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Post by Nalkarj on Jan 13, 2018 2:54:17 GMT
Following my thread on superhero flicks, I’m going to turn to another genre, one of which I’m fonder—the whodunit. I should note that there are some general guidelines here: I’m not going to put, say, The Maltese Falcon, Bulldog Drummond Strikes Back, Sleuth, Deathtrap, Laura, or The Big Sleep, great movies though they are, on my list, as they don’t focus on their whodunit aspects. (Your criteria may be different, of course.) I posted something similar in the “classics” board, but you’re allowed to choose any movie or television episode from any era. So, without any further ado... Film: The Thin Man (1934) Another Thin Man (1939) Murder on a Honeymoon (1935) The Phantom of Crestwood (1932) Green for Danger (1946) And Then There Were None (1945) The Case of the Howling Dog (1934) The Kennel Murder Case (1933) Charlie Chan in Egypt (1935) Charlie Chan at Treasure Island (1939) Charlie Chan in Paris (1935) Death on the Nile (1978) The Last of Sheila (1973) The Scarlet Claw (1944) The House of Fear (1945) Star of Midnight (1935) Remember Last Night? (1935) The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970)
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Post by politicidal on Jan 13, 2018 3:11:06 GMT
Agatha Christie's Poirot
The first season of How to Get Away With Murder until like all Shondaland series, it jumps the shark and into the lion's mouth.
Clue
Murder on the Orient Express
Evil Under the Sun
Anatomy of a Murder
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Post by Primemovermithrax Pejorative on Jan 13, 2018 3:14:57 GMT
One of My Wives is Missing, 1970s tv movie adapted from the play "Trap for a single man."
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Post by Nalkarj on Jan 13, 2018 3:26:51 GMT
Television:
N.B. While the categories sometimes overlap, these are not necessarily my favorite episodes of these shows, simply the ones that weave the best mystery/whodunit tales, in my opinion.
“The Adventure of the Lover’s Leap” (Ellery Queen)
“The Adventure of the Chinese Dog” (Ellery Queen)
“Trial by Error” (Murder, She Wrote)
“The Grand Old Lady” (Murder, She Wrote)
“Mr. Monk Goes to the Ballgame” (Monk)
“Mr. Monk and the Daredevil” (Monk)
“Mr. Monk and the Genius” (Monk)
“A Stitch in Crime” (Columbo)
“Forgotten Lady” (Columbo)
“Last Salute to the Commodore” (Columbo)
“Jack in the Box” (Jonathan Creek)
“No Trace of Tracy” (Jonathan Creek)
“The Problem of Gallows Gate” (Jonathan Creek)
“Mother Redcap” (Jonathan Creek)
“Black Canary” (Jonathan Creek)
“Satan’s Chimney” (Jonathan Creek)
“The Tailor’s Dummy” (Jonathan Creek)
“Wicked Wedding Night” (Death in Paradise)
“Predicting Murder” (Death in Paradise)
“Ye of Little Faith” (Death in Paradise)
“Stab in the Dark” (Death in Paradise)
“A Study in Pink” (Sherlock)
“The Hounds of Baskerville” (Sherlock)
“Peril at End House” (Agatha Christie’s Poirot)
“Murder on the Links” (Agatha Christie’s Poirot)
“Death on the Nile” (Agatha Christie’s Poirot)
Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? (1980)
“The Killings at Badger’s Drift” (Midsomer Murders)
“Ghosts of Christmas Past” (Midsomer Murders)
“The Curse of Beaton Manor” (Murdoch Mysteries)
Sherlock Holmes (entire series, w/Jeremy Brett)
“The Laws of Motion” (Father Brown, 2013 series)
“The Mirror of the Magistrate” (Father Brown, 1974 series)
“The Dagger with Wings” (Father Brown, 1974 series)
“The Sorcerer” (Colonel March of Scotland Yard)
“The New Invisible Man” (Colonel March of Scotland Yard)
“Error at Daybreak” (Colonel March of Scotland Yard)
“The Case of the Winthrop Legend” (Sherlock Holmes, 1954 series)
“The Case of the Exhumed Client” (Sherlock Holmes, 1954 series)
“Speedy Death” (The Mrs. Bradley Mysteries)
“Retirement is Murder” (Frasier)
“The Town of No Return” (The Avengers)
“Castle De’ath” (The Avengers)
“Too Many Christmas Trees” (The Avengers)
“From Venus with Love” (The Avengers)
“The Living Dead” (The Avengers)
“Death’s Door” (The Avengers)
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Post by Nalkarj on Jan 13, 2018 3:46:33 GMT
One of My Wives is Missing, 1970s tv movie adapted from the play "Trap for a single man.” An excellent choice. I wrote some comments about it somewhere around here…
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Lynx
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Post by Lynx on Jan 13, 2018 4:27:47 GMT
My hat's off to you Sir. You truly know your stuff and if I might add, quite the Historian.
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Post by Lynx on Jan 13, 2018 4:37:10 GMT
Have you seen the series "Rosemary and Thyme" ?
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Post by Nalkarj on Jan 13, 2018 4:52:48 GMT
My hat's off to you Sir. You truly know your stuff and if I might add, quite the Historian. Thanks for the kind words, lynx0139. I am fond of whodunits, as you may be able to guess… As for the TV shows, they put a lot of them on TV, and I’m also surprised when I find a well-plotted episode—an unexpected gem, to speak. For example, Murder, She Wrote is usually a bit too cutesy and poorly-plotted (“ I never said it was poison!”) for my tastes, but every once in a while there’s a work of ingenuity like “Trial by Error” (perhaps the best courtroom mystery of them all) or “The Grand Old Lady.” As for the history, my own tastes in film lean towards the ‘30s and ‘40s; if I were interested in “my favorite movies” lists, most of my favorites, of all genres, would probably come from those decades. Yes, indeed, but I’m not all that fond of it, for better or worse.
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Lynx
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Post by Lynx on Jan 13, 2018 5:14:56 GMT
After I pondered your words for a while......I have to agree with you. Take care Sir....it was a pleasure to meet you.
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Post by BATouttaheck on Jan 13, 2018 5:20:53 GMT
NalkarjI've been meaning to mention this one to you.... Rehearsal for Murder (1982)It's a made for TV movie starring Robert Preston and seems like it might be right up your alley. For some reason his picture is not on the DVD cover. It's on YouTube so no horses need be beaten (dead or otherwise) www.youtube.com/watch?v=SX98vl2_UNcNot GREAT but a fun mystery.
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Post by mikef6 on Jan 13, 2018 5:31:13 GMT
A great subject. One of my favorites, in fact. The 10 titles I list here are never set in stone. They are just what I consider to be 10 great detective movies, not THE 10 Best. My two main criteria are: 1) there must be some deduction by a detective and 2) the quality of the final revelation of the killer. Thus, The Maltese Falcon meets my standards, but The Big Sleep doesn’t. So, for better or worse, here are 10 great detective films.
The Thin Man / W.S. Van Dyke (1934) Charlie Chan At The Opera / H. Bruce Humberstone (1936) The Maltese Falcon / John Huston (1941) Murder My Sweet / Edward Dmytryk (1944) And Then There Were None / Rene Clair (1945) D.O.A. / Rudolph Maté (1950) The Last Of Sheila / Herbert Ross (1973) Night Moves / Arthur Penn (1975) Brick / Rian Johnson (2005) Ne Le Dis Á Personne (Tell No One) / Guillaume Canet (2006)
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Post by Deleted on Jan 13, 2018 6:54:51 GMT
A great subject. One of my favorites, in fact. The 10 titles I list here are never set in stone. They are just what I consider to be 10 great detective movies, not THE 10 Best. My two main criteria are: 1) there must be some deduction by a detective and 2) the quality of the final revelation of the killer. Thus, The Maltese Falcon meets my standards, but The Big Sleep doesn’t. So, for better or worse, here are 10 great detective films. The Thin Man / W.S. Van Dyke (1934) Charlie Chan At The Opera / H. Bruce Humberstone (1936) The Maltese Falcon / John Huston (1941) Murder My Sweet / Edward Dmytryk (1944) And Then There Were None / Rene Clair (1945) D.O.A. / Rudolph Maté (1950) The Last Of Sheila / Herbert Ross (1973) Night Moves / Arthur Penn (1975) Brick / Rian Johnson (2005) Ne Le Dis Á Personne (Tell No One) / Guillaume Canet (2006) I have not gotten around to 'Tell No One' yet but have been meaning to for quite some time now. I read the novel a long while ago and really annoyed it. You'd recommend the film adaption?
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Post by darksidebeadle on Jan 13, 2018 9:34:56 GMT
The Thing (1982)
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Post by louise on Jan 13, 2018 13:47:52 GMT
TV series; Midsomer Murders Murder, she wrote Poirot (a bit hit and miss, some episodes especially later ones were very poor) Inspector Morse Lewis Vera
Columbo is one of my favourites, but you can't exactly call it a whodunnit, since you know whodunnit from the beginning.
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Post by mikef6 on Jan 13, 2018 15:10:22 GMT
I have not gotten around to 'Tell No One' yet but have been meaning to for quite some time now. I read the novel a long while ago and really annoyed it. You'd recommend the film adaption? Yes, absolutely see it. Harlan Coben is one of my favorite mystery writers working today. There are not many in the modern world of mystery fiction who can pile on the surprises and twists like Coben. "Tell No One" is one of his best but it took the French to bring it successfully to the screen. I do believe that it is the only one of his books that has reached the Big Screen. (Coben has written and produced shows and mini-series for TV. I don't watch much at all that has been made for TV or streaming so haven't seen any of his work for those formats.)
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Post by Nalkarj on Jan 13, 2018 15:41:22 GMT
BATouttaheck Wouldn’t ya know it, I watched Rehearsal for Murder (via YouTube) for the first time a few months ago, mostly because of Levinson and Link. It’s a lot of fun, though a few things seemed “off” to me—as if Levinson and Link intended a bigger twist, or something like that. Thanks for thinking of me there, Bat. mikef6 I don’t believe I’ve read anything by Mr. Coben, for my sins… I’m not particularly well-read on modern mystery fiction (or modern fiction in general, to be honest). I think I told you somewhere here that I’d like to look into Ne le dis à personne… I will find it and get back to you! By the way, apropos of European mystery films, have you seen Contratiempo, a great little Spanish mystery flick? Very good, very fun and well-paced. louise I was waiting for someone to bring this up! Columbo is of course an “inverted mystery story” (or “howcatchem”), in which you know the identity of the murderer from the get-go, and the focus is the sleuth’s attempts to catch him. A few Columbo episodes, including “Last Salute to the Commodore,” which I put on the list, are whodunits, but they’re the exceptions.
To be strict with our definitions, you are of course right here. And yet… and yet… Columbo has far more in common with the whodunit tradition than, say, the tales of R. Austin Freeman, who pioneered the genre—that is to say, we are provided with fair-play clues by which we may determine how Columbo will be able to catch the killer (and, oftentimes, there are other, subsidiary mysteries—the “how” in “Columbo Goes to the Guillotine,” for example). “Forgotten Lady,” “A Stitch in Crime,” and “By Dawn’s Early Light” are particularly good in this regard (and just very good episodes, to boot). For that matter, one of the Monk episodes I’ve put on the list, “Mr. Monk and the Genius,” is a howcatchem, yet it’s still a fair-play problem. Again, these are not strict whodunits, so perhaps I’m breaking my own rules, but they’re far closer (in my opinion) than, say, something like The Big Sleep (or even Deathtrap), in which we don’t know the killer’s identity from the beginning. I hope that makes some bit of sense…
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Post by Nalkarj on Jan 16, 2018 0:43:51 GMT
Not sure if anyone else is interested in this, but there was a Monk marathon on last night, and, in watching one or two episodes that I hadn’t already seen, I noticed something somewhat curious. The majority of mystery shows—e.g., Murder, She Wrote or Diagnosis: Murder—tend to be under-plotted: the solution to the mystery relies on a single clue (as Carr wrote that a mystery never should), usually of the “ I never said it was poison” variety. For example: OK, OK, Salzmank, we’ve got the picture. Now, in our scenario, it’s very lucky for Mrs. B and the Sheriff that Joe confessed, as there is not only (1) no evidence to convict him but also (2) no way to know he was the murderer even from what he said. You don’t need Perry Mason to figure out this is rough on poor Joe. What if Joe had shown up at the scene of the crime and had seen the weapon after Mary Ellen was killed but (because he was afraid of being suspected) kept mum about it? Or what if the Sheriff had told someone else about the weapon, and that person had told Joe? There are so many other options here that Mrs. B’s “clue” is not really a clue at all. Now, that is the large majority of TV whodunits— capisco, capiamo. I was intrigued by the fact that, in one of these Monk episodes, the opposite happened: it was actually over-plotted. [ Minor SPOILERS for “Mr. Monk Goes to Vegas.”] “Mr. Monk Goes to Vegas,” the episode in question, is probably one of the best of the series’ run, with a good setting, some funny gags, and a great, Columbo-esque turn from guest villain James Brolin. Yet it has a severe plot/script problem that is, in many ways, the opposite of Mrs. Busybody’s case above: it tries to be over-clever. À la Columbo, we know early on that Brolin is the killer; the question is how he did it when he has a cast-iron alibi. About halfway through the episode, we see (in a fun joke) exactly how he could have done it, and I thought for sure that the rest was just going to be about Monk’s attempts to find evidence.
Not so: the writers have something else up their sleeves. That method is never referred-to again, and instead we get a convoluted and frankly ludicrous answer that involves an accomplice, a sliding panel, and a complicated and unbelievable impersonation (which, however, I managed to spot from the beginning). More than that, the real solution just wouldn’t work, in Vegas or anywhere else, and it taxes the viewer’s credulity far too much, whereas the false solution was perhaps simplistic but workable and believable.
I admired the writers’ cleverness (two solutions!) and chutzpah, but it all comes across as kinda stupid; both Mrs. Busybody above, and this Monk episode, achieve the same goal by different means.
Again, I don’t know if I’m the only person intrigued by that, but I wonder if you’ve ever found something similar: not under-cleverness but, perhaps, over-cleverness. (Actually, some episodes of Jonathan Creek may qualify—oh, and another Monk, “Mr. Monk and the Lady Next Door.” Is it a Monk trademark?) I don’t think it ruins the episode, but I’m surprised that the writers shot down their own cleverness in that way.
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Post by Nalkarj on Sept 9, 2020 3:25:34 GMT
This may be blasphemous, but is Geraldine McEwan anyone else’s favorite screen Miss Marple? To be candid, I find the McEwan adaptations much better-paced than the much-vaunted Joan Hicksons, and McEwan displayed a wonderful mischief-streak that made her Marple more of a character than a stereotypical old gossip.
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Post by darksidebeadle on Sept 9, 2020 4:23:13 GMT
Basic Instinct
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Post by politicidal on Sept 9, 2020 14:54:01 GMT
A more recent example but I really enjoyed Branagh's Dead Again.
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