Murder, My Sweet (1944)

Film: Murder, My Sweet (1944)

Stars: Dick Powell, Claire Trevor, Anne Shirley, Otto Kruger, Mike Mazurki

Director: Edward Dmytryk

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Throughout the month of June, in honor of the 10th Anniversary of The Many Rantings of John, we will be doing a Film Noir Movie Marathon, featuring fifteen film noir classics that I'll be seeing for the first time.  Reviews of other film noir classics are at the bottom of this article.

If we're going to start a film series about my favorite genre, film noir, we have to include at least one film from 1944, basically the creative beginning of the classic noir, and home of some of the best noir films ever made (Double Indemnity, Laura, The Woman in the Window).  The biggest title I was still missing from 1944 was Edward Dmytryk's Murder, My Sweet, which along with those other three titles, are generally considered to be four of the foundational movies in the genre.  Murder, My Sweet, though, was a movie that I actually knew well.  During the quarantine I'd actually watched Farewell, My Lovely, a version of this story by Raymond Chandler, and I was curious what a picture made by RKO at the height of the Hays Code would do with such a violent tale.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is told by narration, with detective Philip Marlowe (Powell) being interrogated by the police about two murders.  We go in flashback to learn the story of how Marlowe is hired as a bodyguard for a man who is transporting some valuable jewels.  During their transport, Marlowe is bludgeoned (Dick Powell gets several concussions in this movie), and the other man killed, with the jewels missing.  Marlowe is asked by the police not to investigate his own crime, but he does, which leads him to meet Jules Amthor (Kruger), a frail, wealthy man, his daughter Ann (Shirley) with whom he becomes sweet on even if she finds him crude, and Helen (Trevor), a bombshell who is married to Amthor, clearly for his money.  The film unfolds as most film noirs do with double-crossing, mistaken identities, and eventually Claire Trevor looking glamorous as hell holding a gun before joining a pile of corpses on the floor.

Generally I'm not a fan of Dick Powell's, but he works well as Marlowe.  He's not particularly sexy, but then again is Philip Marlowe supposed to be conventionally sexy, or is he just supposed to be sexy because he can't be tamed?  Either way, it works, and this movie handles the story of Chandler's gritty novel better with parameters than 1975's, which gets lost in the many, many plot pivots of the novel by also needing to include more sex & violence for a modern audience.  Without that pull, Murder, My Sweet has more focus.

Of the two leading ladies, Claire Trevor comes out the best, and honestly steals the movie.  She's used judiciously-despite a top billing slot, she's very much a supporting player (this is Powell's movie), but she uses every inch of the screen, slowly seducing Marlowe & everyone around it.  I always take it as a sign that a femme fatale has been successful if you secretly want them to get away with everything as the movie ends...that's very much the case here.  Anne Shirley is fine but too much of a wallflower by comparison.  Weirdly, despite being only 26 at the time & regularly working in movies, this was her last film even though she'd live for another fifty years.  Shirley, who had become an actress in movies as a teenager & struck unexpected success in Anne of Green Gables (hence her stage name), had never intended to make this her career, and after an Oscar nomination & a high-profile failed marriage to actor John Payne, she decided she was done with Hollywood

Previous Films in the Series: The Woman in the Window, The Killers, The Big Sleep, Nightmare Alley, Ride the Pink Horse, Night and the City, They Live By Night, Gun Crazy, In a Lonely Place, Sweet Smell of Success, The Big Heat, Pickup on South Street, The Killing, The Long Goodbye, Body Heat,