So You Want to Be a Detective

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.

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.

Of the Joe McDoakes shorts I've seen this is far and above the best. It is cleverly written, pleasantly acted by George O'Hanlon, and above all wonderfully directed by Richard L. Bare. It's a takeoff of the Philip Marlowe-type detective thrillers so popular at the time, and unlike most spoofs it does not go too far over the top, and the result is like a mini-movie, surprisingly evocative of the very sort of film Bogart was making at the same studio at the same time. A delight. Love that tall man!

This wonderful spoof of "The Lady in the Lake", complete with first-person camera and surprise killer must surely rate as one of the most imaginative short subjects Hollywood ever produced. Not only are the players in rollicking form, but Bare's direction, cleverly aping Robert Montgomery's seeing-eye style and even some of his fist-in-the-lens effects, comes across as remarkably smooth and adept.

Narrator Art Gilmore certainly relishes his finest role in the series (for this outing, he's supplied with even funnier lines than either Young or O'Hanlon), and I just loved that sultry blonde suspect, so seductively played by Warners' top siren, Lila Leeds.