Jake Gyllenhaal, the mysterious gumshoe in "Prisoners", Invented physiognomy

Jake Gyllenhaal in Elle Men (China) magazine, 2013

"I love that my man Jake Gyllenhaal is back as a hard-hitting actor. His portrayal of Detective Loki is mysterious, empathetic, tough, and believable—all without a backstory. All we know about Loki is that he spends Thanksgiving alone at a Chinese restaurant and that he has never foiled a case. He is the perfect engine for this contemporary noir where each turn (well, almost each turn) in the narrative is believable and gripping. But more than that, he embodies the “complex simplicity” that Thoreau speaks of. He tells little with words but tells so much with presence and clues. Clock my man’s crazy tattoos and the erratic blinking he does whenever he is thinking hard about something. Scope his shirts buttoned esse-style, all the way to the top.

These are the signals of a confident and searching actor and they signify to viewers that Detective Loki is a force to be reckoned with in his world. Even though Loki has a shadowy backstory, these little clues are all we need to fall in love with him." Source: www.vice.com

As Max Allan Collins points out, in contrast to the gumshoe heroes of Black Mask, Dick Tracy began as a landmark police procedural, with Tracy performing ballistics tests, using lie detectors, and tracing fingerprints, combining criminal forensics with a ratiocinative mode that updated Holmes for a modern urban America.

Nevertheless, the unprecedented violence that Gould brought to Dick Tracy combined with the vividness of his villains to ensure that the unambiguous moral universe of the strip avoided sanctimoniousness. Many major 1930s’ adversaries were based upon real-life criminals such as Al Capone (Big Boy) and John Dillinger (Boris Arson); others, as Richard Pietryzyk notes, were “caricatures of various Hollywood personalities such as James Cagney, Greta Garbo, and Boris Karloff ” (who would belatedly embody this by appearing as the deadly Gruesome in RKO’s Dick Tracy Meets Gruesome (John Rawlins, 1947)). The 1940s saw the wartime strips escalate both the levels of violence and the grotesqueness of the villains in tune with the times, reveling in what Garyn G. Roberts describes as an escalation of “invented physiognomy.” -"A Companion to Film Noir" (2013) by Andrew Spicer & Helen Hanson