Frank Krutnik's "Thrillers, Chillers, and Killers"

Frank Krutnik is an emeritus reader in film studies at the University of Sussex in Brighton. His publications include Popular Film and Television Comedy; In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre, Masculinity; and Inventing Jerry Lewis; and he is coeditor of Un-American Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era.

Krutnik applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Thrillers, Chillers, and Killers: Radio and Film Noir, and shared the following:

Page 99 concludes the chapter “The Transmedial Seriality of Michael Shayne #1: From Book to Film”. The page wraps up the discussion of the low-budget B-film series in which the Producers Releasing Corporation (PRC) cast Hugh Marlowe as Brett Halliday’s private eye Michael Shayne. Even though reviewers complained that the PRC series was hampered by budgetary restrictions, with verbal exposition often substituting for dramatized action, these films were more faithful to Halliday’s version of Michael Shayne than the earlier Twentieth Century-Fox series, in which Lloyd Nolan took a broadly comic approach to Shayne.

The final paragraph summarizes the differences between these two film series and the common conception of what a film noir is and does. These series films “are modest in their budgets and their ambitions, never engaging seriously with the implications of the murderous activities their detectives investigate”. Unlike many cherished noir movies, they avoid complex storytelling strategies or an emphasis on the ‘fallen world’ of American modernity. Even so, such B-film series performed a valuable role in contributing to double-feature programming and the studios’ obligation to theatre owners, as well as representing “significant developments in the Michael Shayne media franchise”. At the same time as audiences were able to watch the PRC films in cinemas, they could also listen to the detective’s adventures on the radio, courtesy of a popular series from the Mutual Broadcasting System, as well as engaging with Halliday’s ongoing book series. The various media “produced widely differing versions of Shayne, but they were recognizable iterations of an established cultural figure, the hard-boiled private eye, that had achieved substantial familiarity across U.S. popular culture by the late 1940s”

The Page 99 Test does not really provide a successful snapshot of the book as a whole. It certainly illustrates one of its key themes - the questioning of conventional approaches to (film) noir - but there is no mention of the central topic of radio drama. It is the following chapter that examines in detail the various appearances of Michael Shayne on the airwaves, including a convincingly noir approach to the detective by Jeff Chandler.

Visit Frank Krutnik's website.

--Marshal Zeringue