" The Case of the Lucky At the Regal. "Charlie
The Cinema
Cfian. in Shanghai., ' At the NeNV Gallery.,---" The `Aniateur Gentleman" At the London Pavilion IT is curious how little the cinema has done for the detective public ; perhaps that public is not large enough to tempt the film magnates, consisting, as ,it chiefly does, ,of cross-word.
puizlers and tired intellectuals. There have been a few unsuccessful attempts to transfer Sherkick Holmes to the
screen, there was even a rather deplorable effort by an English company to film an adventure of Lord Peter Wimsey, but the only sustained detective characters' on the screen are Mr. Warren Williams's Perry Mason, Mr. Warner Oland's Charlie Chan, and Mr. William Powell's suave, suede imper- sonations in such agile and amusing films as The Thin Man, revived this week at the Royal Court Cinema, and Star of Midnight. Of course the cinema cannot go in for the really dry, donnish game ; the type of detection which depends on a Bradshaw's time-table has to be excluded, for a cinema audience cannot be expected to carry a series of mathematical clues in mind. Detection is almost necessarily the weakest part of a detective film ; what we do get in the Perry Mason films is a more vivid sense of life than in most detective stories, the quality we get in some of Mr. David. Froine's novels, in all Mi. Daihiell Hammett's, and in a few of the early works of Miss Sayers.
Perry Mason is my favourite film detective ; he is curiously little known, perhaps because his films, as " second features," are usually, not shown to the Press.. The Case of the Lucky. Legs is an admirable film, but it is thrown in as makeweight at the Regal to the appalling film, I Give You My. Heart., Perry. Mason is a hard-drinking and not very scrupulous lawyer. He owes something to the character estab- lished by Mr. William Powell: there is the same rather facetious badinage with a woman assistant, but he is, I, think, .a more genuine creation. - Mr. Powell is a little too immaculate, his wit is too well-turned just as his clotheq: are too well-made, he drinks hard but only at the best bars ; he is rather like an advertisement of a man-abont7town in Esquire, he shares some of the irritating day-dream quality,, of Lord Peter Wimsey. I find the cadaverous, not very, well- dressed Perry Mason more real in his seedy straw hat, with his straggly moustache ; one does not find him only in the best bars ; he is by no means irresistible to women; .his background is the hiss of soda rather than the clink of ice. He is far more likely on the face of it to be a successful detective than Mr. Powell's character because he belongs to the same class as his criminals. Often indeed, as in his latest case, they are his clients. For, I can neve.r„re4IIV believe that a good detective will be found in the Social Register or that Lord Peter would be capable of detecting anything more criminal than a theft by a kleptomaniac duchess. To those who do not yet know Perry Mason I recommend The Case of the,Lucky Legs,as good Mason,if not good detection, better, I think, than The Case of the Curious Bride.
Charlie Chan does a good deal more honest detection with finger-prints than Mason, and his break-up of a big dope smuggling gang in Shanghai is a well-made, if conventional, piece of genuine Chan. A much more desirable person, of course, this slow, astute Chinaman with his rather lovable turns of broken English than the shady lawyer. But the lawyer is better fun.
The Amateur Gentleman too is a kind of detective story set in Regency days. An innkeeper's son (Mr. Douglas Fairbanks, Jun.) dresses up as a gentleman and mixes in Society in order to find the aristocratic thief for whose crime his innocent father is condemned to hang. There is a superbly unconvincing boxing match with bare fists before the Regent, and the film is very prettily dressed. Miss Clemence Dane has done a very workmanlike job with the dialogue, which is never disagreeably mannered, but nobody can do much with Mr. Jeffery Farnol's romantic vision. I prefer myself Perry. Mason's amusing chase in and .out of bars and aeroplanes and the bridal suite of a seedy- and immoral little
Previous page
