The Lone Wolf Keeps a Date (1941)

THE LONE WOLF KEEPS A DATE  (1941)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Sidney Salkow
    Warren William, Frances Robinson, Eric Blore,
    Bruce Bennett, Thurston Hall, Jed Prouty
Between the silent era and the late 1940s (according to our friends at Wikipedia), no fewer than ten different actors played the Lone Wolf, a.k.a. Michael Lanyard, a jewel thief/detective who first appeared in a novel published in 1914. The actor who took on the role most often was Warren William in a series of nine low-budget mysteries released by Columbia between 1940 and 1943. In this one, the Wolf has slipped off to a stamp collectors convention in Havana, where he gets involved in the case of a young man wrongly jailed for murder. It might be just a coincidence that Columbia was the studio of the Three Stooges, but there's a definite element of slapstick in this. William has a funny scene where he pretends to lose it over some self-inflicted damage to his stamp collection, but it's Eric Blore - Fred Astaire's loyal attendant in "Top Hat" - who gets most of the comic relief.