Best Mystery Movies of 1941

Bucolic lawyer John Wayne takes on big-city corruption in A Man Betrayed. He sets out to prove that an above-suspicion politician (Edward Ellis) is actually a crook. The price of integrity is sweet in this instance, since Wayne happens to be in love with the politician's daughter (Frances Dee).

Like the first entry in Columbia's "Ellery Queen" series, Ellery Queen's Penthouse Mystery depicts its amateur-criminologist hero as an oafish ignoramus. This time around, Chinese ventriloquist Gordon Cobb (Noel Madison), is murdered by a gang of jewel thieves. Baffled by the contradictory clues, Inspector Queen (Charles Grapewin) asks his son Ellery (Ralph Bellamy) to help out.

A female reporter goes undercover to investigate the series of mysterious disappearances of young women, who were all linked to a local drama school.

An apparent suicide by a rich woman leads her nurse and a policeman to an insurance scam.

A society doctor (John Hubbard) helps an insurance-company file clerk (Marjorie Weaver) check deaths related to a big policy.

A series of murders in the West End of London baffle the officers of Scotland Yard and draw the interest of a crime reporter to the case.

A condemned inmate's premature death places officials under suspicion.

Newspaper magnate, Charles Foster Kane is taken from his mother as a boy and made the ward of a rich industrialist. As a result, every well-meaning, tyrannical or self-destructive move he makes for the rest of his life appears in some way to be a reaction to that deeply wounding event.

George Sanders makes his final appearance as crook-turned-detective Simon Templar, a.k.a. "The Saint," in The Saint in Palm Springs. The gimmick in this one is a set of rare stamps, smuggled from England. Wendy Barrie is the true heir to this treasure, and the Saint is engaged to protect her and the stamps. Our hero meets Barrie in a posh Palm Springs resort, where a gang of homicidal thieves have converged to relieve the girl of her inheritance. Three murders and one kidnapping attempt later, the villains are foiled by the Saint, with the aid of his onetime partner in crime Pearly Gates (Paul Guilfoyle). The Saint in Palm Springs is the sixth in RKO's series of films based on the character created by Leslie Charteris.