Hollywood’s
Detectives
Crime Series in the 1930s and
1940s from the Whodunnit to Hard-Boiled Noir
Fran
Mason
Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2011
Hardcover.
ix+187 p. ISBN 978-0230578357. £50.00
Reviewed by Delphine Letort
Université
du Maine – Le Mans
Fran Mason’s book on the 1930s’
and 1940s’ Hollywood crime fiction series provides an interesting insight into
an overlooked sub-genre of detective fiction. Cheaply made as B features in the
context of the double bill, which aimed at attracting spectators whom the Depression
deterred from going to the cinema, the detective series presented by the author
offer curious variations on the English formula of the whodunit, appropriating
such figures as Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Leslie Charteris’ The Saint and
Michael Arlen’s Falcon. While Fran Mason highlights the creative constraints of
working within Hollywood with B-level budgets, he also focuses on the
relationship between the literary sources and their film adaptations to
pinpoint how Dashiell Hammett, S.S. Van Dine, Earl Derr Biggers, John P.
Marquand, among others, contributed to renewing the archetypal figures of the
genre by presenting crime as more completely integrated into American society.
Conceived as
60 to 70-minute programmes, the films of the series display specific stylistic
features which Fran Mason spotlights through the six chapters of his study. The
scholar enhances the multifarious character of the detective whose persona—and
sometimes that of the actor performing his role—determines the crime text. The
detective’s role is shaped by the plot: the sense of mystery generated by the
enigma to be solved sheds light on his detection in the whodunit, while suspense
prevails in the action-based thriller. Drawing on a rich critical background
which ranges from literary theory (Todorov) to film noir studies (Bordwell,
Cawelti, Doane, Kaplan, Krutnik, Telotte, etc.), Fran Mason examines the series
as a cultural production whose discourse he analyses in light of the
hard-boiled tradition which became the dominant mode in the 1940s. The figure
of the private detective is a significant trope in film noir, with Sam Spade
and Philip Marlowe embodying “the detective’s integrity by his resistance to
economic temptation” [139]; however, film noir detectives are more often than
not embodied by victim heroes “stumbling about blindly or powerlessly within a
world they cannot control, subject to the corruptions and seductions of a
fallen society, particularly in the form of desire and money, as an obstacle to
masculine empowerment” [139].
Although Mason provides critical comments on films noirs, his most illuminating remarks concern the B-series he views as hybrid
forms, intersecting the whodunit mode with screwball conventions in The Thin Man. The 13-year long MGM series
may depict the wealthy as corrupt and immoral; however, the domestic situation
of Nick and Nora Charles counterbalances the criminal elements of the
narratives, providing textual pleasure rather than social comments on American
society [31]. Mason retraces the evolution of the detective’s status from ‘The
Thin Man’ style to the textual worlds of ‘Charlie Chan’ and ‘Mr Moto’, whose
Asian origins became synonymous with qualities of harmony, tradition and
serenity in the highly popular series. Peter Lorre’s interpretation of Mr Moto
added complexity to the persona because “as a Hungarian émigré from Nazi
Germany playing a Japanese agent he draws attention to the placelessness of the
textual world of the series and its representation of the dislocations of
global politics to suggest that personal allegiances are variable and temporary”[106].
Crime is not treated in moral terms in most B-films which foreground action and mystery as entertaining devices. Significantly, the criminal
detective introduces ambiguity in The
Saint and The Falcon series, moving
between law and crime to return society to order. Mason underscores the
transformations that underpin adaptation, for instance pointing that the Saint
becomes a chivalric detective with a shady past in the American series while he
is drained of criminal associations in its English version. The Sherlock Holmes
series, first produced by Twentieth Century Fox and later by Universal, offers
the character a diversity of settings where he can perform his detection
skills: whether he plays the role of a spy-hunter, an active male hero in the
manner of the investigative thriller or a special agent, he personifies English
Victorian values and signifies stability and integrity—which, nevertheless,
makes it impossible for him to fit into the hard-boiled world of film noir. To
conclude, Fran Mason invites the reader to rediscover the B film series as
entertainment culture which both contrasts and anticipates the darker tones of
film noir. His detailed analysis reveals the rich subtext of a genre that has
been granted little scholarly attention because of its B-status.
