Murder, My Sweet
The Noir Odyssey Writer: John Paxton Based on the novel “Farewell, My Lovely” by Raymond Chandler Director: Edward Dmytryk Cinematographer: Harry J. Wild Music: Roy Webb Cast: Dick Powell, Claire Trevor, Anne Shirley, Otto Kruger, Mike Mazurki, Miles Mander Release: December 9, 1944 Studio: RKO Pictures Percent Noir: 90% For a film noir, “Murder, My…
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The Robert Taylor Odyssey
The Noir Odyssey

Writer: John Paxton

Based on the novel “Farewell, My Lovely” by Raymond Chandler

Director: Edward Dmytryk

Cinematographer: Harry J. Wild

Music: Roy Webb

Cast: Dick Powell, Claire Trevor, Anne Shirley, Otto Kruger, Mike Mazurki, Miles Mander

Release: December 9, 1944

Studio: RKO Pictures

Percent Noir: 90%

For a film noir, “Murder, My Sweet” has an obscenely stacked deck. One look at the roster of creators behind the project should have you salivating. Chandler! Powell! Paxton! Dmytryk! Trevor! Kruger! Wild! Be still my heart! Put all these talents together and it seems inevitable that you’re gonna get something great. And, unsurprisingly, the movie is just that.

This is the first of many Phillip Marlowe adaptations, and appears to arrive fully formed, with all the usual trimmings. Raymond Chandler wrote the novel that John Paxton adapted, so you know you’re in for weird, serpentine plotting that barely makes sense if you try to keep track of everything. Plot was never the point of Chandler’s work anyway – it was relishing the opportunity to see Marlowe yelling at a myriad of people, and in that regard the movie delivers in spades.

The movie has about five beginnings. We fade into a blind Marlowe (Dick Powell) possibly under arrest, then flashes back a few days. A huge moose of a man aptly named Moose (Mike Mazurki), who at the very least has some brain damage, hires Marlowe to find his beloved Velma, who he hasn’t seen in eight years. Then suddenly we’re concerned with a guy named Marriott (Douglas Walton) who hires Marlowe to escort him to the woods where he is to pay to get a jade necklace back. Marriott ends up shot dead (Marlowe: “[It was like] an elephant had stepped on his head.”) and Marlowe is a suspect. But we need some dames in this story, so we get a blonde one named Helen (Claire Trevor) who owned the jade and her daughter-in-law Ann (Anne Shirley). Both try to hire Marlowe, and seduce him, and scream at him, and disappear on him in the middle of very important conversations. Confused yet? Eh, just go with it – that’s part of the fun.

It’s a credit to screenwriter Paxton that it’s as coherent as it is. I’ve read the book, and trust me, he had quite the beast to tame. Paxton was a great screenwriter (“The Wild One,” “Kotch”), and his life inspired one of the best noir graphic novels ever – Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ “The Fade Out.” Paxton keeps all the book’s essentials and copies and pastes the best Chandler dialogue (“She was a charming middle-aged lady with a face like a bucket of mud. I gave her a drink. She was a gal who’d take a drink, even if she had to knock you down to get the bottle.”) then adds in a few of his own flourishes. He essentially breaks the fourth wall a few times, winking at the audience about how little it all makes sense by having Marlowe complain about how everyone is paying him money to take the case and suddenly paying him money to drop the case. Then, when Marlowe is yelling at random suspects, they will often interrupt and point out plot holes. Marlowe shrugs it off, admitting he sometimes just says stuff to say stuff. You can’t help but smile.

Knowing he’s got a murky story to work with, director Edward Dmytryk throws in more noir shadows than you can shake a stick at. The first sequence, where Marlowe is blind, has cigarette smoke and face shadows and body shadows and weird expressionist shadows… that room is bleeding mood. Working with his cinematographer, the great Harry J. Wild (“Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” “His Kind of Woman”), Dmytryk manages to find atmosphere and shadows in every scene, even bright office scenes that take place in the middle of the day. And the expressionistic stuff he does when Marlowe is drugged and sedated for three days? Holeee shit. I usually have no patience for the usually crappy camera tricks from that time period, but Dmytryk plays it smart with the cobweb over the camera and the sequence involving doors. Heck, even the fade to black used when Marlowe is clunked over the head has style, using animation to close the frame in an awesome way, almost like the iris shots from the silent era.

Dmytryk directed several well-regarded films noir, including “The Sniper” and “Crossfire.” He almost lost his career thanks to the Communist blacklist, but came back and made films like “Raintree County” (Montgomery Clift was in his car accident halfway through shooting and Dmytryk had to figure out a way to make his pre-and-post surgery footage all work together), the remake of “The Blue Angel” and “The Caine Mutiny.” I have opined previously that his films usually do not age well, but am ecstatic that this is the exception.

He also cast the movie well. This film was a big deal for Powell, who was aging out of romantic roles and wanted something grittier. Well, he got it. His interpretation of Marlowe is aces through and through, never winking at the audience and playing the scenes straight and with an inherent exhaustion that works wonders. There’s also a great moment where he can’t help but dance in the great hall of a mansion that never fails to make me laugh out loud – I wonder if it was improvised…

Trevor acquits herself very well to the femme fatale role here, knowing when to play it straight and when to ham it up juuuust enough. I love the shot of her lying in the dark in her beach house, lit cigarette breaking the blackness of the room. Shirley (who retired after this film) has the trickier role, being both a possible fatale but also retaining enough innocence to work as a straight romantic lead for Marlowe, and she does very well. Her chemistry with Powell is palpable, and it’s a shame she quit after this film. Supporting players like Kruger and Mazurki are solid as always.

After the beach house is introduced, things begin to sag a little bit. There’s still a bunch of crackerjack dialogue to be had, but the film is weighed down by the necessity to explain all the randomness we’ve just seen, and watching people talk and talk and talk is less interesting for me than the mystery itself, especially when the payoff is…well…fine and not outstanding. The film fails to pay off the Moose character in the explosive way one would hope, and Marlowe is blinded in a “meh” fashion. It’s not bad, and had the first two-thirds of the movie not been incredible, the lesser stuff wouldn’t stick out like a sore thumb.

But alas, it does, and that holds back “Murder, My Sweet” from being a masterpiece. Still, it remains one of my favorite Chandler works ever, and Powell is so appealing as Marlowe and can spit out the dialogue like nobody’s business. I really wish he’d gotten to play this role again on the big screen.