Sun 6 Nov 2011
A Movie Review by Walter Albert: MICHAEL SHAYNE, PRIVATE DETECTIVE (1940).
Posted by Steve under Mystery movies , Reviews[6] Comments
MICHAEL SHAYNE, PRIVATE DETECTIVE. 20th Century Fox, 1940. Screenplay by Stanley Rauh and Manning O’Conner based on the novel Dividend on Death by Brett Halliday. Director: Eugene Forde.
Lloyd Nolan plays Mike Shayne; Marjorie Weaver is the spirited female protagonist; Joan Valerie plays the femme fatale; Donald MacBride is the irascible, incompetent police chief (Peter Painter) with an even dumber but less irascible sidekick, Michael Morris; Walter Abel, Douglas Dumbrille, Clarence Kolb, and George Meeker impersonate a quartet of heavies and candidates for chief murder suspect.
Irving Bacon, who was regularly flattened by Arthur Lake as he tried to deliver the mail to the Bumstead residence in the popular Columbia series has a cameo as a fisherman neatly manipulated by Shayne into concealing testimony that would have implicated the latter in the murder.
This is a race-track, night-club mystery and is notable for two things:
Some really dumb situations for Shayne (his car stalls at the murder scene as the police are arriving; he throws what he believes to be the murder weapon — his own gun — into the bushes from which he handily retrieves it the next day after the police have presumably searched the area; he sticks his head into a dark room into which a man with a gun has just fled and is knocked out by the mug; and in the hoariest and most predictably resolved plot gimmick in the film, he stages a mock murder using ketchup as blood, and when he attempts to play out his mini-drama, discovers that the ketchup has been enriched with some very real blood, from a fatal bullet wound).
…And the introduction of a Little Old Lady detective (Elizabeth Patterson) whom he embraces at the end as his “partner” while he whispers to her, “And we’ll split the money.”
I have not seen one of these Lloyd Nolan Shayne films in forty years. I would hope the others in the series have aged better. Patterson is a graceful actress who makes the best of an awkward role. She has read all the Ellery Queen mysteries and the Baffle Book and she keeps wanting to share a particularly difficult “baffle” with Shayne.
Superior to The Gracie Allen Murder Case, to take an contemporaneous example, but you may not see that as a recommendation.
November 7th, 2011 at 11:57 am
I don’t remember writing this review, but more recently (circa 2007) I bought the lst volume of a DVD release of four of the films and had a more favorable impression of the series. I also saw later films at conventions and do recall a deterioration in the quality of the final entry or two.
However, Lloyd Nolan was pitch perfect as Shayne in all of the films and would be my chief reason for revisiting them.
November 7th, 2011 at 12:18 pm
My own review of this film, which I remember writing but only belatedly remember posting, can be found here:
https://mysteryfile.com/blog/?p=281
All in all, I’d say that you and I agree about the movie itself, but while I thought Lloyd Nolan’s performance as a PI was right on, he wasn’t my idea of Michael Shayne at all.
Maybe if they’d forgone the funny and/or “dumb” stuff, I’d have had another opinion.
I bought the DVD set as soon as it came out, but I think I was misled by the fact that it was labeled “Volume One” of the series. I’m still waiting for Volume Two, and I’m tired of holding my breath.
November 8th, 2011 at 7:15 am
Yeah, there was too much “Comedy” in the series, but TIME TO KILL was an excellent adaptation of Chandler’s THE HIGH WINDOW.
November 8th, 2011 at 10:11 am
I’ve seen only a couple of the Nolan films (and one with Hugh Beaumont) but TIME TO KILL isn’t one of them. Since it isn’t one of the films in the recent set of DVDs, I don’t believe I even have a copy. I imagine that the first set didn’t sell all that well, and we’re on our own trying to find the rest of the series.
November 8th, 2011 at 12:29 pm
I liked these films when I saw them many years ago and yes, some of the detective action was a little silly. But Lloyd Nolan was a good enough reason to watch. Then and now. I always liked him too, as the rogue cop in LADY IN THE LAKE.
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