Exploring Detective Films in the 1930s and 1940s: Genre, Society and Hollywood

Abstract

Hollywood’s version of the whodunnit in the 1930s and 1940s was not always of the classical style associated with the progenitors of the literary detective genre (Poe and Conan Doyle) or the writers of Golden Age clue-puzzle mysteries (such as Christie and Chesterton). The whodunnit does, nevertheless, provide the template for most of Hollywood’s crime series, even if sometimes it is only to furnish a mystery sub-plot in films that emphasise action or suspense. The ‘Charlie Chan’ films, for example, which formed the longest running of Hollywood’s crime series, privilege the mystery form of the whodunnit, including the conventional unmasking of the murderer in the denouement. There were also numerous ‘Philo Vance’ films throughout the period, the best known of which, The Kennel Murder Case (1933), is paradigmatic of the clue-puzzle style in its rendering of a locked-room mystery involving more than one person trying to kill the same man at about the same time on the same evening. Even in series that were more variable in style, such as the ‘Sherlock Holmes’ films, where the emphasis was often on suspense, there was still always some form of mystery or riddle to occupy Holmes while he contended with criminals whose identity he had already revealed, such as The Dancing Men Code in the espionage film Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon (1942) or the mystery of how the victims are killed in a thriller such as The Spider Woman (1944).