Backdrop fallback

Philo Vance's Gamble

Philo Vance's Gamble

Share

Philo Vance's Gamble

"He Finds His Greatest Adventure With A Death-Dealing Adventuress!"

1947

1h 2m

6.3(7 votes)

Mystery

Overview

Private Detective Philo Vance gets involved with a succession of murders and a mystery concerning the disappearance of an emerald that has been smuggled into the United States.

Links & Resources

Social & External

The people behind it

Cast & crew

10 featured cast members

Starring

Alan Curtis

Alan Curtis

Philo Vance

Vivian Austin

Vivian Austin

Laurian March (as Terry Austin)

Frank Jenks

Frank Jenks

Ernie Clark

Tala Birell

Tala Birell

Tina Cromwell

Gavin Gordon

Gavin Gordon

Oliver Tennant

Cliff Clark

Cliff Clark

Inspector Walsh

James Burke

James Burke

Lt. Burke

Toni Todd

Geegee Desmond

Francis Pierlot

Francis Pierlot

Roberts

Joseph Crehan

Joseph Crehan

Ellis Mason

Creative team

Directed by: Basil Wrangell
Written by: Arthur St. Claire
Lawrence Taylor
Produced by: Howard Welsch

Similar Movies

The Dead King

The Dead King

Chasing down wretched souls who leave no trace is the curse of Detective Bosworth. He really just wanted to call it a night, but a dubious phone call just before midnight lures him back into the game. Cornered by his nemesis, Bosworth finds himself the target of a bizarre power play. A black-humored parable of human hubris. A precisely timed finale in which the opponent's vanity becomes the most unpredictable downfall.

Without Justice

Without Justice

A mother and daughter were brutally murdered in their apartment on Saturday morning. The killer treated the latter cruelly — her face was disfigured beyond recognition. The missing item — an ancient cross with black pearls — was found at one of the acquaintances of the murdered woman. He was hastily tried and sentenced to capital punishment...

Spy Hunt

Spy Hunt

Roger Quain, escorting two zoo-bound black panthers on the train from Milan to Paris, is unaware that a Western agent, Catherine Ullven, has hidden a microfilm in the collar of one of the animals. But when the train is derailed in the Swiss Alps and the panthers escape, she is forced to involve him in her mission, which now includes enemy agents hunting the microfilm, the animals, Catherine and Roger.

Successive Slidings of Pleasure

Successive Slidings of Pleasure

A young woman is questioned by the police and the judges, suspected of being a modern witch. The girl who shared her apartment has been found dead, and a pair of scissors impaled through her heart, as she lay attached to the bedposts. Apparently, the girl does have powers, to make all people around her fall prey to her spell, glissing progressively into desire, lust, and the unknown.

Femme Fatale

Femme Fatale

A worried artist tries to locate his wife who suddenly abandoned him only to discover that she led a secret life - or two. He proceeds to investigate her past and stirs up a hornet's nest.

Murder with Pictures

Murder with Pictures

Suspected crime boss Nate Girard beats a murder rap, and newspaper photog Kent Murdock is on the story. Girard and lawyer Redfield throw a party for the news men where Murdock romances a mystery woman who confronted Girard in front of him, but Murdock's fiancée Hester shows up. After they return to his apartment, have a fight, and she leaves, the mystery woman slips in and begs for his help. Police Inspector Bacon and the cops show up, looking for the mystery woman; Murdock hides her. Murdock goes with the cops to discuss the murder the woman is suspected of. Bacon explains (in flashback) how some photogs were setting up a shot with Girard and Redfield. When the flashbulbs popped, Redfield keeled over dead and the woman, Meg Archer, fled while the newsmen ran out to phone their papers. The newsmen (who were rounded up later as thoroly as possible) are taken into police custody, except for Murdock (who wasn't at the scene), who is given a cap on the sly by rival McGoogin. Altho ...

221B Baker Street

221B Baker Street

You are there at 221-B Baker Street for each of the10 adventures. You search with Holmes and Watson through turn-of-the-century London for solutions to each.

To Each His Hell

To Each His Hell

After her daughter is kidnapped, a mother discovers that there can be something even worse after "the worst."

A Face in the Fog

A Face in the Fog

A mysterious killer known as The Fiend uses an unusual bullet as his trademark for his murders.

Below the Deadline

Below the Deadline

After a good-natured Irish cop is framed for a diamond robbery and murder and presumed dead in a train wreck, he gets plastic surgery and returns to expose the real killers.

Midsummer's Equation

Midsummer's Equation

Masaharu Fukuyama reprises his role from 2008's "Suspect X," playing the physicist-cum-detective Manabu Yukawa. The scientist-sleuth arrives in an oceanside town to speak on a panel. But when a man turns up dead outside the inn where he's staying, Yukawa begins to unravel the connections that tie the victim to the activist daughter of the innkeepers, and a precocious boy who first appears on a train—and keeps popping up. It's a Sherlock Holmes mystery with an environmental twist, and one that should please fans of a classic whodunnit.

S.O.S

S.O.S

A young maiden in love with romcoms and obsessed with the idea of love, gets irrevocably consumed by it.

Backfire

Backfire

Mara McAndrew's marriage is falling apart. Her husband, Donnie, a Vietnam veteran, suffers troubling flashbacks about the war, leaving him unresponsive to her needs. Mara wants out, but she also wants Donnie's money. When Mara meets a mysterious stranger, Reed, at a local bar, she believes she has found the right person to help her out of her predicament. But Mara worries that Donnie's sister, Jill, is on to her.

Malignant

Malignant

Madison is paralyzed by shocking visions of grisly murders, and her torment worsens as she discovers that these waking dreams are in fact terrifying realities with a mysterious tie to her past.

Die diamanté Club

Die diamanté Club

A movie about a woman who smuggle with diamonds with her two dealers and it is up to the 2 detective to catch them but in the meantime is there 2 murder cases as well, are they all linked together?

Psycho III

Psycho III

When Maureen Coyle, a suicidal nun who resembles Norman's former victim, Marion Crane, arrives at the motel, all bets are off and "Mother" is less than happy.

These Four Days I've Lived With You

These Four Days I've Lived With You

An impulsive young man kills his wife by accident. When he wants to get rid of her corpse, the image of his wife haunts him.

Cold Creek Manor

Cold Creek Manor

A family moves from New York into an old mansion in the countryside, still filled with the previous owner's things. As they begin to make it their own, a series of events begin to occur that makes them believe that the former inhabitants are not yet gone.

Cherry Falls

Cherry Falls

When students in the small town of Cherry Falls learn a serial killer is targeting virgins, they realize their only chance of survival is to throw a “Pop Your Cherry” party.

The Walker

The Walker

Carter Page III, a middle-aged gay man in Washington, D. C., is a "walker", a single man who escorts other men's wives to social events so the husbands do not have to. One of the women he escorts, Lynn Lockner, is the wife of a United States senator and is carrying on an affair with a lobbyist. When she finds the lobbyist murdered, she embroils Carter in an investigation that leads to the highest levels of the federal government.

Recommended Movies

The Kennel Murder Case

The Kennel Murder Case

Philo Vance, accompanied by his prize-losing Scottish terrier, investigates the locked-room murder of a prominent and much-hated collector whose broken Chinese vase provides an important clue.

Marlowe

Marlowe

Mysterious Orfamay Quest hires Los Angeles private investigator Philip Marlowe to find her missing brother. Though the job seems simple enough, it leads Marlowe into the underbelly of the city, turning up leads who are murdered with ice picks, exotic dancers, blackmailed television stars, and self-preserving gangsters. Soon, Marlowe's life is on the line right along with his case.

The Mirror Crack'd

The Mirror Crack'd

Jane Marple solves the mystery when a local woman is poisoned and a visiting movie star seems to have been the intended victim.

Zero Effect

Zero Effect

Daryl Zero is a private investigator and—along with his assistant, Steve Arlo—he solves impossible crimes and puzzles. Although Daryl's a master investigator, he doesn't know what to do with himself when he's not working; he has no social skills, writes bad music and drives Steve crazy.

Thirteen at Dinner

Thirteen at Dinner

Actress Jane Wilkinson wants a divorce, but her husband, Lord Edgware, refuses. She convinces Hercule Poirot to use his famed tact and logic to make her case. Lord Edgware turns up murdered, a well-placed knife wound at the base of his neck. It will take the precise Poirot to sort out the lies from the alibis - and find the criminal before another victim dies.

The Ritual Killer

The Ritual Killer

Unable to process the death of his daughter, Detective Boyd embarks on a hunt for a serial killer who murders according to a brutal tribal ritual: Muti. The only person who can help Boyd is Professor Mackles, an anthropologist who hides an unspeakable secret. The line between sanity and madness thins as Boyd goes deeper into the killer’s world.

Prescription: Murder

Prescription: Murder

In Columbo's first outing, a psychiatrist uses a patient he is having an affair with to help him kill his wife, but his perfect alibi may come apart at the hands of a seemingly befuddled LAPD lieutenant.

Edge of Darkness

Edge of Darkness

As a seasoned homicide detective, Thomas Craven has seen the bleakest side of humanity. But nothing prepares him for the toughest investigation of his life: the search for his only daughter Emma's killer. Now, he is on a personal mission to uncover the disturbing secrets surrounding her murder, including corporate corruption, government collusion and Emma's own mysterious life.

The Blue Gardenia

The Blue Gardenia

Upon waking up to the news that the man she’d gone on a date with the previous night has been murdered, a young woman with only a faint memory of the night’s events begins to suspect that she murdered him while attempting to resist his advances.

A Walk Among the Tombstones

A Walk Among the Tombstones

Private investigator Matthew Scudder is hired by a drug kingpin to find out who kidnapped and murdered his wife.

Murder at the Embassy

Murder at the Embassy

1934. Private detective Miranda Green investigates a murder perpetrated in the British Embassy in Cairo, where a top secret document was stolen, risking to jeopardize both Buckingham Palace and the peace of the world. All those present in this closed place are suspected: the American photographer, the English student, the American actress, the Egyptian security guard, the ambassador interpreter, the Egyptian gardener and - why not? — the Ambassador himself. But who would have expected that a small group of Nazis would be behind a plot, risking to jeopardize both Buckingham Palace and the peace of the world?

Flypaper

Flypaper

A man caught in the middle of two simultaneous robberies at a bank desperately tries to protect the teller with whom he's secretly in love.

Murder, My Sweet

Murder, My Sweet

After being hired to find an ex-con's former girlfriend, Philip Marlowe is drawn into a deeply complex web of mystery and deceit.

Twin Peaks

Twin Peaks

An idiosyncratic FBI agent investigates the murder of a young woman in the even more idiosyncratic town of Twin Peaks. (This standalone version of the series pilot was produced for the European VHS market and has an alternate, closed ending.)

The Late Show

The Late Show

An over-the-hill gumshoe in Los Angeles seeks to avenge the killing of an old pal, another detective who was involved in a case concerning a murdered broad, stolen stamps, a nickel-plated handgun, a cheating dolly, and a kidnapped pussycat.

The Big Sleep

The Big Sleep

Private Investigator Philip Marlowe is hired by wealthy General Sternwood regarding a matter involving his youngest daughter Carmen. Before the complex case is over, Marlowe sees murder, blackmail, deception, and what might be love.

The Prowler

The Prowler

Thirty years after a murder on the night of Avalon Bay's graduation dance, the sleepy town's teens meet grisly ends at the hands of a prowler once thought to be a jilted soldier home from war.

The Black Book

The Black Book

After his son is wrongly accused of kidnapping, a deacon who has just lost his wife takes matters into his own hands and fights a crooked police gang to clear him.

The Interview

The Interview

A duel between a suspected murderer and a detective pressed by people who want results. But whose skin is really wanted?

Murder She Said

Murder She Said

Miss Marple believes she's seen a murder in a passing-by train, yet when the police find no evidence she decides to investigate it on her own.