Murder, My Sweet (1945)

Murder, My Sweet
Dir. Edward Dmytryk. RKO Radio Pictures, 1945.

Actor Dick Powell

            Powell began his career at age 17 as a singer with his own band, then toured with other bands through the 1920s. He began acting in 1932 and landed a contract with Warner Brothers, shooting several musicals in which he starred as the romantic male lead. Working regularly with director Busby Berkeley, he crooned and hoofed his way through such hits as Dames (1934), The Gold Diggers of 1935 (1935), Stage Struck (1936), The Gold Diggers of 1937 (1936), and Hollywood Hotel (1937). In the early 1940s, Powell tried to switch over to dramatic roles and leave behind his clean-scrubbed, cheerful boy-next-door persona (Unterburger). He did that no more successfully than with RKO Pictures in Murder, My Sweet, where he played rumpled, smart-mouthed, beat-up detective Philip Marlowe, whose tough perseverance went beyond any loyalty to client or any financial reward. He became a tough professional, opposed to both cops and criminals. He repeated this macho type of role in Cornered (1945) and in Pitfall (1948), where he played a bored family man, seduced into the margins of criminality by an exciting, dangerous woman, outside of his routine insurance-executive life. In the 1950s, Powell made a successful transition to television by forming Four Star Productions with Charles Boyer, Ida Lupino, and David Niven. In this company, he played the key roles of actor in the series Four Star Playhouse (1952-56), host of Dick Powell’s Zane Grey Theatre (1956-61) and of The Dick Powell Show (1961-63); and producer of such hits as The Rifleman and Wanted—Dead or Alive (Unterburger).

Director Edward Dmytryk

            Starting his career as a handy boy at Famous Players-Lasky Studio in 1923, he graduated to film-cutting and then editing. He began directing, mostly adventure pics, in 1935 for Columbia, then started doing B-grade mysteries with The Falcon Strikes Back in 1943 for RKO, and finally hit the high-budget or A-films with Murder, My Sweet the following year. He continued a string of successful, hard-hitting action films-noirs with Cornered (1945), an international post-war manhunt story, and Crossfire (1947), a compelling study of anti-Semitism in the guise of a mystery. In 1947, Dmytryk was subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee, but he fled to England, where he was extradited. In 1950, he was sentenced to six months of prison, after which he appeared before the Committee as a friendly witness and became the only one of the “Hollywood 10” to name names of supposed Communist sympathizers in the industry. Returning to Hollywood, he directed a number of psychological dramas, such as The Caine Mutiny (1954); Westerns, such as Broken Lance (1954) and Warlock (1959); and action dramas, such as Alvarez Kelly (1966). His later films, into the mid-1970s, suffered from poor scripting and inadequate character development. After teaching filmmaking at the Universities of Texas (1978) and Southern California (beginning in 1981), he turned to writing cinema textbooks (Hillstrom).

            Many of his films seem to reveal a naïve faith in the common man, “a deep reverence for American ideals” and optimism toward the goodness of human nature that “defuses dramatic conflict.” Murder, My Sweet must be considered an exception to this trend with its deep-seated cynicism about social corruption. Nonetheless, “his characters strive to find and affirm a sense of personal dignity, whatever the odds” (Hillstrom 259).

Tonight’s Feature

            In late 1944, the film was first released as Farewell, My Lovely—the original Raymond Chandler novel title—in Minneapolis, where the audience expected to see Dick Powell crooning again. RKO Pictures was aware that musicals were declining in popularity in the 1940’s and audiences conditioned by war were prepared for a more hard-hitting, dramatic cinema. Moreover, studio execs were convinced by Dick Powell that he could make the shift from fluffy musicals to hard-boiled roles. So after the film initially flopped, in March of 1945 the studio re-released the film in New York as Murder, My Sweet so there would be no ambiguity about the plotline or tone. True to the novel, director Dmytryk achieved a powerful cinematic translation of Chandler’s cynical viewpoint on upper-class corruption, depicted as sharing the vices of skid-row while glossing them over with fancy clothes and well-appointed mansions.

Dmytryk, who had learned from improvising around the low budgets of the B-films where he got his start, applied innovative techniques of camera-work and lighting to this gritty, violent noir mystery. “The disorienting angles, low-key and high-contrast lighting. . . , and the private eye’s blindness in the first scenes point to a disordered and ominous world beyond control” (Silver and Ward 192). True to the developing stylistics of the early film noir period, the film’s narrative is contained by the fixed limits of flashback as Marlowe tells his story, fully knowing the outcome, by reflection and wry commentary, even though the action is often swift and apparently random. Expressionist effects are achieved in an early scene when flashing lights first hide and then reveal the ugly mug of Marlowe’s first client, fighter Moose Malloy. Such effects later create surreal images and symbols, especially in the fearful dream scenes when Marlowe has been drugged by a shady doctor who incarcerates relatives of the rich and scheming. In a violent finale where the deceptions of the past are revealed, the original mystery is solved, but Marlowe’s clients do not survive the revelation. In fact, the only truth seems to be the detective’s well-founded paranoia toward the menacing environment of an unreal city, with its cavalcade of perverse and grotesque characters (Silver and Ward).

Works Cited

Hillstrom, Laurie Collier, ed. International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, Volume 2:

Directors. 3rd ed. Detroit: St. James Press, 1997.

Silver, Alain, and Elizabeth Ward, eds. Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American

Style. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1992.

Unterburger, Amy, ed. International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, Volume 3, Actors and

Actresses. 3rd ed. Detroit: St. James Press, 1997.

Upcoming Features in the "Detective & Crime Movies" Film Series, Fall 2001:

Oct. 26             Brighton Rock (Boulting, 1947), with Richard Attenborough

Nov. 2               The List of Adrian Messenger (Huston, 1963), with George C. Scott

Nov. 9               Blow-up (Antonioni, 1966), with David Hemmings, Vanessa Redgrave

Nov. 16             The Usual Suspects (Singer, 1995), with Kevin Spacey

Handout prepared by Greg Lyons
for the Fall 2001 "Detective & Crime Movies" Film Series,
organized by Greg Lyons, with the support of
COCC Humanities Dept. & Westside Video (Bend, OR)

Related Links

All-Movie Guide. All Media Guide, AEC One Stop Group, Inc., 1992-2002.
Search by Title, Person, or Keyword: http://allmovie.com/
...Murder, My Sweet
URL: http://allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=A33849
...Edward Dmytryk: Director, Editor
URL: http://allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=B87908
...Dick Powell: Actor
URL: http://allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=B106959

Murder, My Sweet (1944) Internet Movie Database - IMDb.com, 1990-2002.
URL: http://us.imdb.com/Title?0037101
...External Reviews of Murder, My Sweet (1944)
URL: http://us.imdb.com/TUrls?COM+0037101
...Dick Powell
URL: http://us.imdb.com/Name?Powell,+Dick
...Edward Dmytryk
URL: http://us.imdb.com/Name?Dmytryk,+Edward

Available online handouts for films shown in Fall 2001 "Detective & Crime Movie" Series:
Brighton Rock (1947). Dir. John Boulting.
URL: http://www.cocc.edu/humanities/HIR/Film/brightonrock.htm
The Kennel Murder Case (1933). Dir. Michael Curtiz.
URL: http://www.cocc.edu/humanities/HIR/Film/kennelmurdercase.htm
Murder, My Sweet (1945). Dir. Edward Dmytryck.
URL: http://www.cocc.edu/humanities/HIR/Film/murdermysweet.htm
The Usual Suspects (1995). Dir. Bryan Singer.
URL: http://www.cocc.edu/humanities/HIR/Film/usualsuspects.htm

See also Popular Culture Video List (2000).
Detective | Science fiction | Travel | Film noir | Spy thriller | Western
Greg Lyons, comp. COCC Library & Humanities Dept. video holdings, 2000.
URL: http://www.cocc.edu/humanities/courses/film/popculture.html

Return to Film Studies - Index of Online Resources
URL: http://www.cocc.edu/humanities/HIR/Film/index.htm

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Last updated: 26 May 2003
Cora Agatucci ~ E-Mail: cagatucci@cocc.edu
Copyright © 2002-2003, Greg Lyons
Humanities Department, Central Oregon Community College