Whether a paean to The Maltese Falcon or just a well executed rip-off, The Walls Came Tumbling Down is innovative and entertaining in its own right, totally undeserving of the obscurity into which it somehow fell. The plot has its bizarre turns, beginning with the beginning, when an aged priest is found hanged in his rectory, an apparent suicide. A newspaper columnist by the familiar name of Archer (Lee Bowman) turns amateur private eye and finds himself among a not-so-heavenly host of art dealers, socialites, lawyers and assorted infidels searching for two Bibles that hold the clue to the whereabouts of a missing Da Vinci painting depicting the fall of Jericho. Sam Spade's secretary Lee Patrick does an equally good job for Archer in this film, and art dealer J. Edward Bromberg is very Sidney Greenstreet, but whatever O'Shaughnessy-esque qualities Marguerite Chapman may have must remain our secret. Fast paced direction and what the original Variety review called "hep dialogue with an occasional lapse into smart-chat" make this a sharp little film worth rediscovering.