Lab Crew Cracks Murders in Kid Glove Killer (1942)
| Chicago Puts Killer Over Larceny For First-Run Crime Pairing |
| Good Sport Fred Zinneman Submits To On-Set Gag With Crime Lab Equipment |
I looked at two of his from the Crime group to detect an emerging style. Zinnemann wrote in his autobiography (oversized, richly illustrated, and recommended) of thrift plus rush in doing these. “Rigid schedules” were maintained, four days allowed for each reel shot. The Crime Does Not Pays, being two reels and somewhat deluxe among shorts, had name casts, at least to extent of known character players, and curried favor with both law enforcement and civic minds in towns where they played. Zinnemann signed While America Sleeps and Forbidden Passage, 1939 and 1941 respectively. Like others of the Crime group, they focus on victims of lawlessness and teach that no good can come of outlawry. There is downer aftertaste from these not unlike latter-day scaring straight by law dogs.
What Kid Glove Killer anticipates is Dragnetstyle of confined detection, B films having much relation with TV to come. It’s been said that Jack Webb got his cue from He Walked By Night, but surely he saw and was influenced by Kid Glove Killer too. There was a series here just waiting to happen. Metro in fact suggested in early press that there would be further exploits for “Gordon McKay,” forensic expert and test tube wiz who could solve misdeeds without getting off his lab stool. Van Heflin essayed the part just before Johnny Eager broke out and won him an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. Maybe he saw a McKay series as hobble to progress and balked. McKay had makings of a modern Sherlock Holmes with up-to-minute technology at his service. Here was best evidence so far that crime would not prevail over such sophisticated means of combating it in play. MGM’s trailer for Kid Glove Killer cites 310 “detective novels” read by three million during 1941, plus 56 magazines devoted to detecting art. I wonder what portion from such vast number seek out crime fiction in our present day, or do they get fill of felonies from television? Something “original and startling” was a constant goal at peak of crime interest that I assume was the 30/40’s, what with the rise in pocket novels contributing to mayhem in print.
Zinnemann wrote that Kid Glove Killer was shot in three weeks. He knew he had arrived when he asked for a camera crane and they gave it to him. There was a preview in
