Murder, My Sweet

Murder, My Sweet (Edward Dmytryk, 1944) A neat trick, this. Although the third Raymond Chandler adaptation to make it to the screen—the first being The Falcon Takes Over (taken from the same source novel as this—Farewell, My Lovely) co-opted as a story-line in the George Sanders "Falcon" movie series, and the second, Time To Kill (based on "The High Window") featuring Lloyd Nolan's popular Michael Shayne character, Murder, My Sweet is the first to feature Raymond Chandler's "slumming angel", Philip Marlowe.*  

The main departure is the title: Chandler's choice, "Farewell, My Lovely," was ditched after a preview screening because those first viewers were expecting more of a musical, as the movie starred Dick Powell, who was a mainstay of that genre and not the first person casual movie-goers would think of as a slightly soft-boiled detective sifting through the grime of Los Angeles. The name was thus changed to something suggesting more violence than tap-dancing...and probably to protect the innocent.**

Dmytryk and writer John Paxton do a fair job of keeping the first-person narration intact (the set-up is that Marlowe is being grilled by the usual suspicious police and he's giving his side of how things went down), and keeping a steady pace that's surprisingly fast. Although they didn't use Chandler's exact phraseology, they do a nicely watered down, tightened-up version of it for cinema audiences for whom thinking too much of the cleverness of a metaphor as it passes by their cerebellum might slow down a film's momentum. Call it "Chandler Lite." Although a lot of it is quite good, if less surly. One of my favorites is when someone says they don't like Marlowe's manners: "Yeah, I've gotten complaints, but they keep getting worse."

Powell can't get too far from his roots—he does a fancy two-step
in the "mausoleum" of a foyer.

It works, especially for the speed of this film. For the role of Marlowe, especially the first one, Dmytryk and the studio made an odd choice in Dick Powell, an A-lister in musicals. But, he's very effective. He's got a lived-in face, like a hound's, not a matinee idol's, slightly doughy (as is his body-type, despite being told he's "in good shape"—that's Marlowe to a wife-beater "T."), and you believe that Powell would be a reflexive weisenheimer—something about the "hoofer" background. The light comedy experience makes the sarcasm go down very well.

And Dmytryck has the noir feeling down, too, being as he was one of the architects of the style. Begin your movie in transition so the audience has a lot of questions it has to answer, go heavy on the atmosphere and always exit the scene with a sardonic quip. You already know you're in the hands of a master with the sequence that introduces "Moose" Malloy (Mike Mazurki) who just suddenly appears as a menacing reflection in the window that only appears because of the intrusion of a nearby flashing neon light. It's as disconcerting...well, as disconcerting "as a tarantula on an angel food cake", thank you very much! Dmytryck also has fun dancing around the brim of the Hayes Code in the two knock-out sequences of Marlowe being knocked out—always a hallmark of Marlowe stories and fans of inky pools of blackness, Long Goodbyes and Big Sleeps (or "Big Lebowski's," if you'd rather, later).

Indispensible in the mix is a high concentration of sass which is provided by that queen of the form, Claire Trevor, whose performance as an evil step-monster is almost too much of a good thing. Murder, My Sweet would have been a rich enough story without her. Her presence and its tilting of the sexual equation slams this one deep onto the classic shelf. Powell would play Marlowe again on television, but this initial outing made him definitive...until Bogart came along.

But, for the record books...Chandler always said that Powell was his favorite version of Marlowe.

* The Big Sleep with Bogart as Marlowe was made the same year, but not released until two years later.

** They finally got around to using the title in the 1975 Dick Richards remake that starred Robert Mitchum, who would have been too pretty for Marlowe in his youth, but had aged into a wrinkled world-weariness that worked. When he was approached by producer Elliott Kastner and financier Sir Lew Grade to play the part—after their first choice, Richard Burton (??!!), had turned it down—Mitchum says that he said: "Why don't you just re-release Murder, My Sweet with Dick Powell and we can all go to the beach?"