Mysteries Essay, Research Paper

The mystery has been popular for just about as long as films have had an audience. Almost as soon as filmmakers could do more than show loosely connected action, there was an interest in presenting puzzles, usually involving crime of some sort. The earliest filmings of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories date from the first decade of the twentieth century, and the audience for such stories was already well in place. These early examples of mysteries largely concerned rudimentary puzzles — details as such were limited largely by the severely limited running times of movies. It was only in the second decade of this century that the mystery took on its familiar, albeit basic form. Stories of crime and its solution had all of the attributes of melodrama and not much less subtlety, and, of necessity, all of the clues had to be visual in nature. The earliest serials, including the familiar Perils of Pauline, were hooked around chains of successive and interlocking mysteries, initially unexplained actions, the regular threat to the heroine, and the attendant question of how the heroine would escape kept audiences happily guessing for months at a time. By the mid-teens, the genre was familiar enough to allow for the success of parody. Douglas Fairbanks Sr. starred in a film called The Mystery of the Leaping Fish, a savage satire of Sherlock Holmes in which the dashing actor played a detective name Coke Ennyday, who is incapable of dealing with the clues or the manhunt before him without ingesting an unnamed white powder. The mystery as we know it today began to coalesce in the 1920s, in America with the first of several filmed versions of the whodunnit story The Cat And The Canary — the original "haunted house" story for purposes of cinema — and in Germany with the Expressionist films of Robert Wiene and Fritz Lang. The American model, which was derived from a theatrical tradition, was impossible to exploit fully until the sound film arrived, with its ability to present clues and blind alleys that were more than visual. But the German model, which was a product of pure cinema, was fully formed and capable of doing virtually everything it needed to in order to reach its audience at the dawn of the 1920s — that's one reason why a picture like The Cat and the Canary, which was a hit in its own time, seems slow and creaky today, while Wiene's The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, or Lang's Testament of Dr. Mabuse, are dazzling and compelling films even 70 years later. The German films were also a major influence on British filmmakers, including Alfred Hitchcock and Michael Powell, who learned how to make use of the visual technique behind the Expressionist films and bring it to bear in the sound era — this was doubly fortuitous, not only for British cinema but for movies in general, as the rise of the Nazi government destroyed the entertainment film (outside of the documentaries of Leni Riefenstahl) in Germany itself. With the coming of sound and the perfecting of its use in the early 1930s, the American cinema mystery model came into its own. At the center of the genre was the private detective, whose attributes changed with the sensibilities of the audience. The year 1931, for example, saw the first filming of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon by director Roy Del Ruth and starring Ricardo Cortez as private investigator Sam Spade. The Sam Spade portrayed by Cortez (real name Jacob Kranz) was very different from that played by Bogart a decade later in the definitive screen version of the story — a suave, decadent playboy, with few rough edges and a glib style, Cortez's Sam Spade was hardly a gritty investigator capable of going head-to-head with over-zealous police officers or psychopathic thugs. The detective in the 1930s was characterized as a clever ladies man, quick with words, but much more comfortable at cocktail parties than in the streets: Philo Vance (portrayed variously by William Powell and Warren William), Cortez's Sam Spade, and Nick Charles (William Powell) were gentlemanly dinner companions who happened to have a knack for putting clues together. During the era, there were several film adaptations made of Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories, of which the two most important were The Return of Sherlock Holmes and Sherlock Holmes, both starring Clive Brooke (but for different studios) — both were successful, but for reasons best understood at the time, neither was followed up directly despite the huge array of Conan Doyle stories available for subsequent filming. Also popular during the 1930s was the character of Captain Hugh "Bulldog" Drummond, a creation of English writer H.C. "Sapper" McNeile. A World War I veteran who was bored with life as a civilian, Drummond hired himself out as an adventurer and proved himself the match of criminal conspirators from around the globe, a sort of freelance James Bond from the pre-jet age. Ronald Colman first brought Drummond to the screen in 1929 in a creaky early talkie called Bulldog Drummond, which is an interesting document, but which also suffers from all of the problems of early sound films, with severely limited camera movements and the lingering technique of the silents still in evidence. Colman later portrayed the Drummond character to greater success in Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back (1934), a funny, fast-paced mystery thriller whose puzzles are not wrapped up and revealed until the final 20 minutes of the film — alas, due to a rights conflict, this movie has only been shown publicly once since 1946, at a 1994 retrospective at New York's Lincoln Center. But the movie was successful enough to launch a series of eight more Drummond pictures, starring Ray Milland (who only lasted for one film) and then with John Howard in the title role — a forceful investigator and adventurer, capable of taking personal revenge on his enemies, Drummond contained some of the attributes of the modern adventure hero. The end of the 1930s and the coming of World War II brought a maturation of style and subject to the mystery film. The detective-based mystery had begun to wane by the end of the decade (the Drummonds, except for the two Colman titles, were all low-budget "B"-pictures), and new subject matter and heroes were called for. It fell to Alfred Hitchcock to answer the public's demand with a pair of groundbreaking mysteries: The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes. These were very probably his two finest films, and they broke many barriers in the mystery field, mixing international intrigue (spy stories had been relatively unpopular during the isolationist/post-World War I era) and some muted but impossible-to-ignore sexuality into the mystery formula. Equally important was Hitchcock's addition of comedy to the proceedings, which allowed him to juggle the moods of tension and humor and give audiences more thrills than they had bargained for. But the most important of Hitchcock's innovations came in the form of his central characters — in place of detectives or the police (who usually played only a peripheral role in the solving of his mysteries), Hitchcock used innocents and amateurs, characters who came from ordinary walks of life, suddenly thrust into life-and-death situations. Audiences could not only identify with these characters more easily than they could with any detective, but the presence of such characters and their efforts at solving the puzzles facing them raised the tension and suspense of the films themselves. Hitchcock would exploit these elements better than almost any other filmmaker (his only real rival at the time was Michael Powell, and then only for one movie, Contraband, although in the 1960s directors as different as Stanley Donen in The Prize and Charade, and Edward Dmytryk in Mirage would come up with effective Hitchcock-style thrillers, and the television series The Man From U.N.C.L.E. would use this formula on network television each week for 3? years during the mid-1960s). The end of the 1930s saw the miraculous casting of Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce in the roles of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson for two movies, The Hound of the Baskervilles and The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. The pair were an instant hit in these two handsome, well-made mysteries from 20th Century-Fox, the first Holmes films set in the original stories' authentic Victorian period. Two years later, Universal cast the two actors together again in the first of a series of a dozen low-budget but exciting mysteries set in modern times — their success was such that neither actor was ever able to fully escape from the roles of Holmes and Watson, but the films themselves are among the most watched, well known, and often revived of 1940s mysteries. In keeping with the times, however, the main trend in the early 1940s was a darker one. The opening of the decade saw the birth and growth of film noir (see separate essay on that subject), which became the dominant form of the mystery and really a separate sub-genre of its own. But the mystery genre as a whole became both grittier and richer due, in large part, to the loosening of standards coupled with an abandonment of the movies' upper-class pretensions. The outbreak of the Second World War and the Cold War that followed opened up a range of plots that writers in the 1930s could scarcely have dreamt of. Hitchcock, by that time a Hollywood resident, was at the forefront of the field with films such as Spellbound (1945), a deeply psychological and very romantic murder mystery, multi-layered and exquisitely textured, which seemed to define the new maturity of the mystery genre at its most elegant. The 1950s saw a slackening of interest in the mystery, at least in feature films, as television began to intrude on much of the territory that had previously belonged to movies. Pictures got bigger, as television began taking up material that could be handled on lower budgets, and lower budget films became an endangered species. The first television detective series, such as Rocky Kane and Boston Blackie, would have been considered crude even in the 1930s in terms of plot and characterization, as television either adapted radio techniques with some awkwardness or relied on low-rent writers with a lot to learn about the new medium. The radio-based Dragnet, produced, created by, and starring Jack Webb, achieved some level of respectability and high ratings with its detailed look at police procedure. Subsequent series such as M Squad (starring Lee Marvin), and Mike Hammer — the series adaptation of Mickey Spillane's literary detective — (starring Darren McGavin), succeeded based on their high levels of violent action. By the end of the 1950s, however, the writing in television mystery began to catch up with where the movies had been in the 1940s, and the medium began to develop sophisticated characterizations and interactions between characters and their environment. The best of these series was The Naked City, loosely based on the Jules Dassin film from 1947, which was shot on the streets of New York and featured very complex portrayals and writing. On a wholly different level, there was Checkmate a thinking-man's detective show created by celebrated mystery writer Eric Ambler, about a trio of investigative specialists (led by Sebastian Cabot as a psychiatrist) whose business was in preventing crime. The mystery more or less disappeared from feature films as a genre during the 1960s, apart from the James Bond movies and their offshoots, which were more action-adventure films than mysteries in any case. The exceptions, movies such as Harper (1966), starring Paul Newman, were really just star vehicles with puzzles at their center, remembered more for their stars than their puzzles. A brief revival took place in the 1970s, fueled principally by a renewed interest in film noir and its attributes and writers — thus, there were the Raymond Chandler-based features, Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye (1973), starring Elliot Gould, and Dick Richards' Farewell My Lovely (1975 — and a truly great film), starring Robert Mitchum, and magnificent one-offs such as Roman Polanksi's Chinatown (1974). These were augmented by the presence of costume dramas such as Murder On the Orient Express (1974) and the nostalgic parody-like Murder By Death (1976). But audiences proved fickle, and apart from Chinatown (which proved impossible to follow up, as the long-delayed sequel The Two Jakes proved), none of these three films was a certifiable blockbuster, and that was increasingly what Hollywood required to justify keeping a genre alive. The fundamental problem behind bringing a successful, truly complex mystery to the big screen lay in the change that took place in audiences — conditioned to bigger and glitzier, faster-paced entertainment, relatively few filmgoers had sufficient patience by the end of the 1970s to sit through the kind of gradual development that most good mystery stories required. Even the haunted house film, that old standby from the 1920s and 1930s, had evolved (or devolved) into gore-and-splatter fests. For the most part, however, television — especially series television — has remained the area where the mystery has held the greatest sway, principally in American series such as The Rockford Files and, much more recently, British productions such as the police procedure thriller series Cracker, starring Robbie Coltrane as a psychologist specializing in criminal behavior. Coupled with successful but more routine programs such as Magnum, P.I. and Hunter (a sort of television answer to Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry movies), the mystery remains healthy, if not as exalted as it once was on the big screen.