'Murder, My Sweet' (1944) / 'The Blue Dahlia' (1946)
The detective drama 'Murder, My Sweet' is based on the novel 'Farewell, My Lovely' (1940) by Raymond Chandler, a pulp writer from Chicago, Illinois. Detective Philip Marlowe (Dick Powell) is
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The detective drama 'Murder, My Sweet' is based on the novel 'Farewell, My Lovely' (1940) by Raymond Chandler, a pulp writer from Chicago, Illinois. Detective Philip Marlowe (Dick Powell) is interrogated by Police Lieutenant Randall (Don Douglas) regarding murder. Bandaged and beaten, Marlowe divulges some details behind his difficult working relationship with ex-con Moose Malloy (Mike Mazurki) who's hired him to locate his missing girlfriend Velma Valento.

"Instead of pink snakes I got smoke."

Dick Powell

'Murder, My Sweet' is a convoluted affair which is probably just as well as it finds its director Edward Dmytryk in no mood for clarity. The film's stylised treatment plays upon the irrational fears of its central protagonist who becomes a metaphorical punching bag for all and sundry. Dmytryk invites his cinematographer Harry Wild to unleash a surprising box of tricks and then teases them into fully formed desires, dreams, nightmares and hallucinations. The intoxicating courtship of camera focus manipulation that results takes in light suffusion, in-camera effects and distorted sound.

"Crime writers have always had an inferiority complex about their work. It goes back to Conan Doyle, who thought his historical novels were better than the Sherlock Holmes stories. Ian Rankin was reflecting (on Twitter) the other day about the low status of crime fiction. And at the recent Crime Writers’ Association awards, authors were heard grumbling that the literary establishment looked down on the mystery genre. But a novel written under genre constraints can be a work of literature, and one writer did more than any other to make detective fiction respectable: Raymond Chandler, the subject of a thorough new biography by Tom Williams. Chandler took violent pulp fiction and transformed it. What distinguished him from his peers was the high seriousness of his intentions. He didn’t get going till his forties, so had no time to waste. He taught himself to write: he took a correspondence course, where he churned out pastiches of Hemingway; to teach himself the mechanics of plotting, he rewrote Erle Stanley Gardner stories; and he applied his Dulwich College classical education to the task of creating a gloriously rich slang. Like that other Dulwich old boy, P G Wodehouse, he became a master of the extravagant simile. (Moose Malloy in Farewell, My Lovely “looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food”.)

He wasn’t interested in creating puzzles. His plots are full of loose ends. What excited him was style, and the creation of atmosphere, filtered through the thoughtful, ambiguous personality of Philip Marlowe. Chandler had a poet’s feeling for language pregnant with implication – even if he sometimes went a bit overboard: in The Big Sleep, when Marlowe visits the decrepit General Sternwood in the hot-house, he notes that “the plants filled the place, a forest of them, with nasty meaty leaves and stalks like the newly washed fingers of dead men”. Auden was an admirer. He said Chandler’s books “should be read and judged, not as escape literature, but as works of art”."

- Andrew M. Brown, 'Raymond Chandler : The Crime Writer Who Made Poetry Out Of Pulp'

"Raymond Chandler published his first detective story, in the pulp fiction magazine Black Mask, at the end of 1933. He explained this departure to his British publisher: “Wandering up and down the Pacific coast in an automobile I began to read pulp magazines, because they were cheap enough to throw away and because I never had at any time any taste for the kind of thing which is known as women’s magazines. This was in the great days of the Black Mask… and it struck me that some of the writing was pretty forceful and honest.” Between these beginnings and 1938, when he began to write The Big Sleep, he wrote 21 Black Mask stories, developing and honing the qualities of his mature work. A late starter, he came to this world as an outsider, a middle-aged English public schoolboy adrift in California. However, he caught on quick. The early stories have several Marlowe prototypes, LA settings, good and bad cops mixed into the regular crime cocktail of violence, drugs, sex and booze.

When he came to write The Big Sleep, Chandler “cannibalised” (his own description) his stories. The central plot of the novel comes from two stories, Killer in the Rain (published in 1935) and The Curtain (published in 1936). Both stories were standalone tales, sharing no common characters, but they had similarities. In each, there’s a strong father distressed by his wild daughter. Chandler melded the two fathers to make a new character and also did the same for the stories’ two daughters. There are other sources, too. Like Carmen Sternwood, his own much-loved wife Cissy had posed nude as a young woman and, like Carmen, taken opium. Marlowe’s alcohol problems reflect Chandler’s own latent alcoholism. In virtually every scene of a Chandler novel, someone is lighting a cigarette, or having a drink."

- Robert McCrum, The Guardian

"The modern detective story is often said to have begun with Edgar Allan Poe’s 1841 short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” a classic example of a locked-room mystery, a mystery in which a crime was committed under seemingly impossible circumstances (doors locked from the inside, windows too small to escape through, stolen items too big to carry). The locked room is a classic motif of the detective story because it exemplifies the mystery’s primary question: namely, What happened? The narrative problem is the formulation of a logical sequence, the solution the reconstruction of a chain of events and a series of causes. The blunt action that sets in motion the plot of Farewell, My Lovely might best be described as an open room mystery. The question Philip Marlowe confronts isn’t what happened? We know what happened. What Marlowe wants to figure out is why."

- Sand Avidar-Walzer, 'Spinning Wheels : Thought And Motion In Raymond Chandler’s Fiction'

Martha Vickers & Humphrey Bogart in 'The Big Sleep' (1946)

Miles Mander, Claire Trevor, Anne Shirley & Dick Powell

Dmytryk positions the principal players in Philip Marlowe's investigation like pieces on a chess board. This aspect is neatly emphasised by a dual vision of a pensive Marlowe aboard a clean, checkered marble floor at the luxury Grayle residence. The intricate blocking in 'Murder, My Sweet' exerted a notable influence on the experimental fringe of commercial French crime cinema and has been credited as inspiring crime set-pieces directed by Jean-Pierre Melville, Rene Clement, Claude Chabrol, Francois Truffaut, Georges Lautner, Yves Boisset and Bertrand Blier. An influence on Dmytryk's visual approach appears to be the work of surrealist poet Jean Cocteau who collaborated with Melville on 'The Terrible Children' (1950).

"Drinking and pulp detectives go together like King and Crimson, but there are long stretches of Farewell, My Lovely - * all of his books really * - that make me too awkwardly aware of the author's alcoholism. I like my pulp heroes to drink superhuman amounts, don't get me wrong; I just don't like the booze to seep into the page and situations and suddenly everyone's 5 highballs deep over 1 cigarette and another 3 over the next, before martinis at lunch and so on. The Long Goodbye is the exception: a harrowing portrait of alcoholism, not just the author's but an inside-out view of the damage it wreaks, the lies and nihilism and self-hate in its wake, etc. My favorite Chandler, though not necessarily my favorite Marlowe."

- Bluff McMolo, Dog Star Omnibus

"A lost story by Raymond Chandler, written almost at the end of his life, sees the author taking on a different sort of villain to the hardboiled criminals of his beloved Philip Marlowe stories: the US healthcare system. Found in Chandler’s archives at the Bodleian Library in Oxford by Andrew Gulli, managing editor of the Strand magazine, the story, It’s All Right – He Only Died, opens as a “filthy figure on a stretcher” arrives at a hospital. The man, who smells of whisky, has been hit by a truck, and staff at the hospital are loth to treat him because they assume he will be unable to pay for his care. “The hospital rule was adamant: A fifty dollar deposit or no admission,” writes Chandler.

Gulli said the story was one of the last things Chandler ever wrote – it is believed to have been written between July 1956 and spring 1958. Chandler died in 1959. “He’d been in and out of hospital, he’d tried committing suicide once, and he’d had a fall down the stairs,” said Gulli. “The story mirrors some of his experiences of that time. It’s about what he calls a ‘transient’, a homeless man who gets hit by a truck and who finds himself in a hospital that is reluctant to treat someone who can’t pay the bill. And of course there’s a twist at the end.”

The Strand is publishing the story this weekend, complete with an author’s note from Chandler in which he reveals his fury at the US healthcare system. The doctor who turned away the patient, Chandler writes, had “disgrace[d] himself as a person, as a healer, as a saviour of life, as a man required by his profession never to turn aside from anyone his long-acquired skill might help or save”. According to Chandler scholar Dr Sarah Trott, the story is “a prime example of Chandler as social critic and visionary in American literary history”, and unlike anything else Chandler wrote, with its serious tone, “bordering on sinister”.

“The story’s unsympathetic dialogue, paired with Chandler’s damning assessment, in itself unique, suggests a deep personal dissatisfaction with American healthcare, where the amount of money a person carries can dictate the level of care they receive,” Trott writes in an assessment of the story also published in the Strand. “It is a contemporary life-or-death story; a cautionary tale about the problematic nature of assumption and appearance in a ‘cash-is-king’ society, and a disturbing commentary about the American dream, where the competition to remain employed means not running a hospital ‘for charity’, even if it requires denying medical attention to a seriously ill patient.” Trott called its publication timely, given the current situation with US healthcare, pointing out that Chandler was a British citizen until 1956, and would have had experience of the contrasting service of the NHS. “It feels relevant today,” agreed Gulli."

- Alison Flood, The Guardian

Claire Trevor

'A Forest' - The Cure

There's a drug-induced dream experienced by Marlowe in this hypnotic mystery that leaps right out of the screen thanks to some astounding creativity, a tripped-out vision provoked when reason falls in the face of scientific greed and medicinal malevolence. Dick Powell's fallible detective is a soluble sponge who absorbs every suspect's neurosis while living out the crimes he's investigating in an effort to close his casebook and ideally get paid. Claire Trevor's subversive trophy wife Helen Grayle is an experienced practitioner of the dubious arts married to an ancient relic of a distant past. Anne Shirley's persuasive gatekeeper Ann Grayle is capable of unlocking the most unlikely family secrets in this deliciously twisted crime thriller.

Raymond Chandler's novel 'Farewell, My Lovely' was loosely adapted as 'The Falcon Takes Over' (1942), part of 'The Falcon' crime series. Dick Richards filmed another version starring Robert Mitchum in the role of Philip Marlowe, 'Farewell, My Lovely' (1975). Dick Powell and Claire Trevor performed 'Murder, My Sweet' on the radio in the 1940s.

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'The Blue Dahlia' - not to be confused with 'The Black Dahlia' (2006) - is a crime mystery based on an original screenplay by Raymond Chandler. Three discharged United States Navy Officers, Johnny Morrison (Alan Ladd), Buzz Wanchek (William Bendix) and George Copeland (Hugh Beaumont), touch down in Hollywood, California having boarded the same flight in the South Pacific. Buzz and George rent an apartment together hoping to save some money while Johnny goes home to his wife Helen (Doris Dowling) who hits him with some unwanted family news. When a serious crime is committed, the troubled Johnny finds himself caught up in a web of intrigue.

"Every guy's seen you before, somewhere. The trick is to find you."

Doris Dowling & Alan Ladd

'Quiet Men' - Ultravox

The depression piece 'The Blue Dahlia' deals with abuse, harassment, addiction, adultery, denial and exploitation while cultivating a sensory input of drug-tinged paranoia. Director George Marshall's languid, textured treatment is exemplified by a long drive through pouring rain that's intercut with action from a pair of unfolding sub-plots; a wry, atmospheric and fateful passage that's the very essence of film noir. Cameraman Lionel 'Curly' Lindon uses rhythmic whip-pans, subtle zoom-ins and mobile p.o.v. shots that add multiple layers to the complex storytelling. Marshall looked at German cinematographer Theodor Sparkuhl's unusual work on pictures like Stuart Heisler's 'Among The Living' (1941) and 'The Glass Key' (1942), and Jack Hively's 'Street Of Chance' (1942). Impressed by Lindon's work, the two men would go on to collaborate on 'Variety Girl' (1947), 'Tap Roots' (1948) and 'Boy, Did I Get A Wrong Number' (1966), by which time Lindon had struck up a strong working relationship with the filmmaker John Frankenheimer who recognised his hard-earned 1940s reputation as "the fastest cameraman in Hollywood."

"As a movie producer, John Houseman's first success was "The Blue Dahlia" in 1946, uniting Alan Ladd, Veronica Lake and Raymond Chandler. A reformed drinker, Chandler had batted out some 85 pages of scintillating screenplay when, according to "Front and Center," he suddenly announced that the only way he could finish was off the wagon, at home, and supplied with round-the-clock secretarial and chauffeur service. Houseman agreed to all this, and the next morning "Ray lay, passed out, on the sofa of his living room. On the table beside him was a tall, half-filled highball glass of bourbon; beside it were three typed pages of script, neatly corrected -- Ray's work of the night."

"During those last eight days of shooting, Chandler did not draw one sober breath, nor did one speck of solid food pass his lips," Houseman writes. And "The Blue Dahlia's" last line of dialogue, filmed as written, was: "Did somebody say something about a drink of bourbon?"

- James Lardner, The Washington Post

"I learned about drinking whiskey, specifically bourbon whiskey, from Raymond Chandler. Actually, I recently read in his letters that Chandler was more of a gin man. So I really learned about drinking whiskey from Chandler’s alter ego, Philip Marlowe. Actually, "drinking" is not the best description of how Marlowe imbibed his Four Roses or Old Forester. He was more of a self-medicator, administering a slug of booze from the office bottle before going downtown to talk to the cops, or after a rough night on a case, or just because. No mixing or pouring it over ice. Just powering it down neat and strong as God intended.

Needless to say, this is not a good way to learn how to drink, at least not in a socially acceptable way. When I first read the Philip Marlowe stories, I was enamored of his hard-boiled lifestyle, and I tried having a slug of bourbon a la Marlowe from time to time, but I soon realized that it was better to have bourbon on ice, or in a Manhattan. It is much easier on the liver that way.

But Chandler knew what he was talking about, because he was an alcoholic, and probably no stranger to bottles in the deep drawer of his office desk, and slugs of drink to keep him going when blocked on a writing project, or maybe just down in the dumps. I recently thought about Chandler and drinking when I saw a showing of the film The Blue Dahlia, starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake, and based on an original screenplay by Chandler. It was made in 1946, and by this time Chandler was working in Hollywood as a screenwriter, having had had some success collaborating with Billy Wilder on the script for Double Indemnity. Film noir was hot, and Chandler was the man to turn out the product."

- Michael Norris, 'Raymond Chandler And The Blue Dahlia Gambit'

Veronica Lake & Howard Da Silva

'Johnny Come Home' - Fine Young Cannibals

Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake are compelling as sparring adversaries, antagonistic moralist Johnny Morrison and cynical hostess Joyce Harwood, a pair of depressives desperate to cut ties with some questionable associates and leave their suspicious pasts behind them. They're joined by Howard Da Silva as slimy nightclub owner Eddie Harwood, Howard Freeman as sleazy hotel manager Corelli, Doris Dowling as decorative lush Helen Morrison, Don Costello as gutter gangster Leo, William Bendix as traumatised hothead Buzz Wanchek and Hugh Beaumont as balanced military veteran George Copeland.

"Veronica Lake and Alan Ladd reunited once again to make their third and final film noir together, The Blue Dahlia, which was based on an original screenplay written by Raymond Chandler. Prior to filming in 1945, Ladd was due to return to the army near the end of World War II, so the movie was rushed through production with Lake and co-star William Bendix already attached."

- Shawn Dwyer, 'Alan Ladd And Veronica Lake : Great Romantic Pairings Of The Classic Era'

“He got pegged as being short, 5’2”. But he was actually 5’6” or 5’7”,” said actor/producer David Ladd, himself a very tall man and one of actor Alan Ladd‘s four offspring to work in the film industry. Ladd spoke about his father following the absolutely fantastic screening of The Blue Dahlia at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ summer film noir series curated by Randy Haberkamp. The George Marshall-directed Los Angeles crime whodunit, dating from 1946, has at its gritty core a tough-guy screenplay by crime writer Raymond Chandler. It was Chandler’s only original screenplay, his follow-up to a successful collaboration with Billy Wilder on Double Indemnity. There’s urban legend about Chandler finishing the script at home while on a bruising round-the-clock bender, dispatching pages to the studio by courier. Watching Dahlia’s close-knit ensemble of character actors hurl Chandler’s hard-boiled, indeed nasty, lines at each other gives tingling pleasure. The director burns time and space around the words so you can take them in. Dahlia is one of seven films Ladd made with co-star Veronica Lake. Ladd, junior, noted: “My parents loved each other. Veronica and my Dad did not have a real relationship outside their films. But one of his dearest friends, a lifelong friend, was William Bendix.”

- Debra Levine, 'Get Shorty : Alan Ladd Remembered At The Academy'

"This gun's for hire ..."

'Penthouse And Pavement' - Heaven 17

For long stretches of 'The Blue Dahlia' you can hear a pin drop. When the action does hit it hits hard though. Marshall shoots an exemplary dust-up at an abandoned house in this broken, intimate crime drama which includes a homage to the chilling moment in 'This Gun For Hire' (1942) when a child asks Philip Raven (Alan Ladd) for her ball back and his violent instincts threaten to kick in (though this time around it comes when Johnny hears something he didn't wish to hear about his own kid).