One-time movie crooner
Dick Powell
literally turned his career around in the 1944 film noir Murder My
Sweet. Powell stars as Phillip Marlowe, the hard-boiled private
detective antihero created by novelist
Raymond Chandler. Hired by hulking, psychotic Moose Malloy (
Mike Mazurki)
to locate Moose's old girl friend, Marlowe is pitched headlong into a
morass of intrigue and deception. The participants include duplicitous
glamour-girl
Claire Trevor, sodden slattern
Esther Howard, suave blackmailer
Otto Kruger and dyspeptic doctor
Ralf Harolde.
At one point, Marlowe is railroaded into a lunatic asylum, where under
the influence of drugs he experiences a surrealistic nightmare the like
of which would not be seen on screen again until Hitchcock's
Vertigo (1958). So fascinating are the "bad" characters in
Murder My Sweet that the two 100% "good" characters, heroine
Anne Shirley and detective
Don Douglas, seem wishy-washy wimps by comparison. After years of insipid golly-gee roles,
Dick Powell
startled his fans with his cynical, world-weary portrayal of Philip
Marlowe. The part put him back on top of the box-office tallies and
enabled him to extend his acting career into the 1950s, which led to an
even more lucrative "third life" as a powerful TV-studio executive.
Murder My Sweet was based on Chandler's
Farewell My Lovely, previously filmed in 1942 as
The Falcon Takes Over; a remake, Farewell, My Lovely, was produced in 1975, with
Robert Mitchum as Marlowe.
