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Murder My Sweet
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by RKO Radio Pictures
Sales Rank: 22614
Price: $19.98
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Dick Powell will forever be known as a 1930s crooner in archetypal musical comedies, but this career-changing role shows Powell at his best and remains perhaps the most faithful cinematic representation of Raymond Chandler's hard-boiled hero, Philip Marlowe, ever put on screen. In this adaptation of <i>Farewell, My Lovely</i>, Powell's cynical, smart-talking private eye is hired by a dim ex-con (pug-nosed Mike Mazurki) to find his girl Velma, and by the prissy stooge of a blackmail victim to babysit him during a handoff. The meeting ends with the stooge's death, and Marlowe is immediately engaged by the owner of some jewels, the wily Mrs. Grayle (Claire Trevor), to recover them. As Marlowe navigates the dark, dangerous world of wartime L.A., splitting his search between high-society haunts and the cheap, smoky bars and flophouses of the inner city, he turns up one too many stones, winds up on the wrong end of a fist, and wakes up to a drug-induced nightmare that director Edward Dmytryk delivers with a mixture of surreal symbolism and sinister expressionism. Powell delivers screenwriter John Paxton's snappy lines and droll asides with hard-boiled cynicism, like someone not quite as tough as he talks; but it's Powell's innate vulnerability that makes this reluctant saint of the city so compelling. Dmytryk's shadowy style creates a visual equivalent to the web of intrigue Marlowe navigates, an almost perpetual world of night. One of the first great <i>films noir</i> and an often-overlooked detective-movie classic. <I>--Sean Axmaker</I>
Viewer Reviews
When Dick Powell made this movie his acting career astonishingly was at a very low ebb, but this movie helped revitalize the old song and dance man into a transformed 'noir' actor. He had a lot of help in this movie not only from an excellent script but also from some excellent actors. One of my favorites has always been Claire Trevor, and if she had not been identified, don't know that I would have ever recognized her as this dazzling, coniving blonde of the jade necklace.
Powell is given some very good, wise cracking lines, but underneath he is a teddy bear and that comes through at times, especially with Anne Shirley. One client says he doesn't care for Marlowe's (Powell's role) attitude, with Marlowe replying that he has had complaints about that before, but the attitude doesn't seem to improve. Along the way, and it is a confused way for much of the movie, Marlowe accuses or suspects nearly everyone in the cast, with the police always eyeing Marlowe as a possible suspect. Ring around the rosey, only death intervenes from time-to-time in this game. Everyone seems to have something to hide or some angle they are playing with Marlowe picking up easy money. As he says, some people are paying him to stay with the investigation, while others are paying him to drop the investigation. As many times as he is sapped and knocked out, one would think he would welcome grabbing the money and letting the thing solve itself. But as he says, ethics are involved, his mainly since he was originally hired to body guard a client, with that client turning up dead on Marlowe's watch. It's just another aspect of being a teddy bear underneath it all.
Rich good looking women, sleezy con men and thugs, a stolen jade necklace worth a cool hundred thousand never stolen, and plenty of guns leads to a full fledged Raymond Chandler group of writings brought to the Hollywood screen by RKO. When looking at 'noir' films it just doesn't get much better than this film.
If you haven't seen it you have missed a very good effort in both acting and writing.
Semper Fi.
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