**SPOILERS** Having elderly music store owner Edward Stillwell, Paul E. Burns, show up at what you would expect to be, from watching Sam Spade & Philip Marlow like 1940's private eye flicks, his rundown and barley lit office in what looks like swanky Sutton Place, check out the 59th Street Bridge outside the office window, private investigator Don Gale, Richard Dix, is anything but interested in taking up his case.
Stillwell is willing to pay Gale all his life saving, $100.00, to track down and find 21 year-old Elora Lund, Pamela Blake, whom he hasn't seen or heard from for almost seven years. It's when Stillwell tells the very uninterested Gale that Miss. Lund is to inherit a large amount of money that her widowed mother, who had just passed away, left with him that Gale suddenly got interested in the case knowing that he'll, if he finds Miss. Lund, get a piece of it.
The movie "Mysterious Intruder" is a lot like the "Maltese Falcon" with an unscrupulous private eye, like Sam Spade in the latter, breaking every rule in the book trying to get his hands on, instead of the legendary "Black Bird", a set of 1887 wax recordings cylinders of Swedish Nightingale Jenny Lind worth over $200,000.00. Gale is in fact a lot more unscrupulous then Sam Spade ever was by using people to trick poor old Mr. Stillwell into getting hold of the wax recordings without even giving them to their rightful owner Elora Lund!
Gale using one, of many, of his lady friends hot blond Freda Hanson, Helen Mowery, to impersonate Miss. Lund to get a hold of the wax treasures has old man Stillwell murdered by the gorilla-like Harry Pontos (Mike Mazurki), who somehow got wind of what was going on, who ends up taking Freda hostage together with a package in Stillwell's store addressed to Elora Lund. When Gale get's to Stillwell's store finding him murdered and Freda missing has the news get out, via the police, that she's not really Miss. Lund. Pontos hearing this on his car radio, together with him finding nothing of value in the package that he stole from Stillwell's music store, lets Freda go as he heads home to his rooming house for a good nights sleep; it turned out to be the last good nights,or days, sleep that the big lug would ever have.
Gale gets it from both sides in the movie, the police and those who work for him, with him getting the royal screwing from non other then Freda herself who's ***SPOILER ALERT*** working behind his back to get the wax cylinders off his hands and keep the $200,00.00 for both herself and her secret crime partner. Freda is later murdered by her unknown and unseen partner in a classic double-cross with the now clueless Gale being the number one suspect in her death.
It's only later that Gale finally gets to the bottom of what's behind all this death and destruction but by then it's a bit to late for him to do anything about it. With him wanted by the police in Freda's, and possibly Mr. Stillwell's, murder Gale goes incognito, as a mummy-like looking bandaged crippled man, to the late Mr. Stillwell's music store knowing that the real killer, or killers, of Freda are there rummaging through the place trying to find the valuable wax recordings.
The ending by far is the best part of the film "Mysterous Intruder" with everyone getting exactly what's coming to them including the on the lamb and under the covers, or bandages, Don Gale. One of the best of the Richard Dix "The Whistler" series of films and at the same time one of most complicated. Still "Mysterious Intruder" is more then worth watching a second time just to see the clues and subplots that you may have missed the first time around.
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