TV Quote of the Day (‘Ellery Queen,’ In Which a Lady of Burlesque Reveals Her Level of Culture)

Stripper Veronica Vale / Ronnie (played by Barbara Rhoades): “He [rich lawyer Gregory Layton] likes me for my talents. He reads to me all the time from O’Neill and Ebsen.”

Ellery Queen (played by Jim Hutton) (puzzled): “Ebsen?”

Ronnie: “Yeah. I didn’t know Buddy wrote plays. But there are a lot of things that I don’t know. But Gregory’s teaching them to me. Of course, I’m teaching him a lot of things, too.”— Ellery Queen, Season 1, Episode 9, “The Adventure of Veronica's Veils,” original air date Nov. 13, 1975, teleplay by Robert Pirosh, directed by Seymour Robbie

This past winter, I went back years—sometimes decades—in viewing DVDs, indulging to the hilt my fascination with a genre I call “retro-detection”—i.e., mysteries set back in the past. I don’t mean mysteries filmed long ago with plots contemporary to when they were first aired, but which now look like something out of a time capsule, like Naked City. Rather, I mean series set in periods a good deal earlier than their original telecasts. 

One example—very fine indeed—is the British series Foyle’s War, broadcast from 2002 to 2015 but set during WWII. The other two, taking place in New York City in the early postwar period, are Nero Wolfe, starring Timothy Hutton, and Ellery Queen, featuring his late father, Jim Hutton.

The above snatch of dialogue from the latter demonstrates, in concentrated form, why I developed an affection for the latter series. It also makes me rue the fact that I never caught it when it first aired in the 1975-76 season. 

Maybe I was too young to appreciate it at the time, with vintage guest stars (e.g., Donald O’Connor, Don Ameche, Ida Lupino, and Eddie Bracken) it would take me years to discover, and winks toward New York, theater and screen history that would have completely escaped me back then. 

“The Adventure of Veronica's Veils” episode, set in 1947—and especially the above quote—is a great example of the latter:

*”Ebsen,” for younger readers, refers not to a playwright (that would be Ibsen), but to actor Buddy Ebsen. In 1947, he still would have been known as an affable song-and-dance man who had missed his chance at wider fame when his aluminum makeup as the Tin Man sent him to the hospital during production on The Wizard of Oz. But 1977 audiences would have known him from a couple of  major roles on long-running TV series in the years since: as the lucky paterfamilias in The Beverly Hillbillies and, even as the rival private eye show Ellery Queen was airing, on CBS as Barnaby Jones. 

*This episode revolved around the revival of burlesque in New York City, 10 years after Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia had banned it. Three decades later, when this episode ran, America was obsessed with new excesses of obscenity and censorship, in which the likes of burlesque looked distinctly quaint.

*The “Veronica Vale” character, with her interest in intellectual improvement, is a knowing nod toward stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, whose own attempts in this direction in the 1930s and 1940s (e.g., writing a novel, The G-String Murders) led Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart to satirize her in their “Zip!” number from the musical Pal Joey. (Sample lyrics: “Zip! My intelligence is guiding my hand./ Zip! Who the hell is Sally Rand?”)

*Veronica’s curiosity, such as it is, is not to be taken seriously. But series creators Richard Levinson and William Link allow her a G-string of humanity. "Out there I'm an actress, here I'm a person," she says as, in an act of becoming modesty, she changes clothes behind a screen while Queen questions her. 

This was by no means the end of the screen allusions in the series. For instance, from “The Adventure of the Mad Tea Party,” blond ingenue Elly (played by Julie Sommars) scoffs at a suggestion that her screen career has suffered from missed opportunities, noting that a role she turned down the prior month was “a dreadful part, with no lines. Some deaf and dumb farm girl who gets forcibly compromised. Well, they gave it to Jane Wyman. I didn't want to play it anyway.” (Ms. Wyman, of course, won a Best Actress Oscar for playing the same role in Johnny Belinda.)

Sadly, Ellery Queen lasted only one season. It did not match the brilliance of Levinson and Link’s earlier series, Columbo, but it was far more clever than their later, far more commercial fare, Murder, She Wrote. 

 
The show was a loving tribute to mysteries published between 1929 and 1971 by cousins Frederic Dannay and Manfred Bennington Lee, who used the name “Ellery Queen” not only as the name of their sleuth but as their own joint pseudonym. 

Levinson and Link borrowed for the small screen a device that Dannay and Lee had used on the printed page: i.e., not long before the conclusion, with all the clues available, Ellery stops and asks the viewer if he can identify the killer, thus breaking the “fourth wall”—i.e., the conceptual space between a performer and an audience.

Look for the DVD set where you can. Rent it if you can (from a decent library system, as I did), or pay if you must (if you can find it). In any case, sit back and enjoy a series with far more to it than the simple whodunit aspects.