The boys tell me I did a couple of murders. Anything in it?
I've spent the past couple weeks reading Raymond Chandler's first few Philip Marlowe novels, so before I forge on with the rest (and their plots start to run together) I figured I would take a second look at a couple of the film adaptations they spawned. The first Chandler novel to make it to the big screen was his second, Farewell, My Lovely, which was turned into a vehicle for George Sanders's high-society detective in 1942's The Falcon Takes Over and then remade two years later as Murder, My Sweet with Dick Powell as the first screen Marlowe. Despite the name change the film, which was directed by Edward Dmytryk, was much more faithful to the novel, even if it did sanitize some aspects of the story, which was also streamlined and simplified during the transition from the page to the screen.
Powell might not have been most people's idea of a hard-boiled detective (at the time he was best known for his roles in musicals and light comedies), but he comes off reasonably well as he negotiates a pair of tricky, interrelated cases. The first is for bruiser Mike Mazurki, who's spent eight years behind bars and is looking for the dame who's supposed to be waiting for him. The other involves the theft of a jade necklace belonging to trophy wife Claire Trevor, whose stepdaughter Anne Shirley can't decide whether she wants to help Powell or get him out of their lives. The film also features Otto Kruger as a phony spiritualist whose part was beefed up for the pictures because movies are much less forgiving than novels when it comes to sending their main characters down blind alleys.
Of course, there are times when 1946's The Big Sleep, which was directed by Howard Hawks and based on Chandler's first novel, seems to be all about sending Marlowe (indelibly played Humphrey Bogart) down blind alleys, but that's part and parcel of the film's unrelenting pace. The second screen pairing of Bogart and Lauren Bacall (whose part was expanded during re-shoots in an attempt to replicate the chemistry they had displayed in 1944's To Have and Have Not, also directed by Hawks), The Big Sleep is the definitive Chandler adaptation, thanks in no small part to Bogart's commanding performance. (Maybe it's because he had already aced the role of Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, but stick the guy in a trench coat and give him a convoluted mystery to solve and he's just dynamite.) He also has some terrific support from the likes of Martha Vickers (as Bacall's much wilder younger sister) and Elisha Cook Jr. (as an information peddler who's in way over his head). This is one of those classics that gets better (not the mention easier to follow) every time you see it.