Michael Curtiz's Private Detective 62

Michael Curtiz directed seven films for Warner Brothers in 1933, all of them short, snappy and of high quality.  Some of the themes that we see in Curtiz's Casablanca (1942) can also be found in these films;  Private Detective 62 is a meditation on ethics and money-making in the private detective racket, at a time when private dicks appeared mostly in B movies and were seen as basically sleazy, with an occasional touch of nobility.  This changed when Humphrey Bogart played Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade in John Huston's The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Raymond Chandler's Phillip Marlowe in Howard Hawks's The Big Sleep (1946).  There were actually two versions of The Maltese Falcon (in 1931 and 1936) before Huston's, with Ricardo Cortez and Warner Williams playing Spade, mostly for sleaziness and comedy.  And in 1947 Robert Mitchum played a complex private eye in the excellent film noir Out of the Past, Mitchum was a reformed private eye, eschewing sleaziness for nobility after falling for the wrong girl.

William Powell is the private eye with more ethics than his partner in Private Detective 62.  I have never been particularly fond of Powell  -- he always seemed rather condescending and aloof, especially after he became enshrined as The Thin Man.  But he was good in silent films (especially Von Sternberg's The Last Command, 1928) and in these early sound films at Warner Brothers, where he worked with gritty actors such as those in Private Detective 62:  Ruth Donnelly, Arthur Hohl, James Bell, et alia.  Curtiz's film is quite episodic but moves quickly and efficiently, as Powell escapes from a boat returning him to France for espionage and ingratiates himself into a detective agency after days of futilely looking for work. Being a private detective is seen as being a job of work, with much danger and little pay, with perhaps a chance of meeting a nice dame on her way to Reno. Curtiz uses rain quite effectively as a plot mechanism  (common in later film noir) and only uses music from radios or night club orchestras, creatively doing without a score.