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Post by Nalkarj on Apr 20, 2017 4:07:15 GMT
[On spiderwort 's advice, I'm creating a thread for this topic--I hope no one minds!  ] I guess that, after my "Favorite Whodunits" and "Charlie Chan" threads, I'm now the forum's resident whoduniteer-in-chief (the term sounds as silly to me as it does to you), but I do love the genre and am offering an argument that I've made elsewhere. I'm interested in others' thoughts, critiques, opinions, etc. At the simplest level, it involves the great writer-director Billy Wilder and what I believe is his admiration for the puzzle plot, exemplified the best in the classical whodunit that I've referenced on the other thread. First of all, we should ask, what is a puzzle plot? Scott Ratner, who's something of a student of the mystery genre, offers the simple definition that it's a plot that is also a puzzle, with clues and a solution. (Many of the concepts, examples, and terms here are borrowed from Ratner, to whom I am indebted for formalizing and discussing these concepts.) In other words, the reader/viewer is able to figure it out for himself, if, as James Coburn says in The Last of Sheila, "you're smart enough." (I'm usually not!) One major characteristic, created by the notion of the puzzle, is this sense of what I have called anagnorisis (a.k.a. what Ratner calls "the paradigm shift," "the Homer Simpson effect"). The term comes from Aristotle and refers to epiphanic revelation that is simultaneously surprising and inevitable. Neither surprise nor inevitability, on its own, would be enough for true satisfaction at the end of a puzzle plot. It would be a surprise if, at the end of Murder on the Orient Express, Burgess Meredith, who was never in the movie, were revealed to be the murderer! (As Ratner put it--"Yes, I killed Ratchett, and I'm proud! Quack, quack, quack...") Similarly, it would be inevitable if Poirot, having analyzed each clue, went through his reasoning with us, telling us everything each step of the way, and didn't save any time for the climactic revelation at the end. (Rather like a police procedural, in fact!) Both have one side of the equation but not the whole thing. While the puzzle plot is most usually found, obviously, in the classical, Golden Age ('20s-'40s) whodunit (because the form suggests it), it can also occur in other, non-mystery works. Examples include the romance Brief Encounter (dir. David Lean, 1945) and the thriller The Sixth Sense (dir. M. Night Shyamalan, 1999). Now, some people do not like the puzzle plot format, and that's just fine. (Our own london777 , judging from his comments on the other thread, is one of them.) I do think, however, that most people do like anagnorisis, the unity of surprise and inevitability. Not only in mysteries, but in fiction (and in life) in general. How many times have you experienced excitement when "all the pieces come together"? Something similar happened on this board in this thread. OK, I've gone on far too long, but, with definitions in order (I can give another example if anyone needs more precision), I think I can make my argument about Billy Wilder. |
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Post by Nalkarj on Apr 20, 2017 4:21:45 GMT
My basic argument is this, then: Billy Wilder was greatly influenced by the traditional puzzle plot, and this influence shows in his directorial filmography. Moreover, his knowledge of this kind of format was inspired to some degree by Ernst Lubitsch, for whom he was a screenwriter before becoming a director himself.
Why Lubitsch?
Well, Lubitsch and his scenarists were some of the greatest plotters of them all. (The plot, needless to say, is not synonymous with the "puzzle plot." It's broader than that, referring to the twists and turns of the story, how things hang together, the typical three-act structure, the satisfaction of the conclusion--essentially, what Aristotle analyzed way back in Ancient Athens with his Poetics.) Just think of the admirable complexity of Ninotchka, Trouble in Paradise, and Heaven Can Wait (that is to say, the plots are very complex but also very easily understandable). Yes, I'd say that Lubitsch, who never did a puzzle plot, was still a major influence on Wilder in this respect.
Now let's turn to analyzing Wilder's [directorial] filmography.
N.B. When I write "puzzle plot," I don't mean "whodunit" (as I wrote above). Wilder only did two films that can be considered whodunits (Witness for the Prosecution and The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes), and even those are arguable. He did, however, do lots of films with puzzle plots and a sense of anagnorisis.
1943: Five Graves to Cairo, only his second film, has one of the cleverest moments of anagnorisis in the history of film, i.e., the revelation of the meaning of the five graves, which is particularly well-clued. (It may not be one of Wilder's best movies, but I find it one of his most underrated--it's great fun.)
1944: Double Indemnity, only his third film, is a film noir, not a whodunit, but the plot that MacMurray and Stanwyck cook up has the kind of brilliant alibi trick that characterized so many great classic whodunits. And there's an incredible detective-work sequence by none other than Eddie G.'s Barton Keyes!
1953: Stalag 17 is more whodunit-like than 99% of "official" whodunits. Holden has to figure out which one among the suspects is the real rat, and the tied-up "lightbulb" that is the rat's give-away functions perfectly as a fair-play clue.
1957: Witness for the Prosecution, perhaps Wilder's one official whodunit, is ironically one of his weakest as a whodunit, though as a film it's great, great fun (particulary Charles Laughton and Elsa Lanchester--wonderful! "Miss Plimsoll, if you were a woman, I'd strike you!"). Wilder neglected to give us any clues before the ending, which both Christie's original play and the script needed. The funny thing is, all those other movies before are well-clued, and none of them is a whodunit! Anyway, still a great movie.
1961: One, Two, Three, another great, hilarious, sorely underrated Wilder picture, has in its humor just about everything central to whodunits. All the little gags, the little moments that are seemingly insignificant, pay off in big gags, big ways, later on in the film--leading to anagnorisis that is comic, not mysterious, but still wonderfully surprising.
1966: The Fortune Cookie combines puzzle plot aspects from Double Indemnity and One, Two, Three in that the clever techniques are done by the protagonist-rogue (in this case, Matthau's hilarious "Whiplash Willie") rather than the "bad guy" (as in Five Graves to Cairo, for example) and also that they're used for comic, not mysterious, ends. In fact, one of the tricks that Matthau uses to convince the doctors that Lemmon was seriously injured harkens back to Agatha Christie's Death on the Nile (and was also used, in something of an obvious take-off of this movie, in the Monk episode "Mr. Monk Goes to the Circus")!
1970: The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, one of Wilder's best and most personal masterworks (IMO, of course), has some of the best clues in the movies (I'm thinking, in particular, of the midgets, the wheelchair tracks, the canaries [bravissimo!], and the copper rings). Ironically, none of those is exactly used re: whodunit, which Wilder chooses to reveal early on in the movie (an understandable, though not entirely desirable, decision), although the why is ingenious and not revealed until the end.
1972: Avanti!, not one of Wilder's best films but still fairly decent, has a great deal of puzzle plot material in the opening (how and why did Lemmon change suits with the guy on the plane?), in why Pamela keeps meeting up with Lemmon in the beginning (well, maybe not for us, but for him), and in how they managed to bury the bodies without anyone knowing.
1974: The Front Page, while not as hilarious or fast-paced as Hawks's clearly exemplary version, is still an above-average adaptation of the play. It contains the puzzle-plotting moment re: hiding Earl Williams, but, since it's not an exclusively Wilderian moment, I won't go into all that much detail.
1978: Fedora borrows a great deal in its plotting from Agatha Christie, with excellent clues (the plot isn't too difficult to figure out, but the clues are clever all the same).
(I haven't seen Love in the Afternoon, which also appears to have puzzle plot aspects, so I didn't put it on this list.)
So, all in all, I would argue that Wilder is enormously inspired by the classical puzzle-plot tradition. Now, some may argue the contrary: "Well, Salzmank, isn't all drama to some degree interested in the resolution of mysteries?" Absolutely, to some degree. Not everything is given away from the get-go, and there is often surprise. But that's the point: the sense of anagnorisis, which is the essence of the fair-play, puzzle-plot whodunit, is not often present in drama (which is fine, of course--not every plot is, should be, or need be a puzzle plot!--but the presence or absence of the element still needs to be analyzed).
So, what's my overarching point? Well, I think puzzle-plotting is a key aspect to Wilder's work that few critics have ever examined before. That's why I'm offering all of you a chance to take a look at my--er--"theory," if you'll humor it with such a grandiose term!
Thanks!
Salzmank
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Post by mikef6 on Apr 20, 2017 15:21:33 GMT
Thanks for this thread; it has possibilities beyond one sentence replies or a list of tiles. I have a head swirling with ideas but will start off briefly and hope others will join in.
A story I have recounted many times on the old boards is about my very early years (first grade or so) when, after my mid-sized west Texas city (Midland) got a TV station, my dad would occasionally let me set up with him to watch the late movie (10:30-midnight after which the station would go off the air until morning). Two movies were, to that kid, a punch like a .45 to the gut. They were “D.O.A.” (Rudolph Maté, 1950) and “And Then There Were None” (René Clair, 1945). Thus began my love of both movies and mysteries. I think I am still looking for the same kind of experience I had will those two films. My early reading was in the Stratemeyer Syndicate books (Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, Jr.) but by junior high I had graduated to Ellery Queen and Erle Stanley Gardner.
As you have shown, the “puzzle plot” can be employed in a widely diverse manner. A little history first. Most academics place the formal origins of the detective story with three short stories written by Edgar Allen Poe from 1841 to 1844 (although occasionally, I take my complete Bible, which includes the Protestant apocrypha, and enjoy a couple of nifty short-short mysteries written sometime in the 3rd to 6th centuries B.C.E. with the prophet Daniel as detective: Bel And The Dragon and Susanna). Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories led directly into the Golden Age that you talked about. A lot of great writers and puzzlers there but Agatha Christie towers about almost all others. In the latter half of the Golden Age, in America, a new form of the Puzzle Plot began to emerge: the hardboiled private eye. That is my specialty. We’re talking Sam Spade, Raymond Chandler and, toward the end of the hardboiled era, the most hardboiled of them all, Mickey Spillane. Since about 1970, in the literature world, the mystery and suspense genre has spun into dozens of sub-genres, viz., the police procedural, the crime drama, and the latest, self-identified area, the thriller. (International Thriller Writers was organized in 2005. Lee Child, author of the Jack Reacher novels, was a founding member.)
In movies (to make a very general statement), probably the most prominent form from the beginnings would be crime, suspense, and the thriller rather than the straight Whodunit. The science fiction film frequently uses elements of the Puzzle Plot. The futuristic “The Children of Men” – an excellent film – was based on a book by detective story writer P.D. James.
One of the terms in the O.P. that I have been thinking about a lot lately (after watching the complete Thin Man, several Charlie Chans, and many episodes of the 1957-1966 Perry Mason series) is “inevitability.” I think that is extremely important to the success of a whodunit. In the Thin Man films, Nick Charles solves them all except the last in which he has to set a trap to force the killer to reveal his/her self. A very weak ending to that fine series. Several of the Chans, especially as the series went on and on and on and finally shifted from Fox to the Poverty Row studio Monogram, had to resort to the same kind of cop-out (if you will pardon the expression) where the identity of the killer is arbitrary, not inevitable.
I could ramble on (and I haven't even touched on Billy Wilder), but am also very interested in what others here – who are lifelong movie watchers and readers – have to say.
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Post by london777 on Apr 20, 2017 15:51:36 GMT
This one will run and run. I have to pick my son up from school now, but will return to try and get my head around all the interesting issues raised and examples cited.
For now, thanks for anagnorisis. A new word for me, but look forward to seeing me include it many future posts, whether or not relevant, to add a touch of class.
Now, some people do not like the puzzle plot format, and that's just fine. (Our own london777 , judging from his comments on the other thread, is one of them).
Which thread was that? Before I renew hostilities with you, I would like to be surer of my ground.
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Post by Nalkarj on Apr 20, 2017 16:04:25 GMT
Thanks for the reply, mikef6 , and for your story! I too love hardboiled private eye tales (especially those from the "Trinity"--Hammett, Chandler, and Macdonald), albeit for different reasons than I love the classical whodunit. (With that said, though, Macdonald was a fantastic puzzle-plotter as well as a great writer, as was his wife, Margaret Millar.) I agree that inevitability is highly important to the puzzle plot. (Again, many of the concepts below are inspired by Rather.) Were it otherwise, we would not feel disappointed if Burgess Meredith were the murderer at the end of Orient Express--I can imagine someone saying, "It's a surprise, isn't it? That's what you want!" Surprise, indeed, is very easy (if there were ten minutes of Japanese nature poetry at the end of a Michael Bay movie, that would be one heckuva surprise!). Combining surprise with inevitability, not only of plot but also of characters and their motivations? Very difficult. Just to disagree on a small aspect re: The Thin Man (one of my favorite movies of all time)... I don't find the lack of inevitability (or even, really, surprise) in the revelation of the murderer to be much of a flaw in that particular case (the first one, let me emphasize). Two main reasons why: (1) it was never much of a mystery in the first place but rather a superb character comedy with a detective character (the emphasis is so obviously on the Charleses, not the plot) and (2) Hammett wrote the original novel as an anti-whodunit, anti-puzzle plot. My last contention is particularly borne out by the last lines of Hammett's novel. Nick has been telling Nora how he arrived at a solution--all guesswork, no deduction. Nora responds, "That may be...but it's all pretty unsatisfactory." The End. To some extent, then, the in-book character of Nora is, believe it or not, criticizing the solution for its lack of satisfaction--and satisfaction is exactly the product of anagnorisis. (Nora's a puzzle-plot fan too!) In other words, Hammett is trying to show how, in real life, detective work isn't so neat and tidy as it is in a classical whodunit. The film doesn't emphasize this aspect as much, but it is still an undercurrent, methinks. So, because of those two facts, I'd say the fact that The Thin Man actually avoids the puzzle plot is a surprisingly good thing. (It increases the comedy.) As a fan of the puzzle plot, I'd argue that having a good detective film that does so is a rare, isolated incident, but it is true in this case. On the other hand, I would agree with you about the puzzle-plotting weaknesses of the sequel, After the Thin Man. In that film, the writers go to the trouble to create two clues (thus providing inevitability) that Nick uses to identify the killer (whose identity is indeed a surprise). But why is After the Thin Man's plotting disappointing where The Thin Man's is not? Well, the writers, having decided to make it a puzzle plot (unlike the original) then decide to renege on their commitment and not show us one of the two clues before Nick reveals the killer. That just seems silly to me. That's not a purposeful absence of puzzle-plotting, that's a neglectful waste of puzzle-plotting they already had. (I still like After, albeit not as much as the first.)
Another Thin Man, still funny but slightly less so than After, actually does solve After's plot problems--it's an actual, fair-play, puzzle-plot whodunit. So maybe they learned something...? |
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Post by Nalkarj on Apr 20, 2017 16:07:45 GMT
This one will run and run. I have to pick my son up from school now, but will return to try and get my head around all the interesting issues raised and examples cited. For now, thanks for anagnorisis. A new word for me, but look forward to seeing me include it many future posts, whether or not relevant, to add a touch of class. Now, some people do not like the puzzle plot format, and that's just fine. (Our own london777 , judging from his comments on the other thread, is one of them).
Which thread was that? Before I renew hostilities with you, I would like to be surer of my ground. , london777. Now, I don't mind it at all if anyone here isn't as fond as the puzzle plot as I am, but--Lord!--I don't want to renew hostilities. I didn't even know you and I were in the midst of hostilities (unless you mean that you didn't like Sheila, which is also fine--I can understand why someone else wouldn't like it, but it's a personal favorite of mine). |
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Post by Nalkarj on Apr 20, 2017 22:41:39 GMT
In case anyone is interested in a--er--visceral (is that the right word?) experience of anagnorisis, here's a riddle one can use to illustrate the point. A man is running home when he sees a masked man running towards him, carrying an identifiable object in his hand. At this time, the (unmasked) man turns around and runs back in the direction from which he came. What was the masked man holding in his hand?(You have probably heard this one, but, if you haven't, I'll put the answer in spoilers.) A baseball. The excellence of the solution is borne out by clues ("home," "mask," the change in direction) within the text of the riddle that lead to an inevitable, yet still highly surprising and unexpected, solution. Note that there is no deductive elimination of alternative possibilities (e.g., he's holding a bomb). However, the answer is just purely satisfying at the most--well, there's that word again!--visceral level. Just in case anyone's interested. |
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Post by teleadm on Apr 21, 2017 18:34:44 GMT
Let me be different!
Fedora is a gem, great performance from an aging William Holden one needs to see this movie more than once to get it, financed by a german tv company
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Post by Nalkarj on Apr 21, 2017 21:24:07 GMT
Let me be different! Fedora is a gem, great performance from an aging William Holden one needs to see this movie more than once to get it, financed by a german tv company I like Fedora quite a bit too, Teleadm—both for the plotting and, more importantly, for the pointed parallels to Sunset Blvd. What makes Wilder so great a filmmaker, I think, is the consistency of his cynic-with-romantic-heart vision. |
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Post by mikef6 on Apr 22, 2017 3:30:12 GMT
Thanks for the reply, mikef6 , and for your story! I too love hardboiled private eye tales (especially those from the "Trinity"--Hammett, Chandler, and Macdonald), albeit for different reasons than I love the classical whodunit. (With that said, though, Macdonald was a fantastic puzzle-plotter as well as a great writer, as was his wife, Margaret Millar.) I had to slap my forehead several times for not mentioning Ross MacDonald (neé Kenneth Millar, 1915-1983) in my paragraph on private eyes. Professor David Schmid (who teaches mystery and suspense fiction at the undergraduate level) believes that MacDonald is criminally underrated today in spite of some high level praise during MacDonald’s own lifetime, incl. NYT Book Review front page praise for “The Underground Man” in a long article by Eudora Welty in 1971. Upon some reflection, it seems to me that the private eye novel – and especially those of MacDonald are not so much “puzzle” plots as “labyrinth” plots. That is, the hero follows a case from a deceptively simple opening though high society, mobsters, cops, and the dark past. Often, we reach the solution at the same time the Eye does (although sometimes, as in “The Maltese Falcon,” the detective reveals that he was tipped to the killer in the early going but needed to get to the bottom of the case). And those labyrinthine plots have never been more twisty than MacDonald wrote, beginning with the eighth Lew Archer novel, “The Galton Case” (MacDonald himself said that this was where he hit his stride). His Archer novels after “The Galton Case” explore family dynamics, multi-generational conflicts, and dark hidden secrets from the past that result in murder in the present. MacDonald has not been all that well served by movies and TV. The was, of course, the two early Archer novels that became vehicles for Paul Newman (as Lew Harper) in 1966 and 1975. In 1974, Peter Graves played Archer in a made-for of “The Underground Man.” I thought at first that Graves might make a good choice, but turned it off early after the script had Archer make fun of a mentally challenged man (when the man stumbles, Graves laughs and says, “Way to go, Fritz”) and then had him marooned at sea by gangsters. There are a few other adaptations, some foreign language. There is a rumor of more Lew Archer to come, one of them produced and possibly directed by the Coens. |
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Post by Nalkarj on Apr 22, 2017 4:21:26 GMT
Thanks for the reply, mikef6 , and for your story! I too love hardboiled private eye tales (especially those from the "Trinity"--Hammett, Chandler, and Macdonald), albeit for different reasons than I love the classical whodunit. (With that said, though, Macdonald was a fantastic puzzle-plotter as well as a great writer, as was his wife, Margaret Millar.) I had to slap my forehead several times for not mentioning Ross MacDonald (neé Kenneth Millar, 1915-1983) in my paragraph on private eyes. Professor David Schmid (who teaches mystery and suspense fiction at the undergraduate level) believes that MacDonald is criminally underrated today in spite of some high level praise during MacDonald’s own lifetime, incl. NYT Book Review front page praise for “The Underground Man” in a long article by Eudora Welty in 1971. Upon some reflection, it seems to me that the private eye novel – and especially those of MacDonald are not so much “puzzle” plots as “labyrinth” plots. That is, the hero follows a case from a deceptively simple opening though high society, mobsters, cops, and the dark past. Often, we reach the solution at the same time the Eye does (although sometimes, as in “The Maltese Falcon,” the detective reveals that he was tipped to the killer in the early going but needed to get to the bottom of the case). And those labyrinthine plots have never been more twisty than MacDonald wrote, beginning with the eighth Lew Archer novel, “The Galton Case” (MacDonald himself said that this was where he hit his stride). His Archer novels after “The Galton Case” explore family dynamics, multi-generational conflicts, and dark hidden secrets from the past that result in murder in the present. MacDonald has not been all that well served by movies and TV. The was, of course, the two early Archer novels that became vehicles for Paul Newman (as Lew Harper) in 1966 and 1975. In 1974, Peter Graves played Archer in a made-for of “The Underground Man.” I thought at first that Graves might make a good choice, but turned it off early after the script had Archer make fun of a mentally challenged man (when the man stumbles, Graves laughs and says, “Way to go, Fritz”) and then had him marooned at sea by gangsters. There are a few other adaptations, some foreign language. There is a rumor of more Lew Archer to come, one of them produced and possibly directed by the Coens. I too love Lew Archer, Mike, and I bemoan the fact that he and his creator are little-known nowadays; in fact, both Kenneth and Margaret Millar are favorite authors of mine. I agree that Archer has been ill-served by the movies, unfortunately. ( Harper is enjoyable--Newman is obviously having fun--but not particularly distinguished; I've never seen the sequel, The Drowning Pool.) I agree with you (and Macdonald) that The Galton Case is where Macdonald his stride, coming out of Chandler's shadow, but I think The Chill is probably his best novel. Interesting to hear about the made-for-TV movie! I agree that Graves would be a good choice for Archer; it's too bad that the script was that atrocious! I agree with you about Macdonald's labyrinthine plotting, and that we often learn the solution at the same time as the PI, but I must insist that Macdonald is still a great puzzle-plotter as well as a great novelist. Your description is apt, but Macdonald insists on clues, inevitability, and surprise--combining them with trenchant observations and great characters and writing--in a way that Chandler (except in Lady in the Lake) and Hammett (except in a few "Op" stories--oh, and the Spade stories he had to write for money [forgot about those]) do not. Not to disparage Chandler or Hammett, by the way, but pointing out what I feel is a prime difference. That superb website Thrilling Detective, which I'm sure you know, carries out the "trinity" theme farther than I have above: they propose Hammett as the Father, Chandler as the Son, and Macdonald as the Holy Ghost of private-eye literature. Perhaps a bit too literal, but then, after considering Macdonald's role in giving soul to the sub-genre (or sub-sub-genre?), perhaps not too far off after all. |
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Post by Nalkarj on Apr 22, 2017 20:47:42 GMT
mikef6, I just re-read your original response, and it seems to me now that you were only criticizing the last Thin Man (making my comments on the whole series irrelevant). Is that so? If it is, my apologies for originally misunderstanding your point.
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Post by mikef6 on Apr 22, 2017 23:30:09 GMT
mikef6 , I just re-read your original response, and it seems to me now that you were only criticizing the last Thin Man (making my comments on the whole series irrelevant). Is that so? If it is, my apologies for originally misunderstanding your point. Salzmank Yeah, my original comment was about the last film. In my mind (I have watched the entire TTM series within recent years), Nick all the rest using logical reasoning. I know that in the first film when Nora asks him who did it as they set down with all the suspects, he says he doesn't know, but then his line of reasoning leads to the final solution. That was also my feelings from the rest, except the last where he has to trick the killer into revealing himself. Your analysis shows me that Nick's ratiocination is shakier than I imagined. Still, for the era and the conventions of the classic whodunit series, TTM - all minus one - is pretty tight. |
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Post by Doghouse6 on Apr 23, 2017 0:22:00 GMT
I agree that Archer has been ill-served by the movies, unfortunately. ( Harper is enjoyable--Newman is obviously having fun--but not particularly distinguished; I've never seen the sequel, The Drowning Pool.) I've not been a Macdonald reader, but I've always had a soft spot for Harper: with its glittering cast and polished production values evoking a last gasp of '50s-style cinematic opulence as its backdrop, and its charge into franker treatment of seamier subject matter anticipating the grittier cinema of the '70s, its swingin' '60s milieu bridges the transition between those two eras with one foot planted firmly in each. At the time of its '75 release (and perhaps expecting " Harper redux"), I was disappointed in The Drowning Pool. A fairly recent re-watch has raised my evaluation of it and allowed me to appreciate, if retrospectively, its own '70s-style grittiness, not unlike that of Night Moves from the same year. While neither groundbreaking nor weighty, it's assuredly worth a watch, especially when done so free of preconceived expectations and taken on its own terms. |
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Post by Nalkarj on Apr 23, 2017 0:30:36 GMT
I agree that Archer has been ill-served by the movies, unfortunately. ( Harper is enjoyable--Newman is obviously having fun--but not particularly distinguished; I've never seen the sequel, The Drowning Pool.) I've not been a Macdonald reader, but I've always had a soft spot for Harper: with its glittering cast and polished production values evoking a last gasp of '50s-style cinematic opulence as its backdrop, and its charge into franker treatment of seamier subject matter anticipating the grittier cinema of the '70s, its swingin' '60s milieu bridges the transition between those two eras with one foot planted firmly in each. At the time of its '75 release (and perhaps expecting " Harper redux"), I was disappointed in The Drowning Pool. A fairly recent re-watch has raised my evaluation of it and allowed me to appreciate, if retrospectively, its own '70s-style grittiness, not unlike that of Night Moves from the same year. While neither groundbreaking nor weighty, it's assuredly worth a watch, especially when done so free of preconceived expectations and taken on its own terms. I have a bit of a soft spot for Harper too, Doghouse, though in that case it may just be that it was the first private-eye picture I ever actually saw when I was young. The last time I saw it, I did enjoy it, but, again, I don't find it all that distinguished. There is definite cleverness, though, in the parody of The Big Sleep, complete with Lauren Bacall as the crippled millionaire who calls Harper in, that opens the movie. |
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Post by Nalkarj on Apr 23, 2017 0:32:05 GMT
mikef6, I just re-read your original response, and it seems to me now that you were only criticizing the last Thin Man (making my comments on the whole series irrelevant). Is that so? If it is, my apologies for originally misunderstanding your point. Salzmank Yeah, my original comment was about the last film. In my mind (I have watched the entire TTM series within recent years), Nick all the rest using logical reasoning. I know that in the first film when Nora asks him who did it as they set down with all the suspects, he says he doesn't know, but then his line of reasoning leads to the final solution. That was also my feelings from the rest, except the last where he has to trick the killer into revealing himself. Your analysis shows me that Nick's ratiocination is shakier than I imagined. Still, for the era and the conventions of the classic whodunit series, TTM - all minus one - is pretty tight. Right, got it, mikef6. Sorry about the initial misunderstanding! If I'm remembering correctly (and we know how my memory served on The Big Sleep!), Nick tells Nora both in the original and in After that he has no idea who the killer is going in to the denouement--and, I think, that's true in both cases, even though in After he discovers evidence (not shared with the viewer) after the gather-up-all-the-suspects scene has already started. In Another, though, he does know, he has done detective work, and he does have evidence. There's also some good detective work in Shadow of the Thin Man (supplied, if I'm not mistaken, by Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee, a.k.a. "Ellery Queen"), though I'm not otherwise a big fan of that entry. I'd say Nick hasn't done much reasoning to solve the mystery in the original, actually--in fact, I don't see any clues in it, unless one counts the metafictional one that MacCaulay is played by Porter Hall, who seemed to make a career of playing cinematic murderers in the '30s! He achieves his solution by a combination of guesswork and getting suspects (in this case Minna Gombell's Mimi) to confess, therefore prompting the killer to act--and catches said killer red-handed. A neat trick, no doubt, but not particularly deduction leading to anagnorisis. (Not to say there is no deduction in The Thin Man-- the revelation that Wynant is dead, while fairly obvious to the viewer, is well-deduced by Nick --but just none regarding the denouement or the killer's identity.) Again, not a bad thing at all--on the contrary!--because it's a beautifully done character comedy, such a great movie. Powell and Loy's performances are really things of wonder. |
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Post by Doghouse6 on Apr 23, 2017 0:50:33 GMT
The last time I saw it, I did enjoy it, but, again, I don't find it all that distinguished. There is definite cleverness, though, in the parody of The Big Sleep, complete with Lauren Bacall as the crippled millionaire who calls Harper in, that opens the movie. Oh yeah, those are absolutely fair assessments. Primarily, it's a fun and undemanding ride in that slick, big-Hollywood-studio style that was then going into recession, but I'd argue that, if the film itself isn't all that distinguished, the cast certainly is, with so many well-known names and faces strutting their stuff and having a great ol' time doing it. |
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Post by Nalkarj on Apr 23, 2017 21:50:04 GMT
If anyone (even london777!) is interested in my continued theorizing, I wrote a little something here. Just to show that one's liking for the puzzle-plot is not based on one's ability to solve it. |
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Post by Nalkarj on Apr 24, 2017 18:56:37 GMT
Yeah, my original comment was about the last film. In my mind (I have watched the entire TTM series within recent years), Nick all the rest using logical reasoning. I know that in the first film when Nora asks him who did it as they set down with all the suspects, he says he doesn't know, but then his line of reasoning leads to the final solution. That was also my feelings from the rest, except the last where he has to trick the killer into revealing himself. Your analysis shows me that Nick's ratiocination is shakier than I imagined. Still, for the era and the conventions of the classic whodunit series, TTM - all minus one - is pretty tight. Right, got it, mikef6. Sorry about the initial misunderstanding! If I'm remembering correctly (and we know how my memory served on The Big Sleep!), Nick tells Nora both in the original and in After that he has no idea who the killer is going in to the denouement--and, I think, that's true in both cases, even though in After he discovers evidence (not shared with the viewer) after the gather-up-all-the-suspects scene has already started. In Another, though, he does know, he has done detective work, and he does have evidence. There's also some good detective work in Shadow of the Thin Man (supplied, if I'm not mistaken, by Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee, a.k.a. "Ellery Queen"), though I'm not otherwise a big fan of that entry. I'd say Nick hasn't done much reasoning to solve the mystery in the original, actually--in fact, I don't see any clues in it, unless one counts the metafictional one that MacCaulay is played by Porter Hall, who seemed to make a career of playing cinematic murderers in the '30s! He achieves his solution by a combination of guesswork and getting suspects (in this case Minna Gombell's Mimi) to confess, therefore prompting the killer to act--and catches said killer red-handed. A neat trick, no doubt, but not particularly deduction leading to anagnorisis. (Not to say there is no deduction in The Thin Man-- the revelation that Wynant is dead, while fairly obvious to the viewer, is well-deduced by Nick --but just none regarding the denouement or the killer's identity.) Again, not a bad thing at all--on the contrary!--because it's a beautifully done character comedy, such a great movie. Powell and Loy's performances are really things of wonder. There's also a fairly decent example of ratiocination in the second that is unconnected to the murderer's identity but explains a side mystery—Nick's explanation of why the check must be phony, because no one writes his signature exactly the same way twice. Not the best clue in the world, admittedly, but I still thought it rather neat. I actually only remembered it a few moments ago. |
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Post by tarathian123 on Apr 25, 2017 13:59:24 GMT
Question - What is a "traditional puzzle plot"?
Most any fiction ever written regardless of genre is in effect a puzzle plot. If we knew the ending before opening the book then we wouldn't bother reading it. To a great extent, likewise a movie.
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