Murder, My Sweet (1944, Edward Dmytryk) (Patreon)

60/100

Second viewing, last seen 1997, on a double-bill with Lady in the Lake. Surprised to find that I'd also revisited The Big Sleep just three weeks earlier (vs. about four months ago as I write now), and was apparently less disappointed then by how comparatively bland this incarnation of Marlowe plays. While I wouldn't go so far as to call Powell miscast—this is arguably among the Golden Age's more effective image shakeups—it was impossible this time for me not to imagine how Bogart would have delivered the same lines, and that comparison never once benefited Powell. "It sounds screwy," Marlowe tells a cop at one point. "All right, it is screwy. Sometimes I'm not smart, but it's all I know." Bogart would have run all three sentences together in a sardonic rush (think of "It's okay if you don't like my manners, I don't like 'em myself, they're pretty bad, I grieve over them long winter evenings"); Powell shouts each one staccato, which paradoxically undermines any tough-guy veneer. Similarly, Claire Trevor and Anne Shirley, while able, lack the iconic power of Lauren Bacall or even of Martha Vickers. (Elisha Cook, Jr. vs. Mike Mazurki as Most Vivid Supporting Male we'll call a draw.) Writing about The Big Sleep back in March, I noted that its appeal is "90% magnificent cocky attitude," which is precisely the element that's largely absent here. Consequently, Chandler's convoluted plot (which I hadn't known 'til now was cobbled together from three unrelated short stories) has to shoulder a lot more weight, which creates a slightly laborious feel. Dmytryk deserves credit for being instrumental in creating noir's look—dig Trevor sitting so deep in shadow at the beach house that you literally can't see anything but the smoke drifting up from her cigarette—and his use of double exposure (yes? thought it was a scrim at first, but it disappears mid-shot) to suggest Marlowe's drug-fogged brain at the asylum is more visually striking than anything Hawks did. Pretty good nightmare imagery, too, just beforehand. And a rare happy ending (in this genre) that really works. Overall, though, this is a solid time-killer, not a movie one wants to savor again and again.