Film-Philosophy 19 (2015): Book Reviews
Review: Fran Mason (2012) Hollywood’s Detectives: Crime
Series in the 1930s and 1940s from the Whodunnit to Hardboiled Noir, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 187 pp.
Joseph Stephen Yanick
New York University
Often because of the incessant academic interest in American film noir,
other films within the detective or mystery genre can be overlooked and/or
disregarded. Significantly, the b-movie serials, which dominated the 1930s
and 1940s, receive very little academic interest. Pre-dating the rise of film
noir in the 1940s, the b-movie mystery serials are responsible for countless
films including the Sherlock Holmes, Falcon, Charlie Chan and Mr Moto
series, among many others. Despite their small budgets, lower production
values and subservient role as companion films to larger a-movies, the
detective serials produced between the 1930s and 1940s constitute a breadth
of valuable coded material. How, then, do we decipher these films, and into
which categories should they fall? These are the questions that are posed
and answered in Fran Mason’s Hollywood's Detectives: Crime Series in the
1930s and 1940s from the Whodunnit to Hard-boiled Noir.
In Hollywood’s Detectives, Mason aims critically to analyse the tropes
within the b-movie serials genre in order to shed light on their key aspects.
Mason’s argument generally focuses around three key things: the role of the
detective in relation to gender, the role of the detective with regard to
ethnicity and class, and the cinematic vaudeville of b-movies. While Mason
doesn’t restrict all analysis to these key aspects, they are the ones that
appear most frequently throughout the book.
The chapters are divided in order to group serials together, as in the case
of similar series like Charlie Chan and Mr Moto, with certain chapters
dedicated to a single serial, as in the case of Sherlock Holmes. Within the
chapters Mason performs two tasks. First, the serial as a whole is ascribed a
general ideology that is then assessed and critiqued through a close reading
of each individual addition to the series. Mason’s approach is mechanical,
tackling each serial in relation to the changes that occur over time. This
approach, however, becomes problematic given the nature of similarities in
plot between the serials themselves. Often the works resituate essential
plots, a claim that Mason addresses himself, in order to subscribe to the
generic conventions, but also as a result of their economically fueled
purpose. Due to the sheer number of films analysed in the work, and the
narrative similarities that exist, the films begin to blend into each other,
creating a numbing experience that lessens the impact of individual works.
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Film-Philosophy 19 (2015): Book Reviews
Mason’s imperative and unique argument falls on the concept of the
cinematic vaudeville, a term that he ascribes to almost every film analysed.
Defined by Mason as, ‘material that retards the progress of the narrative
towards closure’, cinematic vaudeville refers to the scenes in b-movies that
do little to drive the film’s narrative, but rather act as a spectacle for the
spectator: simply scenes of/for pure entertainment. Mason suggests that the
tendencies of cinematic vaudeville are the essence of b-movies. The
vaudevillian tendencies of the b-movie are key in grasping how they
fundamentally differ from a-movies.
Perhaps the less distinctive arguments made by Mason relate to the
ideological work of the serials. Mason ascribes a great deal of importance to
how each film situates the role of the detective. For the Chan, Wong and
Moto serials, the role of the detective sheds light on racial identity and
conflict within America. Mason analyses the role of the Asian detective as:
Further complicated because they are often used to mediate and order a
confusing world to provide understanding in accord with Western and
American ideology, but they are problematic figures for the United States
to incorporate into its own system of values because of both their
ethnicity and the different ideological and value systems that their
‘Asian-ness’ represents. (106-107)
The three Asian detectives discussed within Mason’s book (Charlie Chan,
Mr Moto and Mr Wong) represent conflicting ideas on otherness. Mason
discusses the dual nature of their representation of otherness, while still
maintaining enough semblances of Western ideals, down to the casting of
white actors to represent their characters. Mason handles the role of class
and gender and/or masculinity in very similar ways as he does ethnicity,
utilising key examples from the works.
Despite the author’s great leaps and impressive research the book has a
fatal flaw in its organisation. While the claims made within the book are
well founded, the book’s desire to organise the chapters according to the
serials and not into ideological sections creates disarray within the
discussion. For, as the book progresses, Mason seems to fall into a perpetual
state of repetition due to the natural ideological progression of the serials.
As a result of the historical cultural climate changes that occurred between
1930 and 1940, the films take a similar path from light-hearted whodunit to
dark, almost gothic espionage dramas (despite the use of comedic
interplays, which Mason brilliantly highlights). This creative decision
results in an almost alienating feeling to any reader who chooses to tackle
the book as a whole. While the organisation favors a reading of the serials in
full (tackling each serial film by film, analysing the ideological progressions
that take place), the demonstration of a thesis, which connects all the bmovie serials together, falls short.
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Film-Philosophy 19 (2015): Book Reviews
Another key flaw to the work is its lack of filmic examples. Often the
examples that Mason relies on deal with aspects of plot and story, not the
uniquely cinematic qualities of film. This doesn’t mean that no cinematic
examples are utilised, but there seems to be an important deficit. For
example, the discussion of masculinity in relation to Jeff (Robert Mitchum)
in Out of the Past (Jacques Tourneur, USA, 1947) could have been greatly
improved with references to how aspects of cinematography and editing can
be seen as emasculating Jeff.
Despite the clear progression from serial to serial, the book ends rather
awkwardly, with the conclusion doing little to tie the whole work together.
Thus the book reads more like a series of essays collected through their
similar genre, rather than a unified work with a central thesis. Ultimately,
Mason’s work does represent a strong case in favor of the detective serials,
one that will hopefully incite a larger academic discussion centered on their
place in the academic film canon. Despite the repetitive nature of the book,
the evidence laid forth is astute, and Mason does an excellent job in
enlightening the world to the ideological potential of what was once a
grossly overlooked movement in American cinema.
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