So You Want to Be a Detective

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.

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.

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.

I am NOT a big fan of the Joe McDoakes shorts. Most of them are pretty limp but occasionally they made one that seems to hold up very well today...and "So You Want to Be a Detective" is one of them.

When the film begins, Joe is Phillip Snarlowe--a hardboiled detective. A cameraman goes along with him to watch him at work and often Snarlowe is a total washout. What's also funny is that the cameraman himself gets punched in the face for his trouble.

This film is in many ways reminiscent to Bob Hope's film "My Favorite Brunette"...though a heck of a lot shorter. While I'd never consider it top-notch entertainment, it is funny and kept my interest--mostly because it was a nice change of pace for McDoakes.