The Falcon Takes Over (RKO, 1942)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Beware of the Midwife I ran Charles a quirky film I’ve long had an affection for: The Falcon Takes Over, third entry in RKO’s series of “The Falcon” detective films and the first movie ever made from a story by Raymond Chandler. Though he’d been living and working in the Los Angeles area for decades, first as an oil company executive and then as a writer, Chandler was pretty naïve about the movie business and when RKO and 20th Century-Fox came a-calling with offers for the movie rights to two of his books, Farewell, My Lovely and The High Window, he took them even though they were low-ball deals and the studios involved had no intention of filming them with his detective lead, Philip Marlowe. Instead RKO bought Farewell, My Lovely for the Falcon series and Fox bought The High Window to make it into Time to Kill, the seventh and last in their series of murder mysteries featuring Brett Halliday’s detective character Michael Shayne. (Once what’s now known as film noir became a “thing” later in the 1940’s both RKO and Fox would remake their Cnandler properties with Marlowe as a character, RKO brilliantly in the 1944 film noir masterpiece Murder, My Sweet and Fox in a rather tacky film called The Brasher Doubloon, after the rare 18th century American coin that’s both stolen and counterfeited in the story.)

From this pedigree one would expect The Falcon Takes Over to be a schizoid movie, half camp comedy-mystery and half film noir, and that’s pretty much what we get. The opening scene takes place at the exclusive “Club 13” – a nightspot so ritzy the patrons are required to wear evening dress – which used to be a dive called “Florian’s” where wrestler and small-time thug Moose Malloy (Ward Bond) used to hang out because he was dating a girl named Velma who had a small part in the club’s floor show. The moment Moose crashes into the joint – we’re told later he got a 20-year sentence for manslaughter but escaped after five – we get the sense that the noir world is gate-crashing the world of polite upper-class mysteries like the Falcon films generally. Moose crashes through the club crowd, strong-arming anyone who tries to stop him and murdering the club’s owner, Montgomery, when the poor guy won’t tell him where Velma now is. To make his getaway Moose car-jacks Jonathon “Goldie” Locke (Allan Jenkins), sidekick of socialite and amateur detective Gay Laurence, a.k.a. “The Falcon” (George Sanders), and has Goldie drop him off at the home of Jessie Florian (Anne Revere, who plays the character more hard-boiled and less dissolute than in Chandler’s novel or in Murder, My Sweet). Laurence traces Goldie to Florian’s home and sees her make a phone call alerting someone – we don’t yet know whom – that Moose is out and posing a danger to various criminals, including Laird Burnett (Selmer Jackson), who runs a fancy nightclub (in Chandler’s novel it was a floating casino, one of the gambling boats that in Chandler’s day were anchored off the coast of Los Angeles just past the three-mile limit so they’d at least technically be legal) and has organized a gang of jewel thieves that includes Marriott (Hans Conried, who also had a small role as a police technician in the first Falcon film, The Gay Falcon).

Marriott hires the Falcon to pay some money to crooks who stole a valuable jade necklace from his friend, socialite Diana Kenyon (Helen Gilbert), to buy it back from them – but he shoots the Falcon in the back at the drop point (fortunately the Falcon anticipated a double-cross and loaded the gun with blanks) and then gets shot himself for real. The Falcon is rescued by aspiring reporter Anne Riordan (Lynn Bari, playing a good girl for a change), who wants to work with him on the case because she figures if she solves it and writes an article she’ll be able to get a permanent job on any paper in town. Eventually Burnett is busted and Diana Kenyon is revealed as Moose’s old girlfriend Velma; though she didn’t marry a hapless sugar daddy the way she did in Chandler’s novel and the two other films of it, nonetheless she rose out of the gutter and into affluence and social position, but at the cost of having to pay regular blackmail money to Burnett and Florian. There’s the usual trick ending of the Falcon films, in which Laurence breaks his previous engagement and seems altar-bound to Anne Riordan when a whole troupe of burlesque performers show up at the police station – the cops raided the joint – and their leader pleads for help, and of course the Falcon is always a sucker for a pretty woman …

The Falcon Takes Over is actually quite a good film, ably adapted from Chandler’s typically convoluted original by Frank Fenton and Lynn Root and atmospherically directed by Irving Reis. The cinematographer was George Robinson, borrowed from Universal (where he was about to shoot the beautifully atmospheric Son of Dracula) and creating some vivid noir atmospherics in the parts of the story that call for them. As William K. Everson noted in his book The Detective in Film, “Some of Philip Marlowe’s integrity even seemed to rub off on the superficial Falcon.” It’s a movie that seems in a lot of ways to sum up the effect World War II and its aftermath would have on how Hollywood approached crime films, turning away from the campy badinage of all those 1930’s films that combined murder mystery and screwball comedy and towards the grittier, more serious version of the underworld, complete with dark shadows and chiaroscuro camerawork, that became film noir. It’s also an interesting tribute to George Sanders as an actor that he could transcend his usual flippancy and dig into a part that offered him room for an in-depth portrayal; in a way it’s a warm-up for his role in Douglas Sirk’s fine, underrated Lured five years later, in which he finds himself the principal suspect in a series of sex-related killings and loses his fabled sang-froid as he realizes what’s happening to him (and his performance is matched by Lucille Ball’s as the woman, roommate of one of the victims, engaged by the police as a decoy to find the killer) and once again makes it seem regrettable that Sanders never got to play Sherlock Holmes. He would have been near-ideal for the role, but Sanders’ commercial and artistic peak came at a time (the late 1930’s and early 1940’s) when Basil Rathbone owned the role of Holmes on screen!