Michael Shayne, Private Detective (20th Century-Fox, 1940)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night at about 10:30 p.m. I broke open the boxed set 20th Century-Fox released in 2007 or thereabouts of The Michaen Shayne Mystery Collection, Volume 1 – which as things turned out was a bit if a misnomer as there wasn’t a Volume 2. That disappointed me no end because I was hoping for a DVD transfer of the seventh and last film in the series,Time to Kill, an adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s novel The High Window. My husband Charles and I have been watching three of the Shayne movies on YouTube – including Time to Kill, which turned out arguably better than Fox’s 1947 film The Brasher Doubloon, an ostensibly more faithful adaptation of Chandler’s book. Last night we watched the first film in the series,Michael Shayne, Private Detective, which was the only one of the seven actually based on a novel by Shayne’s creator, “Brett Halliday.” His real name was “Davis Dresser” but he wrote stories in all the major pulp-magazine genres and used a different pseudonym in each one. The book this film was based on was published in 1938 as The Private Practice of Michael Shayne, which for some reason reminded me of the porn film The Private Pleasures of John C. Holmes (in which the legendary straight porn star made an all-Gay movie in an attempt to salvage his career).

The plot of Michael Shayne, Private Detective is so convoluted I can see why Fox’s “B”-department head, Sol M. Wurtzel (of whom the Ritz Brothers joked that when they were assigned to his unit, “things have gone from bad to Wurtzel”), went with other authors’ novels for future Shayne film stories. Michael Shayne (Lloyd Nolan) is hired by old man Brighton (Clarence Kolb) to follow his daughter Phyllis (Marjorie Weaver, who later would become a series regular in the character of a hard-bitten reporter) and keep her from blowing his fortune on bad gambling plates and even worse men. Shayne is invited to move into the Brighton home to keep an eye on the willful Phyllis, who keeps giving him the slip. At one point she makes a big show of giving him the one extant key to her room; but of course she has another one and uses it to escape. A local casino owner named Benny Gordon (Douglass Dumbrille, doing oily villainy as usual and doing it quite well) “takes” Phyllis for $2,000, only Shayne makes him give it back to her. Phyllis is dating gambler Harry Grange (George Meeker), who’s also seeing Gordon’s daughter Marsha (June Valerie, who like Weaver made appearances in other Michael Shayne movies, but in different roles). In order to scare Phyllis offTGrange, Shayne gives him a drugged drink and parks Phyllis’s car, with Grange in it, on a deserted stretch of road. Shayne pulls ketchup on Thomas’s shirt front to make it look like he’s been shot, but when he and Phyllis find the body it turns out someone else killed Grange for real. Later another man, a friend of Shayne’s named Larry Kincaid (Robert Emmett Keane) also gets killed, and thanks to some timely phone calls that set the narrative, police chief Painter (Donald MacBride, who like Dumbrille had played a comic villain in a Marx Brothers movie) assumes Shayne was the killer and acts accordingly.

Michael Shayne, Private Detective is a problematical movie, caught (like the Shayne series in general) on the cusp between the comedy-mysteries of the 1930’s and the darker film noir style that came in with the 1941 Maltese Falcon. (There were certainly films noir before that one, but The Maltese Falcon really signaled the change in style to films that treated murder like the serious business it is, and when hey used comedy it was only to express the sardonic view of the detective hero.) Eventually it turns out that Thomas was killed by Marsha Gordon because he was two-timing her with Phyllis and she was jealous and determined that if she couldn’t have him, nobody else could either. Joan Valerie, who made a triumphant return to the Shayne series as the spoiled diva Rita Darling in the next-to-last entry, Just Off Broadway, gets a great mad scene here as she’s locked in a clo0set but hears every word of Shayne’s explanation of who did what to whom. It also seems that Gordon killed Larry Kincaid – ya remember Larry Kincaid? O.K., nobody else did either – for reasons writers Stanley Rauh and Manning O’Connor, who got the unenviable task of adapting Dresser’s/”Halliday’s” novel into a coherent screenplay, aren’t especially clear about. The director, Eugene Forde, was a 20th Century-Fox "B" man from 1932 to 1947 and did two of the subseqent Shayne films, Sleepers West and Dressed to Kill (not to be confused with the 1946 Dressed to Kill, the last film in the Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes series, or the 1980 Brial De Palma film), as well as three of the laterCharlie Chan movies with Sidney Toler and an entry in a "B" series at Columbia, The Crime Doctor's Strangest Case. This is one “B” detective series that actually got better as it progressed, as Lloyd Nolan grew into the role and seemed to acquire at least some depth as a character instead of just slapping people around when he got upset with them.