Dick Powell Transforms His Career with Murder, My Sweet

Dick Powell as Marlowe.

My favorite fictional detectives are the erudite, snobbish Philo Vance and the sarcastic, sly Philip Marlowe. Both have been the subject of numerous films, but with middling results. Marlowe has been played by an unusual assortment of actors that includes Humphrey Bogart, Robert Montgomery, George Montgomery, James Garner, Elliott Gould, Robert Mitchum, and Liam Neeson. Bogart captured Marlowe’s toughness. Garner projected the right amount of sarcasm. Mitchum exhibited the requisite amount of world-weariness. But none of them could compare to the cinema’s first Philip Marlowe, as portrayed by Dick Powell in Edward Dmytryk’s smashing film noir Murder, My Sweet.

Powell's performance is all the more impressive when one considers his previous films were lighthearted musicals. Indeed, Powell’s early success as a crooner stifled his acting career. (By the way, he had a pleasant voice; my Mom had several of his records.)  But Powell’s career star status was dimming when RKO signed him to a contract. He still had enough clout to pick his own films and his first RKO effort was Murder,  My Sweet. It was based on the second Marlowe novel Farewell, My Lovely—which was my father's favorite book in the series (my second fave to The Lady in Lake).

Like all of Raymond Chandler’s novels, the colorful characters and seedy, neon-lit atmosphere of 1940s Los Angeles overpower the complex plotting which intertwines two mysteries. In the first, a big homicidal lug named Moose Malloy hires Marlowe to find Velma, his former girlfriend. He hasn’t seen her for eight years and it’s been six since she wrote. Of course, Moose spent most of that time in prison--but he still pines for his sweet, little Velma and desperately wants to be with her.

Marlowe’s second case seems even more straightforward. A well-dressed ne’er-do-well named Lindsay Marriott wants Marlowe to accompany him on a midnight rendezvous to buy back a lady friend’s stolen jade necklace. Unfortunately, the plan goes awry when Marlowe is knocked unconscious and awakes to find a pummeled dead body.

Dick Powell and Claire Trevor.

Powell’s dynamic performance anchors the film, but he also benefits from some classic Chandler dialogue (often spoken in voiceover as Marlowe recounts his story to the police). When Marlowe finds a dead body, he quips: “He was just snapped—the way a pretty girl would snap a stalk of celery.” Velma’s sleazy former employer is described as “a charming, middle-aged lady with a face like a bucket of mud.”

Edward Dmytryk was a promising director with a thin resume when he made Murder, My Sweet and he put his all into the film. The pacing is swift, the atmosphere is appropriately sordid, and the visuals are stylish (e.g., when Marlowe is knocked unconscious, a black pool swallows up the frame). I met Dmytryk when he gave a guest lecture at Indiana University in the late 1970s. He wouldn’t have mentioned Murder, My Sweet if I hadn’t asked a question about it. Most of his lecture centered on the years he was blacklisted  during the McCarthy era.

Murder, My Sweet holds up remarkably well as a classic film noir. It also marked a turning point in Powell’s career. He followed it with the compelling, brutal Cornered and established himself as a dramatic actor. He went on to be become a successful film director and a television pioneer when he co-founded Four Star Studios in the 1950s.

For the record, while Murder, My Sweet was the first Marlowe movie, the novel Farewell, My Lovely was adapted earlier as the "B" picture The Falcon Takes Over (1942). Philip Marlowe was nowhere in sight in this version. Instead, George Sanders starred as the debonair Gay Lawrence, who takes on Moose Malloy's case.

Farewell, My Falcon

Raymond Chandler--the creator of Philip Marlowe, one of literature's great detectives--signed a contract in 1941 for RKO to film his novel Farewell, My Lovely. The price: $2000. According to Frank McShane's The Life of Raymond Chandler, it was a decision the writer later regretted, blaming the "unparalleled stupidity on the part of my New York agent."

Even worse, RKO took Chandler's now-acclaimed novel and adapted it as The Falcon Takes Over (1942), a "B" detective film. It was the third entry in the Falcon film series, based on a gentleman detective created by Michael Arlen in a 1940 short story. In fact, the film's opening credits state the screenplay was "based on the character created by Michael Arlen" and then in smaller letters, it includes "From the novel Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler."


George Sanders as The Falcon,
with Lynn Bari.

Surprisingly, the plot adheres pretty closely to Chandler's novel with a big lug named Moose Malloy (Ward Bond) looking for his girlfriend Velma. Moose has recently escaped from the state pen, where he spent five years taking the rap for Velma's boss. Now, he's mad--and that's neck-breaking bad news for anyone getting in his way. After Moose kills a nightclub owner, Gay Lawrence (George Sanders) takes an interest in the case, especially the whereabouts of Velma. He also becomes involved with an alleged necklace theft, a beautiful icy blonde, and a fake psychic. Since this is a plot devised by Raymond Chandler, one can rest assured that somehow it all ties together. (Chandler often interwove plots from previously-written short stories into his novels; for Farewell, My Lovely, the stories were "Try the Girl" and "Mandarin's Jade.")

For anyone who has read Chandler's novel or has seen the superior 1944 adaptation Murder, My Sweet, it's jarring to see George Sanders' upper-class detective filling in for Marlowe. Marlowe's cynical first-person narrative and the seedy settings have been replaced with lighthearted title music and a bumbling assistant named Goldy (Allen Jenkins) who provides comic relief.

Brothers Tom Conway and George
Sanders, with Jane Randolph.

Sanders, after five movies as The Saint--a similar character--and two as The Falcon, looks relatively bored. He would make one more Falcon movie, The Falcon's Brother, in which Gay Lawrence is killed off and replaced with his brother Tom Lawrence (played by Sanders' real-life brother Tom Conway). This clever idea was good news for Sanders' career and for The Falcon series, which improved with Tom Conway and produced a low-budget gem with The Falcon and the Co-eds.

Why didn't Helen Gilbert
get better roles?

Still, at 65 minutes, The Falcon Takes Over is a watchable mystery and features good performances from Ward Bond as Moose and Helen Gilbert as the chilly Diana Kenyon. Judging from this film alone, it's surprising that Gilbert didn't get better parts. Although she appeared in major film series like Andy Hardy and Dr. Kildare, her career stalled after the mid-1940s, although she made a handful of television appearances in the 1950s.

The supporting cast in The Falcon Takes Over also includes Turhan Bey as the fake psychic (foreshadowing his role in The Amazing Mr. X), James Gleason as a police detective, and Hans Conrad (who is unbilled).

A third version of Farewell, My Lovely (with that title, for a change) appeared in 1975 with Robert Mitchum as Marlowe. It earned generally positive reviews, although I was less enthused, principally because Mitchum seemed at least a decade too old to be playing Chandler's detective.