The Adventure of Auld Lang Syne

Episode aired Sep 11, 1975
TV-PG
49m

IMDb RATING

7.7/10

169

YOUR RATING

Ellery Queen: The Adventure Of Auld Lang Syne

Play trailer2:00

1 Video

22 Photos

Crime Drama Family Mystery

After a wealthy industrialist threatens to disinherit family and staff at a New Year's Eve party, he is soon found murdered in a nearby phone booth by fellow guest Inspector Queen, who calls... Read allAfter a wealthy industrialist threatens to disinherit family and staff at a New Year's Eve party, he is soon found murdered in a nearby phone booth by fellow guest Inspector Queen, who calls on son Ellery to help unmask the killer.After a wealthy industrialist threatens to disinherit family and staff at a New Year's Eve party, he is soon found murdered in a nearby phone booth by fellow guest Inspector Queen, who calls on son Ellery to help unmask the killer.

See production info at IMDbPro

IMDb RATING

7.7/10

169

YOUR RATING

5User reviews

See production info at IMDbPro

Trivia
Marcus Halliday refers to Howard Pratt as an "overage Caspar Milquetoast". Caspar Milquetoast was a comic-strip character published in two New York City newspapers from the 1920s to the early 1950s. The character was written as meek, bland, and perpetually nervous.

Goofs
The girl photographer is using blue flashbulbs which weren't manufactured until the 1950s.

Quotes
Ellery Queen: Are you with me? You may even be way ahead of me. Now, it's not that difficult to figure out why Halliday called Kemmelman - a man he never met, a man he never knew. Remember, he had to have known who stabbed him. The knife was wedged in that phone booth, so he couldn't crawl out, and he knew he couldn't talk, so why call the police when he couldn't say anything? So he did the next best thing. Since he didn't have a pencil or a paper, he left us the only clue he could to the murderer's identity. You got the same answer I do?

User reviews5

Featured review

Welcome, 1947

Jim Hutton plays the mystery character/author Ellery Queen in this series about kinder, gentler murders.

It's New Year's Eve shortly after World War II and Guy Lombardo (ubiquitous to New Years celebrations when the series aired) has a prominent, though non-speaking part.

The cast is interesting, if not particularly moving: old movie actor Farley Granger (from Hitchcock's "Strangers on a Train"); a pre-"Charlie's Angels" David Doyle; a pre-"Dynasty" (but still famous) Joan Collins; George Wyner; Ray Walston, Herb Edelmann . . . And they're all acting like crazy. Believe me, Hitchcock, this ain't.

Unfortunately, Jim Hutton's likeable Ellery absent-mindedly arrives late to the party. Part of the joy of this series is the chemistry between Hutton and David Wayne, who plays his father; and in this episode they only come together near the climax.

Some of the solutions in this series are silly but the fun is the journey, not the destination. This early in the series, they hadn't quite hit their stride. Better episodes lay over the horizon.

While some reviewers think of the series as old-fashioned, it *is* set in the 1940s. And when the series first aired it would evoke nostalgia, being no farther from its time period than we at 2024 are from the turn of the 21st century. And while they do a good job of evoking a stylized 1840s, the series has 1970s written all over it.

Still, weak "Ellery Queen" is better than most shoot-em-ups.