MGM Gets Out A Sleeper B

Lab Crew Cracks Murders in Kid Glove Killer (1942)

Chicago Puts Killer Over Larceny For First-Run Crime Pairing

A sleeper sprung from B ranks and opportunity for Leo to show off talent incubated in-house. Kid Glove Killer was all the more pride-and-joy for coming unexpected. There was little extraordinary beyond the fact it was so expertly done. Support purpose of a B (and top-of-the-bill in smaller situations) was served, element of surprise a bonus to ticket purchase. Producing (Jack Chertok), writing (Allen Rivkin, John C. Higgins), and directing (Fred Zinnemann) team had brought experience from past budget work or short subjects and would go on to noir topics after the war. Kid Glove Killer was Zinnemann’s first feature as director. He began in Germany, did assistant jobs through the 30’s, manned various one and two reelers for MGM that included entries in the Crime Does Not Pay series.

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 Dragnet style 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. 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 Inglewood that Louis Mayer attended, an indicator that all MGM pictures, even small ones, had value. Zinnemann memoir put across fear an audience could inspire when they got a picture cold and unannounced, but how else to know if you had a click or a cluck? People talk of movies being ground out like salami during the Studio Era. That’s how Loew’s in the East viewed what MGM in the West was doing, wrote Zinnemann, but creative personnel was still judged on the quality of films they made, and previews could make/break a beginner at directing. Kid Glove Killer got uniformly good trade reviews, as close to raves as B product could generate, but these do not appear to have led to special handling in release. I looked for “sleeper” ads in trades, found none. Initial dates for April 1942 found Kid Glove Killer at Arthur Mayer’s Rialto for Gotham premiere, a site suited to thrillers, mystery, often horror. The film had a first weekend of “capacity audiences,” said Film Daily, earning a five-day holdover. Kid Glove Killer is available on DVD from Warner Archive.