Murder My Sweet (1944)

One night in particular while I was at my dad's over Christmas, we watched several old movies. So expect plenty of those in the weeks ahead, starting with this.

It's Dick Powell's turn to play Phillip Marlowe in this particular Raymond Chandler adaptation. Within the span of a day, Marlowe's hired by a very large, somewhat addled man fresh out of the joint and looking for his old girlfriend, and a well-to-do young guy who's caught up in some sort of blackmail scheme. The well-to-do guy turns up dead shortly, and things spiral from there.

More than most adaptations of Chandler's work I've seen, this one tries to visualize the vivid descriptions of the things he describes. Marlowe has an extended, drug-induced nightmare where he's trying to escape through a series of increasingly smaller doors while a creepy doctor (played by Otto Kruger a detached irritation) simply walks through the doors like a ghost. When Marlowe awakens, they maintain some smoky, gauzy filter over the image, to represent the "smoke" he's still seeing as he comes out of it.

I'm not sure it doesn't come off as more of a gimmick than an effective technique, but points for the effort. The movie also retains Marlowe's internal dialogue, but the entire movie is him relating what's happened to the cops. So it doesn't make a lot of sense for him to describe being knocked unconscious as, 'A black pool opened up at my feet. I dived in. It had no bottom. I felt pretty good - like an amputated leg.' It's a good line, but doesn't fit given the context in which he says it. That story about Harrison Ford telling George Lucas he could write this shit but couldn't make people say it came to mind often during this movie.

Powell plays Marlowe with more energy than Humphrey Bogart did. Little more pep, but also more desperation. Maybe because he has such a rough go of it, between the drugging and the big guy trying to play his windpipe like an accordion at one point. Liable to frazzle anybody. Claire Trevor plays the associate of the well-to-do victim, carries herself as someone who can turn on the charm whenever she feels like, but it's never anything you could trust.

Ann Shirley (in what IMDb says is her last role) plays Trevor's stepdaughter, wary of her stepmother, protective of her father, unsure of Marlowe. She's frustrated and annoyed by him enough it's hard for me to feel like there's a lot of chemistry between them, but I've seen less convincing starts to a relationship.