The Falcon Takes Over (RKO, 1942)

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

After my husband Charles and I watched Murder, My Sweet I dug through the DVD backlog to find the two boxed sets I ordered a while back containing all 13 of the RKO Falcon-series films because I wanted to watch the 1942 film The Falcon Takes Over. I’d already posted on this at https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2021/04/the-falcon-takes-over-rko-1942.html, but though I’ve loved both films for years I never ran them back-to-back until last night (Wednesday, January 7). The Falcon Takes Over was part of Raymond Chandler’s odd relationship with the movie industry; though he’d lived in Los Angeles for decades, first as an oil executive and then as a pulp writer, he was naïve about the film business and so for his first two movie sales, Farewell, My Lovely and The High Window, he accepted low-ball offers from studios who wanted his plots for established “B” detective series featuring other sleuths instead of Philip Marlowe. The High Window ended up at 20th Century-Fox, who made a quite good “B” adaptation called Time to Kill as their seventh and last film featuring Michael Shayne (it’s actually better than Fox’s Marlowe-ized remake, 1947’s The Brasher Doubloon), while RKO bought Farewell, My Lovely for use as the third film in their “Falcon” series. The Falcon, t/n Gaylord Lawrence, was a high-society sleuth created by Michael Arlen, and when the studio had a rights dispute with Leslie Charteris, creator of Simon Templar a.k.a. “The Saint,” they bought the rights to Arlen’s The Gay Falcon and simply changed the lead character of their “B” detective films from The Saint to The Falcon. They even used the same actor, George Sanders, to play him (superbly). The last time I wrote about The Falcon Takes Over I called it “a schizoid movie, half camp comedy-mystery and half film noir,” though ironically viewed right after Murder, My Sweet it looked less campy and more noir than it had before.

As I noted in my comments on Murder, My Sweet, The Falcon Takes Over’s screenwriters, Frank Fenton and Lynn Root, actually kept a couple of key plot elements from Chandler’s novel that Murder, My Sweet’s writer, John Paxton, bypassed. The opening scene takes place at the posh “13 Club,” which currently occupies the space that was formerly the dive bar Florian’s, and Moose Malloy (Ward Bond, a surprising choice given that he was usually the antagonistic police officer giving a hard time to the hard-boiled private eye or woman reporter who would ultimately solve his case for him) literally slams his way into the club. Met at the door by the usual supercilious waiters who insist that he can’t come into the club without formal evening wear, Malloy just literally knocks them to the ground and pushes his way to the office of its owner, Mr. Montgomery (Warren Jackson), killing him by breaking his neck after he insists he has no idea where his precious Velma is. (He survives Malloy’s attack in Murder, My Sweet but gets killed again in the third film of this story, 1975’s Farewell, My Lovely.) In this version Malloy is an escaped convict; he went up on a 20-year sentence but broke out with 15 years left to go, and as soon as he kills Montgomery he car-jacks the car being driven by The Falcon’s assistant, Jonathan “Goldy” Locke (Allen Jenkins), and forces him to drive Moose to the address of Jessie Florian (Anne Revere, the superb villainess of the 1941 movie The Devil Commands, directed by Murder, My Sweet director Edward Dmytryk and co-starring Boris Karloff as a widower who mounts an increasingly deranged series of electromechanical experiments to attempt to communicate with the spirit of his dead wife). In this version Jessie is sober (or relatively so) from the get-go, and when the next major character enters the action, he’s called “Quincey Marriot” instead of “Lindsay Marriott” and is played by Hans Conried as a butch male without even the hints of queeniness that attached to Douglas Walton in Murder, My Sweet. (In the 1975 version, John O’Leary played Marriott as a total screaming queen.)

The equivalent to Helen Grayle nèe Velma in this version is socialite Diana Kenyon (Helen Gilbert), who was alas outfitted with a pretty unbelievable blonde wig by RKO’s hairdresser. She’s hardly in the same femme fatale league as Claire Trevor, but The Falcon Takes Over’s producer, Howard Benedict (who would shortly decamp to Universal and take charge of the Basil Rathbone/Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes movies), deserves credit for casting young, hunky Egyptian-American actor Turhan Bey as Jules Amthor. (Turhan Bey escaped the usual typecasting of actors of color; though it’s a lousy movie overall, I like the 1943 Universal horror film The Mad Ghoul for casting David Bruce as the title character and making Bey the romantic lead.) In this version, instead of going himself, Gay “The Falcon” Lawrence sends Goldy Locke to check out Amthor’s racket, and when he’s knocked out and then comes to both Amthor and his associate are dead. The best aspects of The Falcon Takes Over are George Sanders’s performance (“Some of Philip Marlowe’s integrity even seemed to rub off on the superficial Falcon,” William K. Everson wrote in his book The Detective in Film) and George Robinson’s cinematography. Robinson is best known for his work at Universal, particularly as a horror specialist, and the Root/Fenton script for The Falcon Takes Over gives him a lot of scenes in graveyards and out-of-the-way night exteriors to play with; indeed, much of his work in The Falcon Takes Over rivals Harry J. Wild’s in Murder, My Sweet for sheer noir atmospherics. Like Benedict, Robinson spent most of his career at Universal, and just how he got involved in an RKO film is a bit of a mystery. I’ve long had an affection for The Falcon Takes Over even though it’s hardly at the level of Murder, My Sweet (but then one wouldn’t expect it to be!), and it’s a worthwhile movie whose story source by Raymond Chandler easily makes it the best of RKO’s 13 “Falcon” films.