Hollywood’s Detectives
Crime Series in the 1930s and 1940s from the Whodunnit to Hard-boiled Noir
Book
Chapter
The ‘Sherlock Holmes’ series of films, originally produced by Twentieth Century Fox for two period versions in 1939 (both released as headlining movies), and then by Universal, after the series was revived and...
Chapter
Although the hard-boiled style has been regarded as a dominant mode of the detective film in Hollywood in the 1940s, as Steve Neale describes (2000: 72), the number of hard-boiled films in this period that act...
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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 ...
Chapter
An important strand within Hollywood crime series of the 1930s and 1940s focuses on the figure of the criminal detective whose roots are less in the classical detective mode than in the strain of criminal-cent...
Chapter
Detective series involving Asian detectives were very popular in Hollywood in the 1930s and 1940s and, indeed, the most prolific of the Hollywood detective crime series in this period was the ‘Charlie Chan’ se...
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The crime series persisted into the late 1940s, but the detective crime genre in this period, and into the 1950s, became increasingly fractured, as if the comforting formal style of the mystery series could no...
Chapter
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc.’s (MGM) ‘The Thin Man’ films are unusual among the detective crime series of the 1930s and 1940s because they maintained their A-Movie status as main features throughout their run. Oth...