Jim Hanvey is a genial but top-notch detective who has retired to his country home. An insurance company hires him to find a missing emerald so they won't have to pay out the $100,000 for which the jewel is insured. It doesn't take him long to find the emerald, but he discovers that finding it was the easy part; the difficult part is getting it back to its rightful owner, and he winds up involved in a murder in which an innocent man is framed.
13 May Jim Hanvey Detective (1937)
Straw Dogs
You can do better than watching most current movies by noodling around with old detective movies from the 30’s. They are generally not very good, but collectively they defined the base for our most common idiom.
This one, thankfully, has no racist comedy player. It does depend on colourful characters and is staged as a play. The denouement is in a room of suspects, as usual. There is a ‘bait’ angle, also as usual.
We see the influence of a rather strong folding component: many films from this era feature a news reporter whose writing has agency in the mystery. That happens here. A twist that some gangsters are innocent is revealed way to early by modern standards.
No interesting folds.
Posted in 2022
Ted’s Evaluation — 1 of 3: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.
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