Murder, My Sweet, a.k.a. Farewell, My Lovely (1944)
By the 1940s a number of actors associated with light-hearted comedies were seeking to reinvent themselves by showing that they could take on tougher roles. This may have reflected the hard-headed world of the 1940s, where a large number of men had gone to war, and were dealing with the aftermath of the conflict. This…
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The Movie Screen Scene
By the 1940s a number of actors associated with light-hearted comedies were seeking to reinvent themselves by showing that they could take on tougher roles. This may have reflected the hard-headed world of the 1940s, where a large number of men had gone to war, and were dealing with the aftermath of the conflict.

This situation was mirrored in some of the movies of the 1940s. This was the golden age of the film noir. This comparatively new genre depicted a greyer world where the heroes and the police were almost as violent and unscrupulous as the villains they faced, and moral certainties were being challenged.

More prosaically, this change might just have been the effect of the last decade’s actors suddenly finding that they were too old to continue playing the handsome romantic hero, and needing to find a new niche if they were to survive.

Ray Milland surprised many (including himself) when he convincingly portrayed an alcoholic in The Lost Weekend in 1945. Audiences smirked at the thought of James Stewart playing a tough guy in the 1950 western, Winchester ’73, but their smiles faded when Stewart demonstrated a steely side that they had not hitherto suspected.

Before either of these two actors changed their image, there was Dick Powell, an actor mostly known for appearing in comedies and musicals. Powell too was looking for a stronger role, and he had already been turned down for the lead role in Double Indemnity. This part went to Fred MacMurray, another Hollywood ‘nice guy’ who showed unexpected depths of darkness when given the opportunity.

Undaunted, Powell sought the lead in another movie made the same year. This was Murder, My Sweet, an adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s second novel, Farewell, My Lovely. Indeed this was the film’s original title, and the name by which it goes in Britain. The title was changed in America because it made the film sound too much like one of Powell’s musicals, and it was feared that this would deter audiences. Indeed it is thought that the film did better at the box office after the name change.

The casting of Powell was not welcomed by everyone. The director Edward Dmytryk was initially horrified by the decision to cast Powell. He need not have worried. The movie went on to make a profit of nearly $600,000, and Powell had earned his spurs enough to be offered a number of other roles in thrillers and film noirs.

Powell was fortunate in his choice of movie. Murder, My Sweet is one of the best 1940s film noirs. It is made with a technical flair that produced striking images, the dialogue is punchy, sharp and witty, the acting is uniformly good, and the characters stay in the memory too. The film is also a notable example of effective use of a voiceover.

The film is narrated by Powell, who we see at the beginning of the film being interviewed by the police on a murder charge, and wearing bandages over his eyes. The narration is supposedly his statement to the police, but it contains a number of brilliant quotable lines. Here are my favourites:

She was a charming middle-aged lady with a face like a bucket of mud.

Only reason I took the job was because my bank account was trying to crawl under a duck.

He died in 1940, in the middle of a glass of beer. His wife Jessie finished it for him.

‘Okay 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’re crazy as a couple of waltzing mice. Now let’s see you do something really tough – like putting your pants on.’

He was doubled up on his face in that bag-of-old-clothes position that always means the same thing: he had been killed by an amateur

A black pool opened up at my feet. I dived in. It had no bottom.

The story features Raymond Chandler’s most famous detective, Philip Marlowe (Powell). Marlowe has featured in many films, all made later than Murder, My Sweet, including The Big Sleep, The Lady in the Lake, Marlowe, The Brasher Doubloon and The Long Goodbye. He has been played by actors as diverse as Humphrey Bogart, James Garner and Elliott Gould. Powell therefore has some retrospectively stiff competition to be seen as a Marlowe as worthy of the role as later stars.

Marlowe is investigating two cases, which eventually turn out to be one. It begins when he is hired by a new client, Moose Malloy. Malloy is a heavily-built and imposing figure who does not know his own strength. His touch makes Marlowe wince. He casually throws people across the room who get in his way, and easily rips the flag off the taxi of an unwilling driver.

Dmytryk deliberately shoots the film in a way that emphasises and exaggerates the formidable appearance and strength of Malloy. The role is played by Mike Mazurki, a former professional wrestler who was over 6 foot 4 inches in height. He towers over Dick Powell, an effect achieved by making Powell stand in a trench during their scenes together. (Powell himself was 6 foot two inches, not much shorter than Mazurki.). Further exaggeration of Mazurki’s height is achieved by making the sets with slanted ceilings so that the actor appears to grow as he approaches.

Malloy went to prison to cover for another criminal, Velma. The big man is soft on Velma, and has been trying to find her since his release, even though she did not write to him during the last six years of his eight-year spell in prison. Malloy is as pitiable as he is dangerous. We can clearly see that he has been duped by his Velma, and that his search for her will not end happily. (His fate in the book was even more ironically tragic.)

Marlowe’s other case involves a client called Lindsay Marriott (Douglas Walton). The lift attendant tells Marlowe that he has a new client, and ‘He smells real nice,” which is movie code for homosexual. Another clue is his gender-ambiguous forename. Admittedly Marriott is having an affair with a married woman whom he is probably blackmailing, but the clues suggest that he is at least bisexual. Raymond Chandler was notoriously homophobic and it is not too surprising to find that the one gay character in the story is repellent.

Right now Marriott is trying to get back a necklace that was stolen from the married woman he is seeing. His job is supposedly to meet the robbers in a remote place, and buy it back from them. However he is uneasy about the arrangements, and wishes Marlowe to accompany him for protection. Instead Marlowe is rendered unconscious by an unknown assailant, and Marriott has his head beaten in.

While Marlowe rightly suspects that the ‘robbery’ was a set-up to kill him, he nonetheless feels a duty to the client that he let down. His investigations lead him to the household of Helen Grayle, the wealthy woman that Marriott was blackmailing. She is played by Claire Trevor, an actress who often played the shop-soiled, hard-boiled heroine. Here she is seemingly classier than usual, speaking in an elegant clear voice.

As we soon discover, this change is superficial. Her background is less reputable, and she has been taught to speak well by Dr Jules Amthor (Otto Kruger). She married her weak bore of a husband (Miles Mander) for his money, and has no problem with seeing younger men on the side. “I find men very attractive,” she tells Marlowe. Grayle is besotted by his wife, but her stepdaughter Ann (Anne Shirley) is not. Ann provides the movie’s wholesome love interest, though even she is not above listening at doors.

Hired to find Mrs Grayle’s necklace, Marlowe is drawn into the grimy underworld of crime. The police officers in this story are relatively honest, if hostile to Marlowe’s investigations. They do not even rough Marlowe up during his two spells in custody. Other figures are more sleazy.

There is Jules Amthor, the quack therapist who insists his methods are “ahead of my time in the field of psychiatric treatment,’, though he mostly uses them for extracting private information from wealthy clients whom he can blackmail. He also employs a number of underworld criminals. Another crooked character is Dr Sonderborg (Ralf Harolde), who runs a shady clinic. Amthor renders Marlowe unconscious, and the private eye is taken to Sonderborg’s institute where he is drugged up in an attempt to extract information from him.

This leads to some of the movie’s most unusual images, as we see the world from Marlowe’s drugged-up view. Images revolve, or are superimposed against a back projection; an oversized hypodermic needle appears. To create the impression of Marlowe falling, Dmytryk used a technique employed by Alfred Hitchcock in his film, Saboteur. This involves pulling the camera away from the actor at high speed.

One of the more remarkable methods used by Dmytryk was the use of glass plates. These appear in other scenes too. They are used to make Moose Malloy’s opening appearance more dramatic, as we see him in the reflection of a window with neon lights outside. They are used at the end of the movie so that we have the illusion that Marlowe is close to the firing gun that blinds him whilst keeping the actor at a safe distance so he is unharmed.

In this scene, the glass plates are used to add to the hallucinatory effect by having cobwebs placed on them, giving us a vision of the world as seen through Marlowe’s eyes. This is a film where the characters move around in darkness and fog, literally or metaphorically. There is fog before Marlowe’s eyes in this scene, and actual mist in the scene where he and Marriott go to the drop-off point for collect the necklace. Many scenes take place at night, and of course there is the bottomless black pool that Marlowe falls into when rendered unconscious.

Philip Marlowe has his own seedy side too. He plies an alcoholic woman with drink, sneaks a look at a photograph that she is concealing, and then departs taking the remainder of the bottle with him. He is willing to kiss and flirt with Mrs Grayle in view of her husband, even whilst harbouring romantic feelings for her stepdaughter. As one disgusted police officer remarks, “You’re not a detective, you’re a slot machine”.

However in Marlowe’s case these actions are necessary for his line of work. He cannot be too fastidious in his methods, but his intentions are not without a sense of honour. He works on the case in the name of justice, to redeem himself for his failure to save Marriott, and to protect Ann from harm. If not a white knight, then he is certainly a grey knight who leans towards the side of white.

Not everyone is an enthusiast for Powell’s performance in the film. The film noir purist would consider his approach too light and comic for the material. Perhaps it does not help that the leading actor is frequently dwarfed by his co-star. Indeed allowing for the sordid subject matter, Murder My Sweet is not an especially dark movie. It is thrilling and exciting, but there seems little reason to doubt that it will end well.

On the other side of the argument, there are others who consider Powell to be the best Marlowe ever, and even Raymond Chandler liked his performance. Powell seemed happy playing a grittier role than usual, and he brings a hard-edged charm to the role. There is in fact no reason why a film noir needs to be pessimistic or depressing to be any good. All that is required is for the film to tell its story in a stylish and intelligent manner, and in this respect, Murder, My Sweet excels.