Murder, My Sweet (1944) film notes for SAM Films
Thursday, September 26, 2019
People say what they think in Murder, My Sweet (1944), sometimes with their fists. They think they’ve all got a hand in the disappearance of a dancer named Velma, in the theft of a jade necklace, in a doctor’s blackmail of his wealthy patients, and in the murder of one of the doctor’s associates. Everyone in Murder, My Sweet has a theory, but the one out sleuthing on the streets is Phillip Marlowe (Dick Powell) armed more often than not with only a flashlight. Marlowe rarely does the hitting. His strength is his speech. He strongarms with questions; he uses unconventional methods. Marlowe kisses femme fatale Helen Grayle (Claire Trevor) whose jade necklace, a present from her husband, she claims was stolen. Marlowe kisses good girl Ann Grayle (Anne Shirley) who loves her father despite his choice for a wife.
The women kiss Marlowe back. The men knock him out. Marlowe narrates each time that he loses consciousness, “A black pool opened up at my feet. I dived in. It had no bottom. I felt pretty good. Like an amputated leg.” Marlowe wakes lying next to a car in a canyon outside the city. Inside the car lies Lindsay Marriott (Douglas Waltham) who has something to do with the missing jade necklace. Marlowe is spared. Marriot is murdered.
The characters are closely knit in Murder, My Sweet. Like lamps illuminating portraits in a gallery, their suspicions illuminate one another’s faces.
With Marriott murdered, Lt. Randall steps on the case. He doesn’t like Marlowe anymore than Det. Nulty does. “You’re not a detective, you’re a slot machine,” they tell him. Marlowe doesn’t work for the city; they do. Marlowe kisses the dolls and the dames. They get their kisses from the D.A.
They’re all in it up to their eyebrows. Jules Amthor (Otto Kruger) the blackmailing doctor, thinks Marlowe knows the whereabouts of the jade necklace. When he won’t talk, Amthor answers with Moose Malloy’s (Mike Mazurki) hands around Marlowe’s neck. Marlowe is put to sleep a second time, “The black pool opened up at my feet again. And I dived in. The next thing I know I was going somewhere. It was not my idea.” Marlowe drugged, is locked up in a room. He dreams of a long hallway with doors he can’t open; a man chasing him with a syringe walks right through them. “The doors are too small. The stairs are made of dough,” Marlowe tells Amthor’s strongmen.
Marlowe breaks out and gets himself to Ann’s apartment. He tells her he likes her crooked nose. Her eyebrows are thin and drawn in pencil. She’ll make him eggs and coffee, scotch and soda. “You know I think you’re nuts,” Ann says to Marlowe as they sit on her couch.
Ann has her own thoughts about men and women, about her father marrying Helen a woman much younger than himself. Ann tells Marlowe, “Sometimes I hate men. All men. Old men. Young men.” Her father isn’t in the room to hear, but Helen is. She laughs at Ann; she comes out from her hiding place behind the curtains. “That was only the first half of the speech,” Ann continues. Marlowe stands aside. “The rest of it goes like this, I hate their women too. Especially the big league blondes. Beautiful, expensive babes who know what they’ve got. All bubble bath and dewy mornings and moonlight. And inside, blue steel, cold. Cold but not that clean,” Ann leaves. Helen stays.
The case is close to being cracked. The jade necklace was never stolen. Velma, the disappearing dancer, was living among them all along. A couple more murders occur to wrap up the first. Marlowe gets knocked under one last time, “That old black pit opened up again. Right on schedule. It was blacker than the others, deeper. I didn’t expect to hit bottom. I thought I was full of lead. That’s all I know.”
Marlowe, in all his cinematic iterations, works alone and is not afraid. His conversation is not the kind picked up and spread around like news of a party at the company water cooler. Murder, My Sweet, like a round robin, begins and ends with Marlowe in the same place, blindfolded, at the police station. “I just found out all over again how big this city is,” Marlowe recalls the night he got involved with Lindsay Marriot, the Grayles, Moose Malloy and Jules Amthor. “My feet hurt and my mind felt like a plumber’s handkerchief. The office bottle hadn’t sparked me up so I’d taken out my little black book and decided to go grouse hunting. Nothing like soft shoulders to improve my morale.” Marlowe never loses himself to a man or a woman or a case. “There’s something about the dead silence of an office building at night. Not quite real. The traffic below was something that didn’t have anything to do with me.” With a cigarette and without his sight, Marlowe coolly explains.