Just to clarify, I don't have in mind comic detective or police stories involving bumbling crooks, which I suspect may have always been with us. The sort of film I have in mind focuses on the criminals as the main characters and is primarily about their attempted nefarious deeds.

I love Ealing as much as the next guy, but that claim seems somewhat hyperbolic, which may have been its intent. Crime-gone-wrong comedy is a staple of melodrama (think Snydley Whiplash), and, IIRK, appears everywhere, from Greek plays to Scooby-Doo.

Besides, Ealing isn't crime-gone-wrong, it's criminal-doesn't-benefit. Usually, in the relevant Ealing films, the crime takes place (i.e. the murders in Kind Hearts or the heist in Ladykillers), but either the criminal is caught because of a tragic mistake or someone else benefits (Mrs. Wilberforce in Ladykillers).

Sort of, although I hope there's a serious point to be made somewhere in there.

But none of these really does what I'm thinking of here. Scooby-Doo is comic detective fiction; the protagonists are the Scooby gang, not the perpetrators, who are simply villains. Ditto Snidely Whiplash, who's an evil foil for Dudley Do-Right. (Not to mention, of course, both "Scooby-Doo" and "Dudley Do-Right" post-date the Ealing comedies.) And offhand I can't think of any Greek plays that both feature a crime gone wrong and are comedies.

Basically, I think, in order to do what I'm looking at, you need to begin with what is essentially a caper film, a story that is fundamentally about an attempted crime of some sort, like Double Indemnity. And it has to go wrong somehow (also as in Double Indemnity), but it also has to be a comedy (unlike Double Indemnity). And I can't think of any pre-Ealing films that really do this. But of course that doesn't mean there aren't any.

Ah now, there's an interesting distinction. I think in the end criminal-doesn't-benefit may be a subgenre of crime-gone-wrong, since the point of the crime is to get the benefits, but still it's a valid point.

Actually, now that I think about it, MOST of the movies and TV shows I think of as crime-gone-wrong are really about getting caught or not getting the benefits afterwards. Fargo, for instance. And "Columbo."

No--you pretty much understood my meaning: botched "shady deals".

Ah, interesting. I'll be sure to ask him.

I'm confused. I can understand the Hays Office (and its British counterparts) not allowing for stories about criminals who get away with it but allowing botched-crime films where the criminal doesn't get away with it, whether dramatic or comic. But as long as you're talking about the botched-crime genre and the criminal doesn't get away with it, from a censorial point of view why exactly would a dramatic treatment like Double Indemnity be so much more acceptable than a comic treatment like Kind Hearts and Coronets?

I know that comedy tends to have a mitigating effect morally, but that factor cuts both ways, and in any case I can't see that Double Indemnity is conspicuously more moral or anything than Kind Hearts and Coronets.