dir. Edward Dmytryk; starring Dick Powell, Claire Trevor, Anne Shirley
Oy jesus. A brief note. I am fucked on this project. Well, maybe not irrevocably, but I just spent five days in Minnesota to see my newborn baby niece, and well, my plan to still keep watching noirs while there just completely failed. I can't be blamed, little baby girls are the mathematical opposite of noir. They are 1/noir. They are the square root of negative noir. You can't watch noirs when there is a baby related to you that has just barfed all over you but somehow it is funny and adorable. It can't be done.
Anyway, here is the first of a few write-ups from right before the trip, and well I guess I'll be watching like four movies a day for the next couple days.
Murder, My Sweet is a) my first Raymond Chandler/Philip Marlowe film of the month, b) awesome, and c) overwhelming. For the uninitiated, Raymond Chandler was a pulp detective novelist who had a swath of books adapted into films, often and most famously his stories featuring detective Philip Marlowe. Marlowe will turn up at least once more this month when Bogart plays him in The Big Sleep, I can't remember if he pops up in any of the others on my list.
Marlowe stories are pretty much the quintessential noir detective form: defined, distilled, perfected. This jumps us ahead to c) overwhelming. This damn movie is military-grade noir. It's lab-grown, hydroponic noir. This is that shit that your friends tell you “Don't eat the whole thing” but you're all “Damn I can take it I'm no wuss” and you eat the whole thing and then your friends are standing over you in the hospital all “Dogg why did you run into the DMV wearing a cape and motorcycle helmet and nothing else you didn't eat the whole thing did you”
What I'm saying is it's pretty noir.
Now, I'm not saying it's the best noir, or that it's noir-ishness contributes directly to b) awesome. I'm just saying that this is so pure, every noir detective trope and motif and stylistic tic in here. Men lighting cigarettes for men, women drinking booze, flashbacks and backstory, dialogue so thick with double entendre it gets hard to breathe, heavy shadow and light contrast, at one point the shadow Marlowe's name is actually directly cast onto a fedora-wearing brute from his painted office window. You have femme fatales, you have gold-digging femme fatales, you've got hard-assed police who barely tolerate the loose cannon detective, fast patter dialogue, murder, jewels, and three muddled, unrelated (OR ARE THEY???) plotlnes within the first 20 minutes of the film. In one scene, we see a darkened room, and the only way we know someone is in there is by the slowly rising plume of smoke that puffs up from the couch. And even in this hard-boiled cops & robbers story, there is still a psychedelic dream sequence.
What I'm saying is it gets a little claustrophobic.
I will not even pretend to try and summarize the plot. What I will say is, I had totally forgotten that you cannot try and watch a Marlowe movie while also doing other stuff. I was trying to bake a pie and shit during this movie, and I just kept going back and back again because I had no idea what was going on. Of course, this is part of the fun, as even 100% focused attention is going to leave a viewer at the end thinking “buh wuh wait who killed that guy.” The joy is in the twists and turns. You know lovers will betray each other, you know everyone's lying, and you know that you'll be scratching your head at the end. You go along because everyone on screen looks and sounds so good while they're doing it.
I mean, the film is called Murder, My Sweet, for god's sake. This is the one-stop trip for sex and murder, 1944 style. It is awesome, and it is the best single example of stereotypical detective noir I've seen so far this month.
Okay, it's the only example of stereotypical detective noir I've seen so far this month. Shut up.
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