Murder, My Sweet (RKO, 1944)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Wednesday, January 8) my husband Charles and I watched two of the three movies based on Raymond Chandler’s 1940 novel Farewell, My Lovely, which I regard as his best book. (He thought so, too.) We watched them in reverse chronological order because I was especially eager to re-see the 1944 film Murder, My Sweet, made at RKO Studios, directed by Edward Dmytryk, written by John Paxton from Chandler’s novel and starring Dick Powell as Philip Marlowe. Powell got into this movie under genuinely odd circumstances: he’d been offered a contract by RKO because studio head Charles Koerner (who gets a black mark in film history as the man who fired Orson Welles, and a white mark for giving Val Lewton a chance to produce the stunning series of low-budget horror films, which were as great as they were at least in part because Koerner demoted Welles’s people to the “B” units and Lewton made effective use of their training from the master of radio drama because he’d decided to make sound rather than sight the key element of fright in his films) was convinced musicals were coming back in fashion. Dick Powell, who’d become a star at Warner Bros. in the 1930’s in musicals, mostly in ones with numbers directed by Busby Berkeley, agreed but demanded a “straight” acting role first. So Koerner green-lighted a film of Chandler’s novel, which RKO had already bought the rights to and used as the basis for a “Falcon” series film, The Falcon Takes Over, in 1942. It was shot under Chandler’s original title, but that was quickly changed when Koerner and his fellow RKO executives realized that audiences seeing marquees reading “Dick Powell in Farewell, My Lovely” assumed it was just another musical. So the title was changed early in the film’s release to Murder, My Sweet to get the ‘M”-word in it and make it clear to audiences that it was a crime film.

I first caught this movie on commercial TV in the early 1970’s and was utterly blown away by it; I’d seen the 1946 film The Big Sleep before and had liked it but it seemed way too derivative of The Maltese Falcon – Humphrey Bogart starred in both and the original trailer for The Big Sleep directly linked the two films. (It was shot on the legitimate-bookstore set for the film and featured Dorothy Malone in her book-clerk characterization; Bogart walks in, sees The Maltese Falcon on her shelves, reminisces about what a great movie it was and asks her if she has anything else like it. Malone responds by pulling out a copy of The Big Sleep.) I’m puzzled by how few of the lists of the all-time best films noir mention Murder, My Sweet, since to my mind it is the Raymond Chandler movie the way the 1941 The Maltese Falcon is the Dashiell Hammett movie and the 1944 Double Indemnity is the James M. Cain movie. And if Dick Powell was hoping for a breakthrough role that would get Hollywood to see him as a first-rate actor and not just that nice young man who appeared with Ruby Keeler in all those big musicals, he got it big-time: Murder, My Sweet was an enormous commercial hit and totally revamped Powell’s career from Dick Powell 1.0: Boy Crooner to Dick Powell 2.0: Noir Icon. Like Farewell, My Lovely, Murder, My Sweet opens with Philip Marlowe (Dick Powell) in his office being confronted by a huge man, Moose Malloy (Mike Mazurki), who demands his services as a private detective to track down his old girlfriend, Velma Valento. Moose has just got out of prison after serving an eight-year sentence and a lot has changed in the interim. Moose used to hang out with Velma at a bar called Florian’s, but the new owner who bought it from founder Mike Florian’s widow Jessie (Esther Howard) after Mike died had never heard of Velma. (In Chandler’s book the bar, which was located on Central Avenue, had been bought by a Black owner and had become a Black bar, referencing the real-life transformation of Central Avenue into essentially L.A.’s Harlem. Moose is disgusted at what he calls “shines” in the bar, and a number of today’s P.C. critics have called Chandler a racist for that – but the racism is in Malloy’s character, not in Chandler’s writing. Not until the third film of Farewell, My Lovely, made in 1975 by director Dick Richards and starring Robert Mitchum about 20 years too late as Marlowe, was this plot point dramatized on screen.)

Though he doesn’t murder the bar’s new owner the way he did in Chandler’s novel (and in The Falcon Takes Over), he certainly pushes his weight around. Marlowe goes to visit Jessie Florian, and finds her a whiskey-soaked wreck. He asks her for information about Velma, including a photo, though unbeknownst to him Jessie palms him off with a picture of someone else. Then, after she throws Marlowe out, she makes a phone call and in Dick Powell’s voice-over narration he tells us that she’d suddenly abandoned the alcoholic haze and was speaking on the phone in a normal, non-drunk voice. After that Marlowe returns to his office and gets a visitor named Lindsay Marriott (Douglas Walton, one of the actors – along with Gavin Gordon – whom Hollywood regularly called out for parts that needed the suggestion of being Gay while nominally abiding by the Production Code prohibition against “sex perversion or any inference of it”), who hires him to accompany him on a payoff to a gang of thieves that stole a priceless necklace of fei tsui jade from Marriott’s “friend,” Helen Grayle (played by Claire Trevor as an out-and-out femme fatale). The payoff is supposed to occur at an out-of-the-way place in front of five fence posts that block any progress, and Marlowe agrees to make the payoff himself while Marriott hides in his car (an Isotta-Fraschini sports model; by the way, Gloria Swanson’s big car in Sunset Boulevard was also an Isotta-Fraschini, albeit a different model). Only Marlowe is knocked out by an unseen assailant wielding a blackjack, and when he comes to Marriott is dead and the payoff money is gone. He’s discovered by a young woman whose characterization is the biggest positive change John Paxton made to Raymond Chandler’s original. In Chandler’s book she’s a totally unrelated character named Anne Riordan; in Paxton’s script, she’s Ann Grayle, daughter of Lewin Lockridge Grayle (Miles Mander), whom Helen married after his first wife, Ann’s mother, presumably died. (We’re not told specifically what happened to her, but classic-era Hollywood was so reluctant at portraying divorce the assumption is that Grayle was a widower when he married Helen.) Obviously Paxton was going for the same bad stepmother/good stepdaughter antagonism that had been so much a part of the film of Double Indemnity, but it also strengthens the plot to have this character be an integral part of the main intrigue rather than someone brought in totally out of left field.

Marlowe reports all this to the police, specifically Lt. Randall (Don Douglas) and Detective Nulty (Ralph Dunn). The cops warn him to stay away from a phony psychic named Jules Amthor (Otto Kruger), so of course Marlowe goes out of his way to look for Amthor – though when he finally visits Amthor he gets knocked out, drugged and dragged to an unlicensed sanitarium run by a Dr. Sonderborg (Ralf Harolde from the Son of Kong cast). Marlowe manages to escape from the sanitarium and make his way back to his familiar environs in L.A., and for the rest of the movie he’s a cat’s-paw between Helen and Ann. It all ends at Lewin Grayle’s beach house (“It’s Manderley!” Charles joked, and I pointed out that Miles Mander indeed had a Hitchcock connection: he’d starred in Hitchcock’s first film as a director, The Pleasure Garden, a British-German co-production shot in Germany in 1925). It turns out that Helen’s jade necklace was never actually stolen and that she was a victim of a blackmail racket run by Amthor and with Marriott as a member. Amthor did unlicensed psychotherapy on his clients, wormed out their darkest secrets, and then used them for blackmail purposes. Moose Malloy shows up and Marlowe warns him to stay outside until he gives him a signal – but Moose breaks in early and realizes that Helen Grayle is really his long-lost Velma. There’s a shoot-out in which Marlowe’s eyeballs are singed and he becomes temporarily blind, and he laconically tells Randall – who’s been interrogating him in the source of Marlowe’s voice-over – “I don’t know who shot whom.” Lewin Grayle actually killed his faithless wife Helen, and she also ended up dead, apparently shot by Moose Malloy as her own bullet was taking him out, too. As Marlowe is led out of the police station and put in a taxi, he reminisces about the nice girl he met in the middle of his adventures and expresses the wish to see her again. In a nice bit of Production Code-envelope pushing he thinks – or pretends to think, since I suspect we’re supposed to believe the scent of Ann’s perfume gives her away – the person in the car with him is the antagonistic Detective Nulty, but it’s really Ann and Marlowe kisses her as the film ends.

Murder, My Sweet is arguably the greatest film noir ever made; Dmytryk’s direction and Paxton’s script are everything they need to be (though Paxton made some regrettable decisions, including leaving out the murder of the bar owner and the character of Laird Burnette, who in Chandler’s book ran a casino on a ship just outside the three-mile limit and therefore at least technically legal), and the movie is perfectly cast. Dick Powell as Marlowe is the best performance any actor gave in the role; he’s even better than Bogart and the two of them are far superior to any actors who’ve played him since. Claire Trevor is properly sexy and icy as the “bad girl,” and Anne Shirley is equally right for the “good girl” even though this was her last film. (She retired to marry Murder, My Sweet’s producer, Adrian Scott, and though their marriage broke up under the strain of Scott’s being one of the “Hollywood 10” targets of the House Un-American Committee’s jihad against alleged Communists in the film industry, she married again to screenwriter Charles Lederer and was happy with him until Lederer’s death.) Mike Mazurki is a striking presence as Moose Malloy even though he was just two inches taller than Dick Powell (Mazurki was 6’ 2’’ and Powell was six feet even), and therefore art director Carroll Clark had to build risers into the sets so Mazurki could tower over Powell (something that wouldn’t have been needed with a shorter actor like Bogart or Alan Ladd in the role). And Miles Mander is a figure of real pathos as Lewin Grayle, who sadly realizes he isn’t going to be able to hold his trophy wife back from affairs with other men: a dramatic contrast from his other 1944 role as the jewel thief Giles Conover in the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce movie Sherlock Holmes and the Pearl of Death. Murder, My Sweet is a marvelous movie that sums up the whole Raymond Chandler mythos in one film.