The private detective film will always be the slinkiest and sexiest of thriller subgenres – minus the strictures and/or corruption of police procedure, crime-solving can feel as alluringly shadowy and illicit as the crime itself. Relatively few of us have ever encountered, let alone hired, a private eye; far more of us, I’d wager, have at some point entertained the fantasy that we’d be quite good at the job ourselves.
Newly out on Amazon Prime, Philippe Lacôte’s Killer Heat isn’t exactly a classic entry in the PI canon. Based on a Jo Nesbø short story and starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as a moody detective investigating a sordid love triangle involving twin brothers (Richard Madden and Richard Madden) against attractive Greek island scenery, it’s diverting if not especially memorable, but it does offer the viewers the requisite pleasures of participatory sleuthing. Shaggy-haired and summer-suited, Gordon-Levitt trades in the classic detective fedora for a jauntier panama hat – somehow still giving off, even in his mid-forties, the boyish air he brought nearly 20 years ago to Brick, Rian Johnson’s rather more inspired contemporary answer to the private-eye noir, in which a suburban high-school student channels the likes of Sam Spade in probing an ex-girlfriend’s disappearance.
Playing the characters’ softboiled youth against the hardboiled tropes of the genre, Brick was a neat pastiche that also worked as a straight-up mystery. While private investigators still exist, contemporary films around them often lean too hard into retro-cute japery. Johnson veered in that direction with his recent Knives Out films – starring Daniel Craig as a gentleman detective slightly more in the mould of Hercule Poirot, surrounded by a Christie-esque gaggle of eccentric suspects – though has still established himself as the profession’s foremost 21st-century mythmaker in film.
These days, private-eye movies are most often presented as period pieces. Two fine, wryly playful recent ones – Paul Thomas Anderson’s labyrinthine, deliberately brain-fogged Thomas Pynchon adaptation Inherent Vice and Shane Black’s riotous buddy caper The Nice Guys – both sank into the atmospherically sleazy haze of 1970s Los Angeles. Neither, however, uses that milieu quite as effectively as Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye did in, well, 1970s Los Angeles: updating the classic Raymond Chandler novel to a decaying, post-glamorous New Hollywood, with a wonderfully dissolute Elliott Gould as a hippified, cat-loving Philip Marlowe, it remains the greatest and least self-conscious of all neo-noir movies.
The 70s were, in fact, a rich decade for private-eye movies, modern and otherwise. In the traditional vein, 1975’s handsome throwback Farewell, My Lovely returned Marlowe to 1940s suiting, with a peppery, perfectly cast Robert Mitchum as the detective. But it paled beside Roman Polanski’s ornately sculpted Chinatown, which had an original story and detective hero in Jack Nicholson’s flinty Jake Gittes, though it could have been crafted by Chandler or Dashiell Hammett. But genre updates like Alan J Pakula’s Klute and Arthur Penn’s Night Moves tapped into, respectively, the sexual liberations and political anxieties of the era while honouring traditional investigative plotting. Taking a jokier, more self-effacing approach, Stephen Frears’s delightful Gumshoe (1971) drew attention to Britain’s lack of form in the genre by casting Albert Finney as a shambling Liverpool bingo caller with PI aspirations.
Meanwhile, blaxploitation touchstone Shaft – most famous for the title song, yes, but a tight, lively romp in its own right – offered Richard Roundtree’s swaggering, streetwise eponymous detective as a corrective to the genre’s predominant whiteness. In the mid-90s, Carl Franklin’s sharp, Denzel Washington-starring Devil in a Blue Dress was another welcome exception. The genre’s maleness, meanwhile, has been scarcely addressed over the years: it’s a shame studio interference made such a hash of Hollywood’s only attempt to bring Sara Paretsky’s hard-edged female detective VI Warshawski to the screen, despite a seemingly ideal Kathleen Turner in the role.
As it is, cinema’s best representation for woman gumshoes might remain husband-and-wife detective duo Nick and Nora Charles, as depicted in the Thin Man comic thrillers of the 1930s and 40s. (The second entry, After the Thin Man, can be found on Amazon, and a joy it is too.) Still, despite the genre’s long history of modernisation and modification, it’s the smoke-shrouded, non-neo film noirs of Golden Age Hollywood – Humphrey Bogart’s caustic, muttering Marlowe in The Big Sleep (BBC iPlayer) or indeed Humphrey Bogart’s caustic, muttering Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon – that best feed our private-eye fantasies.
Also new on streaming and DVD
The Nature of Love A middle-aged university professor in a stable but dull marriage surprises herself by entering a passionate affair with a handyman in Monia Chokri’s pleasingly adult romantic comedy, which spikes its wish-fulfilment premise with tart commentary on class and gender politics.
Blur: To the End / Live at Wembley Stadium As a handily timed antidote to Oasis reunion fever, this double-disc box set dedicated to their old Britpop rivals combines a proficient concert film of Blur’s sold-out Wembley shows last year with a more pensive, melancholic documentary study of the band’s middle-aged tensions and anxieties.
Kingdom of the Planet of the Apes The post-apocalyptic action franchise that just won’t die gets by yet again on lush world-building and dazzling creature effects in an instalment that sees the power balance again tipped in the apes’ favour – though when you get past the spectacle, there isn’t a whole lot to care about.
All titles in bold are widely available to stream unless otherwise specified