Alexander Hall | The Amazing Mr. Williams / 1939

detecting love

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dwight Taylor, Sy Bartlett, and Richard Maibaum (screenplay, based on a story by Sy Bartlett), Alexander Hall (director) The Amazing Mr. Williams / 1939

 

In his 1939 film, Alexander Hall uses the metaphor of a man being married to his job quite literally, the frustrated young bride-to-be—if she can ever get her hands around the man for more than two minutes—Maxine Carroll (Joan Blondell) declares she’s through with Police Investigator Kenny Williams (Melvyn Douglas), handing him over to the man she declares to be his true bride, Captain McGovern (Clarence Kolb).

    And throughout most the film, indeed, it appears that Kenny is more fascinated by the crime sites he’s regularly called to than anything a woman may have to offer him.

     His love relationship with his Captain, however, is on and off again, as Kenny keeps attempting to placate Maxine, at a point early in the film by bringing the criminal, Buck Moseby (Edward Brophy), who he’s scheduled to deliver to a state prison along with him to a date, including dragging him and Maxine’s roommate Effie (Ruth Donnelly) along as a pretend companion to Moseby through amusement park rides and a final dinner at a nearby dance club, where the now savvy police arrest the criminal—who’s just once again tried to escape—along Kenny himself.

     To punish his metaphorical lover, McGovern determines to require him take on the job he’s suggested for another lieutenant: to catch a murderer who kills off women by lumping them over the head. Kenny has argued that all they need to do is dress up one of the policeman in drag and let him walk the dangerous streets where the murderer is likely to lurk.

      Against his will, Kenny is forced to undertake the task, despite his obvious moustache (covered up by a hat vail). The detective looks ridiculous, but the ruse eventually works, but not before everyone gets so worried about him for not calling in that even Maxine goes on the search, finding him in a dark alley just before she herself nearly becomes the next victim, while allowing her always “late on the scene” lover to nab the scab and finally slip out of his dress.

      They almost make up and actually plan to go through with the wedding officiated by the mayor, where Maxine works as his secretary, just across the window-view of the police headquarters. But needing help with a new bank robbery in which a guard was killed, Kenny’s demanding police-Captain wife tricks him into returning to the squad by having another detective lure him into helping to solve the case by missing all the obvious bits of evidence. Before you know it, Kenny has once again seemingly solved the case and found the robber through tracking down his son through a dropped coloring book in which, mysteriously, the boy has put beards on all the figures to be colored in, including Snow White. Freud might suggest that the young boy will certainly grow up being, as he evidences, so terrified of women that he turns them all into bearded men, loving the feel of whiskers.

      Obviously, he arrives late to the wedding which, so Maxine, insists will now never take place since it’s clear that he is truly married to the Captain and his sleuthing. And indeed, given the dirty tricks McGovern keeps using to prevent him from marrying Maxine and to retain him at his side, we too begin to wonder whether there might not be some truth to the metaphor. Just like the journalists in The Front Page are wed to their newspapers or, better yet, like Hildy Johnson in Howard Hawks’ remake His Girl Friday is emotionally married to her editor Walter Burns, so Kenny seems to be in a permanent relationship not only with the job but with man in charge of his employment who lives in all-male world where women simply don’t exist.

      In Hall’s The Amazing Mr. Williams there is nothing visually homoerotic about the McGovern-Kenny Williams universe; the love McGovern feels for his underling lies totally in the way in which Kenny’s brain works, in the amazing powers of his ratiocination that is completely different from those of his peers. You might almost describe it as a special way of thinking, a “queer” vision in his ability to track down a killer through the classrooms of children coloring pictures in their books. And wouldn’t you know, the crook’s kid just happens to be the cutest boy in the class, which is how we know his dad to be innocent despite the amazing deductive powers of Detective Williams.

      Finally, on his way once more to deliver up a criminal to the jails of justice, Kenny observes, quite by accident, that the man’s coat still holds the residue of gun powder, suggesting the murderer has used his shoulder as a prop to kill the guard. There were, so it appears, two men involved, just as the convicted man has argued all along, that he was forced into participating in the robbery.

      Kenny is different from all the others in yet another way: he has a conscience. Despite the fact that it may get him 10 years in prison as well, he and his human “package” get off the train at the very next stop to go back and seek out the true murderer-bank thief.

      This the time the only way to track him down, so it appears, is through his consumption of alcohol, an expensive brand, a half-empty bottle of which was found along with other items in the convicted man’s car trunk. With the cops now on the detective’s track as well, he has to take a chance in involving his own girlfriend Maxine since he’s now truly “wanted” by his fellow cops.

      Despite his series of clever ruses, letting the police think that he’ll meet up at the local drugstore with Maxine while he actually visits her apartment the minute they run off, he is caught and handcuffed—although he puts on the handcuffs himself suggesting to his neighborhood friends that the real criminal is his fellow detective, who come to his aid when the other resists.

     But in the meanwhile, having tracked the purchases of the special liquor consumed by likely suspects, Maxine visits the apartment of the real killer’s mol, gets a look at her and overhears their plans to attend the horseraces. When she identifies the woman in the crowd, allowing Kenny to swoop down upon the true criminal—trampled to death by the horses as they round the track—she is made a deputy detective, having been bitten by the lure of unsolved situations herself.

      The two can finally be married since they now share the same queer profession. And the film almost convinces us of the possibility of their living happily ever after, except that just as they are about to leap into bed, the Captain puts out a call...this time for all deputy detectives, a siren call that Maxine now can simply not resist.

      We observe the policemen huddled nearby giggling. It’s obviously been a lure to once more separate the heterosexual couple. Perhaps the Captain is just getting in one more dig on his favorite detective, or maybe he’s gone “straight,” or, more likely, he’s jealous of her for almost bedding down with the man with whom he’s truly in love, and in revenge has taken her away from him.

      This film has been described as a screwball comedy, which it is if you comprehend its relationship with other such screwball works as Bringing Up Baby and My Favorite Wife.

      I might add that the story behind the screenplay of this work was written by Ukrainian-born Sy Bartlett who went on the write some of Hollywood’s major war stories and other psychologically-charged portraits such as 13 Rue Madeleine, Twelve O'Clock High, The Big Country, Pork Chop Hill, Beloved Infidel, Cape Fear (the 1962 version), and Che!, several of them starring Gregory Peck.

 

Los Angeles, April 5, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2022).