Celluloid Sleuths: The Great Detectives of the 1930s and ‘40s

 

I love mysteries.  From unsolved true crimes, to unexplained phenomena, to a good, old-fashioned whodunit, there’s something in my psyche that needs to solve the puzzle, crack the code, and find the answer.  Even as a young Unimonster, I loved shows like Mannix, and Cannon, and Kojak.  Clue was my favorite board game.  And nearly every weekend would feature at least one old mystery movie on the afternoon matinees.  Any mystery movie would do, but my favorites were the iconic detectives of the ‘30s and ‘40s—The Thin Man movies, featuring William Powell and Myrna Loy as Nick and Nora Charles; the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movies, with Rathbone as the great consulting detective and Nigel Bruce as his companion and biographer, Dr. John Watson; and Charlie Chan, played for several studios by Warner Oland, Sidney Toler, and Roland Winters.  They were, in the words of a character from Charlie Chan at Treasure Island (1939), “… whodunit celebrities.”

The Murder-Mystery genre of the 1930s was one of the decade’s most popular, with everyone from the biggest of the big studios to the poorest of the Poverty Row producers wanting to get in the game, and they all wanted their own signature detective.  There was Philo Vance, Bulldog Drummond, James Lee Wong, Mr. Moto, Michael Lanyard, and Simon Templar.  All had their adherents, but none matched the popularity of the big three series.

The first, and inarguably the greatest, of the great detectives was Sherlock Holmes, the world’s first private consulting detective.  Created by Sir Arthur Doyle, a London physician with a struggling practice which left him a great deal of free time to write, Holmes made his debut in the novel A Study in Scarlet, first published in Beeton’s Christmas Annual in 1887.  By the time of Doyle’s death in 1930, he had written fifty-six short stories and four novels describing the adventures of his most popular creation.  The character was first adapted for the screen in 1900 (though the film wasn’t registered for copyright purposes until 1903), a mere thirteen years after his debut.  That film, Sherlock Holmes Baffled, was not only the character’s first appearance on the screen but was the first instance of a Detective film.  Only thirty seconds in length, the film dealt with Holmes failed efforts to stop a burglar who can appear and disappear at will, while stealing a sack full of the detective’s belongings.

Though many actors have portrayed Holmes on-screen in the one hundred and twenty-one years since that initial appearance (in fact, Guinness World Records lists Sherlock Holmes as the most portrayed literary human character in film and television history), none save Jeremy Brett have become so intimately connected to the character as has Basil Rathbone.  In fourteen films made between 1939 and 1946, two for 20^th Century Fox in 1939, and the remainder for Universal, Rathbone so perfectly essayed Doyle’s detective that for succeeding generations he was Sherlock Holmes.  Nigel Bruce’s version of Holmes’ friend and companion Dr. John Watson, on the other hand, bore little resemblance to the literary character, but the on-screen chemistry worked so well that it’s hard to fault Bruce’s acting.

The success of Doyle’s literary creation inspired an entire genre of fiction, the Detective story.  While Holmes had many imitators, few enjoyed the popularity of Earl Derr Biggers’ Charlie Chan.  Modeled on Honolulu Police detective Chang Apana, Chan first appeared in the novel The House Without a Key, though he wasn’t a central character in the narrative.  He was featured in five more novels by Biggers, the last being 1932’s Keeper of the Keys.  Beginning in 1926, a series of films were released starring various Asian actors in the role of Charlie Chan.  However, in all these Chan was merely a supporting character, and none of these films were successful, either financially or critically.

Then, in 1931, Charlie Chan Carries On was released by 20^th Century Fox, and marked several milestones in the Chan filmography.  It was the first film in which the Chinese Detective was the central character.  It was the first time that Chan had been portrayed by a white actor, Warner Oland.  And most importantly, it was the first successful film about Charlie Chan.

Oland would portray Chan in sixteen movies for Fox before his death in 1938.   His last film, the unfinished Charlie Chan at the Ringside, was hastily rewritten as Mr. Moto’s Gamble, the third entry in Fox’s Mr. Moto series.  Following Oland’s death, Fox cast Sidney Toler to continue as the inscrutable investigator.  He would play Chan in no fewer than twenty-two movies, with the first being Charlie Chan in Honolulu, released in 1938.  Eleven of these would be for Fox, but when the studio virtually dissolved its B-picture division in 1942, ending its Charlie Chan series after Castle in the Desert, Toler bought the film rights from the Biggers estate, and made eleven more Chan pictures at Monogram.  Monogram Pictures Corporation was one of the more successful of the “Poverty Row” studios, though even the best of these could hardly compete financially with a major studio such as Fox.  Toler’s first appearance as Chan for Monogram was 1944’s Charlie Chan in the Secret Service, produced on a budget of $75,000, roughly half of what Fox’s budgets ran.

Though Monogram’s production values were found lacking in comparison to those of 20^th Century Fox, there was no let-down in entertainment value, and the quality of the productions did gradually increase.  But as the Monogram Chan films improved, Toler’s health rapidly declined.  Twelve films in two years, eleven of them as Charlie Chan, took a heavy toll on Toler.  In addition, his final three movies came after he was diagnosed with intestinal cancer, which affected his ability to perform on screen.  His final appearance, in 1946’s The Trap, had his sidekicks Jimmy Chan and Birmingham Brown (Victor Sen Yung and Mantan Moreland) carrying the bulk of the action.  Toler died of cancer in February 1947.

Following his death, Monogram cast Roland Winters in the role of Charlie Chan, with his first appearance coming in The Chinese Ring, released in December 1947.  He would play the detective in six films, with the last being 1949’s Sky Dragon, bringing to a close a series that spanned nineteen years, three actors, and included an incredible forty-two movies.

At the opposite end of the scale from the B-pictures from Universal, Fox, and Monogram was the entry of Hollywood’s biggest player into the Celebrity Sleuth genre.  M-G-M was the unquestioned king of the Hollywood studio scene, and it made sense that, when they purchased the rights to Dashiell Hammett’s just-published, best-selling mystery novel The Thin Man, that the finished film would be a top-notch production.  With William Powell and Myrna Loy as the husband-and-wife high society sleuths Nick and Nora Charles, M-G-M had a box-office hit, one that would spawn five sequels.  Unlike Universal, or Fox, or Monogram, which put their Detective films out with the efficiency and rapidity of an assembly line, M-G-M spaced the Thin Man films out, with the last, Song of the Thin Man, released in 1947.

These were some of my favorite movies when I was young, back when Saturday afternoon matinees were staples of the television schedule, each series for reasons of its own.  And now, fifty years later, my admiration for them is even deeper.  As a child, it was the spooky atmosphere of the Sherlock Holmes films, or the sarcastic banter of Sidney Toler’s Charlie Chan, or the action and comedy of the Thin Man movies that had me hooked.

But now, as an adult, I see so many layers to these films that too often are derided as B-grade “popcorn” movies—as though that were a bad thing.  Now, I can see the chemistry between Powell and Loy, the easy, comfortable way they interacted, the affection and attraction their characters showed for one another that had audiences convinced they were a couple in real life (they weren’t).  I can appreciate the variations of the actors’ performances in the Charlie Chan role; the gentle wisdom of Warner Oland, the exasperated sarcasm of Sidney Toler, even Roland Winters, the least effective of the three, brought a more energetic, active style to the character.  And I can understand why, to generations of fans, Rathbone is Sherlock Holmes.

These movies are still favorites of mine for the same reason as so many of the movies I love; indeed, so many of the topics upon which I expound in this space.  It’s because of the sense of nostalgia that they inspire within me.  Nostalgia for a better time in my life, a time when my personal happiness was a far simpler objective to achieve.  A time when happiness meant a dollar bill in my pocket, a good movie on the TV, a new comic book to read, and a new model kit to build.

Some things never change.