Murder my Sweet

Edward Dmytryk's 1944 adaptation of a Raymond Chandler crime novel, Murder my Sweet, is an example of the gris films (as identified by French critics) preceding film noir.  To my eye, there isn't much daylight between  gris and noir -- both types of pictures feature mostly urban settings, purport to having been shot at night (it's always after dark in these films) and involve a parade of characters who are either grotesque or sinister colluding in some kind of criminal endeavor.  These are crimes of opportunity or passion remote from the conspiracies involved in a gangster picture, a different sort of enterprise entirely.  Film gris (like The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep) are based on novels and have well-written dialogue -- they are less expressionistic and doom-ridden than film noir, less obsessed with the working-out of malign fate.  Film noir can be stylized and schematic, sometimes with relatively simple plots involving flight and pursuit; gris have complicated narratives, often complex to the point of being incomprehensible, and there is an odd "drawing room" quality to many of the encounters depicted.  But, these distinctions are splitting hairs, categorizing movies that are all a single strand in American film culture.

With t he exception of Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye, I have never warmed to most Chandler adaptations -- The Big  Sleep is a a monotonous slog through a thousand plot points all pretty much indistinguishable to my eye.  The monotone, romantic cynicism of The Maltese Falcon also seems to me mostly mean-spirited, implausible, and misogynistic.  Murder my  Sweet is a less distinguished variant on themes from these films and seems overlong to me and ultimately tedious.  Many crime novels work on this principle:  a hard-boiled private eye is hired to find someone or something; the private dick is also retained by rich villain for some other completely different errand.  As the private eye works these cases, they begin to converge and, ultimately, a single plot-line emerges that combines the two narratives into a single all-encompassing conspiracy that threatens to destroy all protagonists.  It's a time-worn plot, always works well if properly managed, and has driven many films of this kind from Murder my Sweet to Chinatown.  In Dmytryk's picture a thug just-released from prison (after an eight year term) hires Philip Marlowe (played here effectively by Dick Powell -- his baby-face hardened into a mask of callous indifference) to track down a show-girl who seems to have vanished.  Simultaneously, Marlowe is retained by a rich debutante to find a jade necklace that has been stolen from the girl's stepmother, a lascivious femme fatale who has been cheating on her much older millionaire husband.  The two investigations are laboriously made to converge and, in the climactic affray, Marlowe is blinded by a pistol shot that scorches his eyeballs.  He's not sure who was killed and who survives the fight at the end.  The cops have him in custody and, with his wounded eyes bandaged, Marlowe narrates the story in flashback.  The first half-hour of the 120 minute picture is very atmospheric and gripping, but the movie gradually devolves into a series of routine scenes working out the meaning behind the strange and brutal events occurring at the start of the film.  As is almost invariably the case with films of this sort, the explanation behind the weird events at the outset of the film is much less interesting than the events themselves -- the investigation of the various mysteries reveals them to involve relatively commonplace motivations.

As is always the case with film of this sort, the rogue's gallery of supporting characters promise more than they deliver -- but Murder my Sweet is replete with interesting villains.  Most notably, the lovelorn gorilla and ex-con played by Mike Mazurki is particularly fascinating and projects a peculiar quality of menace and haplessness (a bit like some of the roles played by Ernest Borgnine in the fifties).  There's a smarmy homosexual, too louche for his own good, who appears in a dressing gown in Marlowe's office and shortly thereafter gets beat to death with a sap.  Claire Trevor is good as the scheming tart married to the feckless rich man.  A couple of sinister doctors, seemingly ministering feel-good drugs to the LA elite, complicate the action -- they also ooze suave menace, although the film, here inexplicably faithful of Chandler's hyper-complex plot, uses two characters where one composite would suffice.  A surrealist episode in which Marlowe is drugged-up and babbles nonsense while being tormented by odd visions seems to be belong in another film and, indeed, I think the very stylish montage, involving doorways suspended in black space and spider-webs simulating mental confusion, was directed by another film maker.  The sequences set in the evil doctor's sanitarium, all shadowy staircases with odd broken pediments over the doors and monstrous phallic finials on the balustrades are visually impressive -- although again seem to belong in another film.  (It's a bit like Salvador Dali's dream sequence interpolated into Hitchcock's film Spellbound.)  Marlowe is always getting knocked out -- "diving into a spreading pool of darkness", something that the film obligingly, if unimaginatively, shows us.  There are plenty of memorable lines -- a woman is said to be "cute as lace pants" or to "have a face like a Sunday school picnic."  A rich man's glazed and marble loggia is place where one might "buy a crypt in a mausoleum."  Marlowe is insulted:  "you would cut your own throat for six bits and tax."  Just before he passes out, Marlowe remarks enigmatically:  "I felt like an amputated limb."  The villainess notes: "This is the first time I've killed a guy I liked so much."  And I very much liked the detail of Marlowe striking a match off the marmoreal ass of a cupid bearing a bow and arrow outside of the rich man's mansion, a place in Brentwood so big "you would need a compass to get the mail."