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Detective Agency? Scoring the Amateur Female Investigator in 1940s Hollywood

This article focuses on the problematic character of the ‘working-girl’ investigator in 1940s Hollywood crime films, surveying the ways in which the soundtrack is used to both support and contain her agency as white-collar worker and detective via an engagement with the complex gender politics of 1940s American society. Music facilitates a mobility between textual positions (investigator, love interest, femme fatale, and victim) for the female lead in a manner that has thus far been unacknowledged in studies of classical cinema: the soundtrack links the 1940s crime film’s exploration of justice, criminality, and social responsibility directly with its construction of gendered and sexual identities. Discussion of musical and vocal agency, ownership, and affect in individual films is contextualised in relation to wider issues of both character and audience subjectivity in film, literature, and music, revealing strategies that support and subvert other aspects of cinematic narrative. Four films are analysed in detail – Stranger on the Third Floor (1941), Deadline at Dawn (1946), Two O'Clock Courage (1946), and The Big Steal (1949) – all of which are 'B' movies. The article argues for a more inclusive approach to film musicology that addresses low-budget as well as prestige pictures, and demonstrates the necessity of incorporating pre-existing ‘library’ cues alongside those written specifically for the picture in any nuanced reading of the soundtrack. The article provides the first scholarly analysis of the musical construction of the working-girl detective, together with the more general style and musical language of these particular soundtracks. Excepting Stranger on the Third Floor, it is also the only extended discussion of the films themselves in the current literature. Oxford University Press have made this article available without subscription and promoted it as an ‘Editor’s Pick’ on the OUPblog, where a general-interest version of the essay was published: http://blog.oup.com/2013/04/film-musical-score-female-detective-1940s/.