Word: whodunitism
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Blondie, Jack Lemmon her disinterested Dagwood. and everything goes phffft! one night because of the leer that crawls over Jack's face as he wallows through a whodunit, where it describes how "she began, one button at a time, to undo the front of her sweater . . ." Judy flounces off to get a divorce; Jack takes up bachelor quarters with a friend (Jack Carson...
Black Widow (20th Century-Fox), based on a whodunit by Patrick Quentin, is really just a routine man hunt through Manhattan. However, Scripter-Director-Producer Nunnally Johnson takes the opportunity to give the customers some uptown lowdown, and he dishes it out with chill skill...
...lust to entertain. As director, story editor, casting chief and star of the show, he purposely refrains from dramatic artifice, and thus achieves a different kind of dramatic effect. Seldom has the slice-of-life technique of storytelling been so successfully transmitted to film. Dragnet is not a whodunit at all, and both murder and the sound of gunfire are rare on its shows. Webb sometimes produces truly frightening effects (as in The Big Jump, a film in which he struggles with a madman on a high building ledge), but in the most low-keyed of his stories he still...
...Rainbow (by Myron C. Fagan) was equally wooden and clumsy as the murdered-columnist whodunit it started off to be, and the anti-Communist-who-done-America-dirt it turned into. To keep the audience interested, it needed such allegations as that Harry Hopkins gave Russia the atom bomb...
...average whodunit never solves its most conspicuous crime-the murder of the King's English. But there are a few mystery writers who do not use the pen as a blunt instrument. Such are Britain's Howard Clewes and the late F. L. Green.* Neither An Epitaph for Love nor Ambush for the Hunter will floor anyone with surprises, but each crackles with suspense and crisp, literate prose...