So You Want to Be a Detective

Joe McDoakes argues with the narrator and imagines himself as private detective Phillip Snarlowe. He has a new case and a dead lady in the filing cabinet. This is an outlandish spoof and actually gets a few laughs. It's like Looney Tunes decided to do Philip Marlowe without the animation. Bringing down the fourth wall is the least craziest of the concepts.

So You Want to Be a Detective (1948)

*** (out of 4)

Spoof of countless detective films has Joe McDoakes (George O'Hanlon) working as a P.I. under the fake name of Phillip Snarlow. Soon he gets a case working for a beautiful woman whose father has been murdered. If you're a fan of film noir or just detective films in general then you should find plenty to enjoy here including the lead performance as well as others who just happen to pop up. The film does a very good job at laughing at the genre it's spoofing and that includes a very good shock ending where the killer is revealed in a way that comes off very clever and funny. Lila Leeds would have a very short career in Hollywood but her brief scene as the femme fatale Veronica Vacuum is priceless.

One of the better of the Joe McDoakes shorts has our everyman hero spoofing the private eye genre in So You Want To Be A Detective. The gags are good if not original.

I say not original because Paramount had done this whole thing a year earlier in a feature length film with Bob Hope entitled My Favorite Brunette. It even had one of film's legendary tough guy detectives in Alan Ladd doing a little self deprecation of his own tough guy character.

Still for the eleven minute running time, a lot of good gags are packed in by George O'Hanlon and the cast. So Bogart, Ladd, Duff, Powell, and Montgomery and all the other actors who have played Philip Marlowe, McDoakes is on the case.

Sould have received an Academy Award nomination, at the least. You be the judge.

There had to be some sort of a noir-ish detective romp with Joe McDoakes, considering Warner Brothers phenom successes with THE MALTESE FALCON and THE BIG SLEEP. Here it izzzz, and it's trippy, trippy fun.

I agree, and rather cleverly, producer Richard L. Bare may have "borrowed" detective Sam Spade's "Maltese Falcon" office (the old set), now making it Joe's pad. The amateur "ace" detective salutes the likes of Bogey and Robert Montgomery, if not Dick Powell, out to solve the case of a dead lady found in his filing cabinet???

All the typical 40s private eye gags are crammed into this goofy eleven minute short, plenty of creativity, rather stylishly produced a la Warner Brothers. Most interesting of all is the appearance of Lila Leeds (playing Veronica Vacuum?), who at the time made national headlines with Robert Mitchum, both arrested for possessing marijuana. The bad PR actually helped Mitchum's career, while Leed's career took a beating, this short one of her final screen appearances.

Some notable old timers pop up; famed stunt actor Charles Horvath plays a stiff falling out of a closet. Can you recognize him? He generally played Indians on the warpath. Fred Kelsey (a menace to Laurel and Hardy and the Three Stooges), plays a bartender. Former Our Gang kid Clifton Young plays "Num Num," and silent star Kit Guard plays a barroom brawler.

The insanity would not be complete without the authoratative voice of Art Gilmore, later famous as the announcer for HIGHWAY PATROL.

A diamond in the real rough. Remastered on Warner Brothers dvd, box set containing other series episodes. Thanks many times to TCM for bringing back these golden oldies, not seen for decades.

On the Matinée at the Bijou site, there was an article about a series of short films that featured a character named Joe McDoakes. George O'Hanlon-later known as the voice of George Jetson on Hanna-Barbera's "The Jetsons"-played this character. In this version, he becomes private eye Philip Snarlow as he and narrator Art Gilmore search for a killer. Many of the visual and verbal gags got some chuckles if not big guffaws from me. Maybe I was a little distracted by the feminine charms (not to mention the shapely figure) of Veronica Vacuum, played here by exquisitely sexy Lila Leeds. It's a wonder the Production Code let her on the screen! Anyway, while no great shakes, So You Want to Be a Detective is worth a look.