Unlimitedia Sick Product of a Sick System

KnotStronger This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

Tobias Burrows It's easily one of the freshest, sharpest and most enjoyable films of this year.

Kimball Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Leofwine_draca I thought THE MANDARIN MYSTERY was a rather middling murder mystery with a good premise and weak story progress. The film features the character of master detective Ellery Queen himself as he hunts for a priceless Chinese stamp that a murderer has got his hands on.The early parts of this thriller are a locked room murder mystery which is portrayed in an interesting way. Unfortunately, the rest of the film has a sluggish pace and a strictly ordinary denouement. Eddie Quillan can't make much of the leading role and the supporting characters are too clichéd to be really believable. The film has a lightness of touch which works in its favour but is too bogged down with romance and peripheral character play to really be entertaining.

Rainey Dawn I acquired this film in the Dark Crimes 50-Pack. It's NOT a Dark Crime film but rather a light comedy crime drama. It involves a mystery: a stolen $50,000 Chinese Mandari stamp and murder - all in a hotel. Who is the murderer? Inspector Queen & Ellery Queen must find out (a father and son team).This particular Ellery Queen is just weird. He's young and bizarre. Loves a certain young lady that had her stamp stolen, bubble baths, a strange relationship with his father, weird gestures & expressions on his face and lame humor.This film is not bad - it's mediocre. Not a film I would care to watch again but fun enough for a one time watch.4.5 /10

gridoon2018 The second film appearance of detective Ellery Queen marks a step down from the first, "The Spanish Cape Mystery". Queen is played this time by Eddie Quillan, who is a little too jokey to be very convincing as a crime-solving genius. However, Wade Boteler (who might have been THE most prolific actor ever - IMDb lists him with 444(!) credits) is perfectly cast as his gruff Inspector father, and Charlotte Henry is quite the sweetheart as the innocent (?) girl he falls in love with. The plot is kind of muddled and the poor existing prints don't help the viewer's comprehension much, but it does have some clever bits (like the explanation for the missing fruit from the room where the dead body is discovered). This one is recommended mostly for hardcore genre fans. ** out of 4.

django-1 The literary work on which this film was based--THE Chinese ORANGE MYSTERY--is a locked-room murder mystery that is light on characterization but heavy on the puzzle aspect of the murder, where no one knows who the victim is, the victim's clothes have all been turned inside out, and everything in the murder room has been turned backward. To do a faithful film adaptation of the book would probably be difficult, especially for a 55-minute b-movie which needs to be fast-moving and witty. In the Ellery Queen film made the year before, THE Spanish CAPE MYSTERY, which was an OK film, the filmmakers basically streamlined the plot, but were unable to give much depth or interest to any of the characters (other than Ellery and Inspector Queen). THE MANDARIN MYSTERY takes elements of the book THE Chinese ORANGE MYSTERY--a rare stamp, a murder in a locked room, some of the character names--and basically creates a new story around them. I had just re-read the novel before seeing this film, but they have little in common. If you can forget the book and just treat the film as an entity of its own, it's not that bad. Eddie Quillan is a charming screen presence, and he tries to restrain his comic mugging somewhat, but the script does not allow him to show much analytical prowess, and he spends far more effort romantically chasing the girl who is the main suspect than he does working on the crime. Wade Boteler plays Inspector Queen well--professional, but with a warm heart--and he and Ellery do show glimpses of the rapport they have in the books (and in the Jim Hutton/David Wayne TV series). On the whole, though, this film is an average 30s murder mystery, played with a light touch by a charming comic actor, but it has little to do with either the novel on which it was supposedly based or with the Ellery Queen series in general.