A Film Canon

 

 

This idiosyncratic fusion of screwball comedy and detective fiction presents marriage as a potentially criminal act, capable of breeding dysfunctional families, divorce and death. In this light, the recommended course of action is embodied by the private eye and his wife - the original sleuthing duo - who not only refuse to take marriage too seriously, reducing it to so much inebriation, but persistently deflect consummation into conversation, sleeping in separate beds, and devoting their spare time to a puppy who is eminently more three-dimensional than any of the human children, as evinced in his discovery of the critical clue, which elevates him to the status of a minor celebrity. Even the final implication of consummation is offset by the fact that the couple are themselves so childlike as to preclude any thought of offspring; or, at least, to rob sexual life of the functionality exuded by the other characters, replacing it with a radical, infantile jouissance. The result is detection as flirtation, in which the husband's (William Powell) parody of husbandly rhetoric seeps into his prescient parody of hard-boiled rhetoric, and the wife's (Myrna Loy) titillation is ultimately that of an avid crime reader finding herself privy to a real-life mystery; or, more accurately, in a situation that is as much of a fiction as her marriage, necessitating a similar tongue-in-cheek response. This all culminates in the penultimate scene, in which an ostensibly conventional dinner party is used as a pretext for rounding up all the suspects - most of whom only attend under police duress - and ceremoniously announcing the culprit.