APRIL 2012 Inside research file
Investigating female detectives in film Philippa Gates discovers most progressive roles in low-budget films from the 1930s By Mallory O’Brien To write a history about female detectives in Hollywood films, Laurier’s Philippa Gates, associate professor of Film Studies, had to become a sleuth herself, digging through archives and libraries for films and their cultural influences. In her research of more than 300 detective films, Gates uncovered rare reels that had not been seen for decades. While the popular assumption is that images of women have become increasingly positive over the years, Gates discovered the most progressive and feminist models of the female detective existed in Hollywood’s more peripheral films, such as the low-budget “B” movies of the 1930s. The results of her research are detailed in her book, Detecting Women: Gender and the Hollywood Detective Film (SUNY Press, 2011), which is nominated for a 2012 Edgar Award in the category of Best Critical/Biographical. The highly prestigious Edgar Awards are presented each year by The Mystery Writers of America. Named after writer Edgar Allan Poe, the Edgar Awards honour the best in mystery fiction, non-fiction, television, film and theatre. Gates will attend the award ceremony in New York on April 26. “I know it sounds cliché, but it is an honour just to be nominated,” says Gates. “So many of the crime novels I have read over the years had the Edgar Award/MWA seal on the cover. It feels wonderful to be recognized by the same organization for my critical work on the genre.” It’s a fine honour for a book that almost didn’t happen. “I did not intend to write a book on women,” says Gates. “I received a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council grant to do a project, and originally I was interested in researching 1930s male detective series like Charlie Chan and The Falcon.” But when Gates travelled to
Philippa Gates’ new book, Detecting Women, chronicles her research about female detectives in films
were no female detectives of any a very good movie, but I really love importance until the 1980s — the fact that through my book, at except maybe Nancy Drew and least people can find out about Miss Marple, but we tend to kind these films, and maybe it will help of ignore them because one’s a their own research and inspire spinster and one’s a teenager.” them to find more films.” While in Los Angeles, Gates Of the 300 films about female worked at the Academy of detectives that Gates discovered, Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ more than 130 were from the 1930s Margaret Herrick Library and the and ’40s. For Detecting Women, UCLA Film and Television Archive. Gates focused on the lower-budget The latter has archival copies of “B” films, which represent about 75 many films not available anywhere per cent of the films made in the else. Sometimes she had to watch 1930s. “And yet, up until 10 years ago we thought studying ‘B’ films was like studying comic books — that they aren’t worth academic study because they’re low-brow, or for young people. We are just now moving into an era in scholarship where ‘B’ films are really getting their due.” In addition to housing the older, the films in a garage on an old forgotten films, archives like the film studio lot, which is now a Margaret Herrick Library also storage facility for pre-World War contain production information Two film prints made of highly and alternate scripts. combustible nitrate. “Sometimes I would read the first An archivist would loop each version of a script and think, ‘This reel — about eight minutes long is awesome! She’s so empowered!’ — into a large flatbed machine and And then there would be notes Gates would watch it on a tiny from Production Code Adminscreen with headphones. istration, which was in charge of “Sometimes the archivist would censorship, that say, ‘You shouldn’t say something like, ‘You’re the first have that lady make the cops person to watch this movie since look so bad. You know the police 1931!’ Now, it might not have been will write us letters complaining
Photo: Mallory O’Brien
that Hollywood always portrays cops really badly so maybe don’t make her so smart and the cops so stupid.’” Gates says it’s exciting to see the changes in different versions of the script — some movies can have up to 20 different versions. And when films just don’t exist, their reels lost forever (or collecting dust in someone’s basement), Gates can at least read the script and look at production photos to see what the actors,
“ I just got obsessed with
this idea that these women have been ignored. ” Los Angeles to do her research, she noticed a footnote in a film database that said, “This is a remake of a film that starred a female crime reporter.” Gates decided to do a little more digging, and by the end of the day she had discovered 10 films with women playing the roles of detectives. “I thought, ‘No one’s ever talked about this!’” she says. “I just got obsessed with this idea that these women have been ignored because we tend to think there
Gates’ book has been nominated for a Edgar Award.
sets or costumes looked like, or see how much an actor got paid or what the Production Code Administration didn’t like about the film. Gates found one 1930s film with two main characters who are lesbians, which was produced just before the establishment of the Production Code Administration. Otherwise, it would never have been allowed in classical-era Hollywood. Although no copies are known to exist, Gates was able to talk about the film in Detecting Women. “It’s kind of like being an archaeologist, piecing together information to give people a sense of the film,” she says. In the 1930s and ’40s, the majority of female detectives are represented by traditional sleuths and the “girl reporter” — the girl who wants to land the scoop at her newspaper. Then the female detective all but disappears until the 1980s, except for a handful of crime-fighting women in the blaxploitation films of the 1970s. “They’re really the only detectives of colour,” says Gates. “Jennifer Lopez plays one Latina detective in the 2000s and that’s about it.” The second half of Detecting Women focuses on the 1980s and 1990s, when women portray FBI agents or police detectives. “In some ways, these movies mirror reality. They are a reflection of real-life women moving into different aspects of the public sphere. But while there were female reporters in the 1930s and female FBI agents in the 1980s, these films are kind of fantasies of the possibilities. “In reality, most women who worked at newspapers in the 1930s were writing Dear Abby-type advice columns. They were called ‘sob sisters’ because they were always doing the human-interest angle on stories. They were not the ones doing a lot of investigative reporting. And how many FBI agents were women in the 1980s? Not a lot.” Although these roles for women may suggest more wishful thinking than being a true reflection of reality, Gates believes they still say a lot about the first half of the 20th century. “I think something more interesting was happening in the ’30s and ’40s than we give these decades credit for,” says Gates. “We tend to think that feminism was born in the ’70s, and while I don’t know how many of these early films are ‘feminist,’ there’s a sense that some of these women are proto-feminist models — they represent the possibility that women could really achieve anything they wanted.” 7