cortez somehow found himself at Republic. He turns in a variation on his usual cynical, suave performance. It's not his worst, either. But he is fourth-billed, below William Frawley, who plays a cop. And Adele Mara gets top billing.It's fun to watch. It could very easily have been better but it isn't terrible.