Who murdered the mystery movie?

The mystery movie, that is, the murder puzzle from the Golden Age of detective mystery (generally, the 1920 thru the 1950s), began to change about the same time as the books began to change. In the early 1970s, book critics were starting to write about murder novels that included real character development and commentary on crime in society, grief, and other effects that a death by murder has on people. Both P.D. James and Ross MacDonald got New York Times Book Review front page attention. Most mysteries written today, especially with continuing characters from book to book, respond to that by developing over many volumes the protagonists’ love and family life. Some of the procedurals and the so-called “cozies” pay scant attention to the actual murder plot and the killer is often revealed, not through detection, the following of clues, but by a final attack on the investigator.

Today’s movie crime pictures are rarely mysteries by a Golden Age definition but may exploit violence and action, perhaps showing the good guys as ruthless and the baddies (Michael Mann’s “Heat” [1995] and the more recent but similar in plot, “Den Of Thieves” [2018]). Others take a more nihilistic viewpoint of life, showing crime and violence as a way of life, like “Drive” (2011), a Gritty Urban Crime Drama with car chases down busy streets, brutal fights, and men shot dead on cracked, sunbaked parking lots with weeds growing out of the cracks in the asphalt.

In short, the world began to change in the 1960s and during that time readers’ and movie watchers’ expectations changed with the times. Happily, we can revisit The Thin Man, Miss Marple, The Falcon and a dozen other classic era films and series that we can see again and again and take delight even by knowing the ending.