Murder, My Sweet (1944) is a bit of a mixed bag. An adaptation of Farewell, My Lovely, a noir crime novel by Raymond Chandler, which I’ve read in the last year, its fidelity to the novel is somewhat mixed, and of course that weighs on the audience familiar with the novel.
Taken on its own, it’s a fairly tight story of Phillip Marlowe, Private Investigator, who is hired to find a woman named Velma by a huge man, Moose Malloy. In a bit of a jarring interjection, Marlowe is also hired by another man, Marriott, to assist in the ransoming of a woman’s jade jewels from some thieves. At the exchange point, however, Marriott is sapped to death, and Marlowe is attacked and loses consciousness. He awakens, finds his dead client, and ends up chatting with the police, who are a suspicious lot.
Back at his office, a woman reporter braces him for information, but he brushes her off until she reveals she knows more than she should. Soon enough, he discovers her last name is Grayle, which matches a name he already knows – Helen Grayle, owner of the stolen jewels.
Marlowe and the young Grayle repair to the Grayle estate, where Marlowe discovers Helen Grayle is young, shapely, and married to the elderly Mr. Grayle, himself the father of the faux-reporter. He’s soon hired to continue to hunt for the jade – and nearly seduced by Helen. She knows a name the police have mentioned, Anthor, a man working a blackmail con on troubled, rich women.
Marlowe plans on talking to Anthor, but Malloy shows up and drags him to Anthor. Malloy wants his woman, Anthor the jewels – and Marlowe a little relief from being pushed around. Not giving up information, he’s slugged and drugged, but escapes.
After a few more plot twists, we discover Helen at the Grayle beach house. She’s at work on manipulating Marlowe into doing some dirty work for her, and Marlowe gives her reason to believe he’s bought. But when he returns the next night to report on his progress, Malloy is with him. While Malloy waits outside for his woman, Marlowe finds himself in a double cross with Helen, and then things get tricky as Mr. Grayle and his daughter also show up. Eventually, Helen is revealed to be Malloy’s Velma, and both end up dead, along with Mr. Grayle, and Marlowe is blinded.
In a final scene, Marlowe gets the girl.
And, in a supposedly noir film, that’s right out.
While noir is often about just desserts, it’s rarely about happiness or rewards for the good guys. It’s a chronicle of people pursuing their base urges with abandon, and the unhappy results which attend not only them, but those around them.
And for a noir film, it’s hard to see those motivations. That there are attempts to convey such characterizations is definitely true, but they feel ineffective. Perhaps they ended up on the TV channel’s cutting room floor (TCM was the purveyor), but I doubt it. It just didn’t quite feel real.
Part of the problem might have been the coincidence of Malloy looking for his woman, and her being in another of Marlowe’s cases – assuming that was a coincidence. Perhaps Anthor had told Malloy, but Malloy, given how he’s depicted, would have simply charged into the Grayle estate; hiring Marlowe was far too subtle for Malloy. In the book, Malloy is in fact not connected with Anthor, as I recall.
And that connection to the book may be part of the problem. The book is more vivid, more clever, and more expansive than the movie, as well as being more racist. I cannot help but see the movie through the lens of the book. I appreciated how the movie managed to get at least a few of Chandler’s colorful similes into the movie through Marlowe’s inner narrative, but it’s not really enough.
And the happy ending really ruined it. For me, anyways.
But don’t let me discourage the interested audience member from seeing it. It’s not poorly acted, nor poorly constructed, although sometimes the audio is a bit muffled. There are worse ways to spend a snowy night.
