17. Murder My Sweet
Director: Edward Dmytryk Producer: Adrian Scott Screenwriter: John Paxton from a novel by Raymond Chandler Cinematographer: Harry J. Wild Music: Roy Webb Studio: RKO Pictures 1944 Main Acting: Dick Powell and Claire Trevor "The only reason I took the job was because my bank account was trying to crawl under a duck." "The office bottle…
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Wonders in the Dark
Director: Edward Dmytryk

Producer: Adrian Scott

Screenwriter: John Paxton from a novel by Raymond Chandler

Cinematographer: Harry J. Wild

Music: Roy Webb

Studio: RKO Pictures 1944

Main Acting: Dick Powell and Claire Trevor

“The only reason I took the job was because my bank account was trying to crawl under a duck.”

“The office bottle hadn’t sparked me up so I’d taken up my little black book and decided to go grouse hunting. Nothing like soft shoulders to improve my morale.”

“Nothing bothered me, the two twenties felt nice and snug against my appendix.”

“Mike Florian had ran the joint until 1939. He died in 1940 in the middle of a glass of beer, his wife Jesse finished it for him.”

“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 if she had to knock you down to get the bottle.”

Murder My Sweet holds a special place in my heart when it comes to film noir. It was the first time I had watched a noir movie, consciously knowing what the genre was about. I had seen other examples in the past, but not with the acute awareness that I was viewing a specific type of movie. If I were overly sentimental I might even have placed this picture at number one. It is a personal favorite that even without the nostalgic attachment still shines bright as a cinematic masterpiece in my eyes.

“When I like a guy and he buys me a drink, the ceiling’s the limit.”

“We were watched. I didn’t see anything. I felt it, my stomach. I was a toad on a wet rock, a snake was looking at the back of my neck.”

“I caught the blackjack right behind my ear. A black pool opened up at my feet. I dived in. It had no bottom. I felt pretty good—like an amputated leg.”

“It was a nice little front yard, cozy, okay for the average family…though you needed a compass to go to the mailbox. The house was alright too, but it wasn’t as big as Buckingham Palace.”

“My throat felt soar, but the fingers feeling it didn’t feel anything. They were just a bunch of bananas that looked like fingers.”

Dick Powell plays Philip Marlowe in this 1944 film noir. Known primarily as an actor of musicals and lighthearted comedies, Powell was trying to expand his range and get work in more dramatic fare. He desperately wanted to break out of the typecasting that Hollywood had imposed on him. The fact that the title of the movie was changed from Chandler’s original Farewell My Lovely to something audiences would not confuse with a musical was telling. Nino Frank included Murder My Sweet as one of the pictures he listed when coining the term “film noir” in the summer of 1946.

“O.K., Marlowe, I said to myself. You’re a tough guy. You’ve been sapped twice, choked, beaten silly with a gun, shot in the arm until you were as crazy as a couple of waltzing mice. Now, lets see you do something really tough, like putting your pants on.”

“I wanted to go home and sleep a couple hundred years, but I couldn’t. Nulty was watching my apartment. So I decided to call on Ann to find out why she was living alone and if she really liked it.”

“I’ll have to stop at my place anyway. This suit is beginning to crawl. I think I’ve got another one under the mattress.”

“You know, I think you’re nuts. You go barging around without a very clear idea of what you’re doing. Everybody bats you down, smacks you over the head, fills you full of stuff, and you keep on hitting between tackle and end.”

“O.K. Put a check in the mail. I cost a lot not to do anything, I get restless. Throw in a trip to Mexico.”

Murder My Sweet oozes with the prose and style of Raymond Chandler. The dialogue in this picture is the strongest aspect along with the breathtaking cinematography by Harry J. Wild. Its plot is as perplexing as any in film noir. While some people complain that this Edward Dmytryk feature is light and frivolous, I always looked at it as a fun picture with a sly malignant core. It takes the noir template and fuses it with a joyous sensibility that brings a gleeful smile to my face every time.

“You’re hanging onto something that’s going to smack you. If I fold now, it smacks you later. If I stick, it smacks you sooner, but cleaner. Maybe that’s why I’m sticking. Yeah, I don’t know I’d stick anyway.”

“I hate their women, too—especially the big-league blondes. Beautiful, expensive babes who know what they’ve got…all bubble bath, and dewy mornings, and moonlight. And inside: blue steel, cold, cold like that…only not that clean.”

“I went in the way I knew about. It was simpler. And I had a psychological trick to try out on foxy grandpa. I thought it would give him a bang. I thought it would kill him.”

“You know, this’ll be the first time I’ve ever killed anyone I knew so little about and liked so well. What’s your first name?”

“That old black pit opened up again, right on schedule. It was blacker than the others and deeper. I didn’t expect to hit bottom.”

Unlike the large majority of film noir, Philip Marlowe is not a doomed figure or protagonist. He is not a victim of hopeless circumstance or someone with a fluctuating moral code. While he is a tough guy and cynical towards people and women, he is essentially a good guy who will always do what’s right. Dick Powell’s Marlowe is a man who’s hardboiled wisecracking demeanor masks an upstanding do-gooder with the proper sense of right and wrong. Here, we have the closest thing noir has to a super hero. When nihilism and fatalism is ready to overtake this pulpy world, you can count on Dick Powell’s private eye to snap a one-liner that can make even the most hardened criminals crack a smile before pistol whipping him for the millionth time.