Movie Night With Urbaniak: Murder, My Sweet

Murder, My Sweet is a 1944 adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely. Why is it called Murder, My Sweet instead of Farewell, My Lovely? Well, because RKO Pictures was worried that, with a title like Farewell, My Lovely people might think it was a musical. Why on earth did they think a silly thing like that? Because they made the bone-head mistake of casting fading musical-star Dick Powell as Phillip Marlowe.

This would have been a smashing, head-turning coup if Powell had suddenly transformed himself from affable, aw-shucks boy-next-door into a complex, weary, haunted detective. It would have made Dick Powell the John Travolta of his day, suddenly going from over-the-hill lightweight to crime-movie superstar.

But Powell has nothing going on inside his head. As Urbaniak notes, he’s incapable of simply doing something, he must physically “announce” that he’s about to do something, then advertise that he’s doing it, then congratulate himself for doing it. He doesn’t get angry, he “looks angry.” He doesn’t get rough with a dame, he performs the action of “getting rough with a dame.” He is such a dead-end in terms of inhabiting the character that we ended up spending much of the movie trying to imagine the circumstances under which he got the part. One scenario we came up with was that the director, the capable and efficient Edward Dmytryk, signed on thinking perhaps that Marlowe was being played by William Powell. “Hmm, yes, Bill Powell, that could work, yes,” mused Urbaniak in his best imitation of Dmytryk.

It’s a shame because the script is really good, bristling with all the twists and turns and vivid imagery we expect from the melancholy poetry of Chandler, the direction is crisp and clean, and most of the rest of the casting is wonderful, including Claire Trevor (the Virginia Madsen of her day), Otto Kruger (who would have made a great Bond Villain in another time) and Mike Mazurki (the Big Lug of his time). All these people play their scene effortlessly and with great wit and panache (required tools for Chandler).

Butfor us, a lot of the movie was spent trying to think of who the Dick Powell of today is. It’s a harder task than you might imagine — there isn’t room in today’s movie culture for affable, lightweight leading men. Urbaniak suggested Anson Williams at one point as a possibility, and I countered with Judge Reinhold, but that’s about as close as we could come. Stumped, I moved on to trying to figure out who, today, would be worse casting than Dick Powell in the role of Marlowe. Rick Moranis got a vote, as did Ray Romano and Tim Allen.

PS: One nice thing about watching a Raymond Chandler adaptation on DVD is that you can pause it whenever you want and try to figure out who the hell everyone is and what they’re talking about and who’s fooling whom and what who knows why.

RECOMMENDED: watching a whole bunch of Chandler adaptations and then watching The Big Lebowski. Many of the characters, sets and plot-points of Murder, My Sweet turn up in skewered, inside-out or upside-down versions in Lebowski and watching them in close proximity will help illustrate just how funny and inventive the latter movie is.

NOIR MOVIE NEWS: Urbaniak and I watched Chinatown a few nights ago, and the next night I happened to go see the new In the Valley of Elah. The movie is good but I couldn’t help notice that, somewhere in Act III, detective Charlize Theron gets her nose injured and spends about twenty minutes of the movie with a band-aid across it. The nod to Chinatown seemed too obvious to be a coincidence, but I had to wonder, was the band-aid put in as a joke by writer-director Paul Haggis, or did Charlize Theron insist on getting her face damaged in order to help sell her as a tough detective?