Now here is a Noir with a capital N.
After two of my favorite movies of this series (Gaslight and The Hitch-Hiker) were only questionable inclusions under the noir umbrella, and some of the more clear-cut examples didn't really do it for me (such as D.O.A.), I determined I needed some more definite specimens of the genre to get this series back on track in terms of its mission statement: to help me determine what I think of noir as a genre.
(Talk amongst yourselves. I'll give you a topic: Noir is not a genre, but rather a style. Discuss.)
I had hoped to do that with what seemed like quintessential noir: 1955's Kiss Me Deadly, directed by Robert Aldrich. But just because something is a quintessential example of a genre (or a style) does not necessarily make it readily available, and for the life of me, I could not source Kiss Me Deadly. Hopefully that will change before the end of the year.
So in June, I pivoted to 1944's Murder, My Sweet, directed by Edward Dmytryk, not realizing that it's noir to the nth degree: It's actually the first film appearance of Raymond Chandler's famed detective Philip Marlowe. And Chandler pretty much invented film noir, even while not straying outside the pages of a novel.
The novel in question was 1940's Farewell, My Lovely, which I think is also a movie. (Yep, 1975, starring Robert Mitchum.) I now see on Wikipedia that Murder, My Sweet actually went by the name of the novel in the U.K. (which means probably also here in Australia), but since I'm U.S.-centric and I rented this from U.S. iTunes, there's no question of what I will call it here.
Murder, My Sweet predated Humphrey Bogart's first appearance as Marlowe by two years, making it particularly appropriate for this series, as Bogart himself is intrinsically intertwined in the mission statement of Knowing Noir.
In fact, since I've now seen Bogart as Marlowe twice (The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon), I was a bit taken aback to see Dick Powell playing the role, as he seemed too clean-cut for my tastes (even while using the same rapid-fire, quippy dialogue that characterizes Marlowe). Of course, checking into it now, I see that Falcon is actually a Dashiell Hammett novel and Bogart plays Sam Spade, but honestly -- what's the difference between Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, really, or between Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade? (Purists would likely kill me.)
In any case, it doesn't change the fact that whatever I thought of Bogart, he set the template for this hard-boiled detective in my mind, and Powell did not seem grizzled enough by comparison. Still, I ended up liking his performance more than I like those of Bogart, which continues to put Bogart behind the 8 ball in terms of ultimately converting me. (Incidentally, Powell was a very familiar name, but do you know how many of his other movies I've seen? Zero.)
Wikipedia also clearly credits Murder, My Sweet as being one of the first film noirs (along with Double Indemnity, which I have grown to really love) and crucial in the development of the genre, so it's clearly where I should have started this series rather than waiting until June to get to it.
But because I find Chandler's novels so densely plotted and serpentine -- not from reading any, only from seeing them adapted on screen -- I had a similar experience with this as I did with The Big Sleep, which is kind of my poster boy for why I think I don't like film noir. In a film like this, if you miss one character name or one connection of that character to another character at the start of the film, you're never going to recover. And so it was with Murder, My Sweet, which I watched mostly in ignorance of what was actually happening, leaving my only outlet for comprehending it in retrospect to read the Wikipedia plot synopsis after I was finished.
Okay, I've just done that. It really didn't help. Though I can see why I was disoriented from near the start, and it wasn't just because I was on my second movie of the night, and clearly not at my most mentally acute. The story appears to have three different branches that come together over the course of the narrative, but when each one is introduced (in that most classic of noir tropes, a prospective customer arriving at the private dick's office), it seems unrelated to the previous one, and therefore, a sort of narrative error rather than part of a premeditated structure. That brought the "Now who's this guy again?" factor, which was already going to be present anyway, up to 11. To get any of the obligatory references to the plot in a piece like this out of the way, I'll just say that it involves finding a lost woman, recovering a missing jade necklace, jealousy, and multiple murders and schemes to murder someone that may or may not come to fruition. (Hence, the title.)
Being lost in the plot should have been a surefire recipe for disaster, as it was with The Big Sleep, but in this case I got past it, because the other noir elements were so strong, and adhered so strongly to the dictionary definition of the genre (or style). In fact, I made reams of notes, including a series of quotes, mostly spoken by Marlowe in either dialogue or voiceover, that seemed part and parcel to what we now think of as noir. Namely:
"There's something about the dead silence of an office building at night."
"The joint looked like trouble, but that didn't bother me."
"A black pool opened under my feet, with no bottom. I dived in."
"There are a lot of things about this I don't know. Some things I'll never know." (How true! Ha ha)
And finishing with an exchange between Marlowe and Anne Shirley's Ann Grayle:
"I don't think you know what side you're on."
"I don't know what side anybody's on. I don't even know who's playing today."
Those last two moments were great encapsulations of what it feels like to be lost within the plot of a movie -- as lost as the movie's protagonist, apparently -- but let's use that "black pool" quote as a transition to something else I want to talk about.
In that quote he's referring to the moment when unconsciousness arrives, and that gets at one of the noir tropes I enjoy the most -- the fact that the noir protagonist (usually a private eye) is always getting beat up. Marlowe sinks into the "black pool" at least three times in this movie, the last of which involves a gun flash right next to his eyes that temporarily blinds him. You aren't really a private eye unless you emerge from the experience bloodied and bruised from multiple skirmishes, most of which you lost badly, and most of which were the result of your inquisitive nature, your failure to show proper fear of a massive hoodlum towering over you, and your acerbic wit. Marlowe also spends three days alternating between mania and catatonia in a sanitorium after being drugged by one of his adversaries, as an early twist on the detective-getting-beat-up trope.
What's more, Dmytryk includes an on-screen graphic with these "dark pool" moments, where we see the screen being sort of covered by an encroaching black tar that eventually fills the whole screen. (But one whose viscosity is a bit thinner, so it can move quickly.) This was just one of the film's visual effects that I appreciated, which I frankly did not expect in a film made in 1944 -- and one of the first of its kind. In his frequent moments between states of consciousness, Marlowe has a couple dream sequences that feature superimposed imagery and hallucinatory moments like a series of imaginary doors leading off into oblivion. There's a time when he feels in a thick fog and likens it to the world being covered by a spider web, and the screen has such a spider web filter over the images.
I'm starting to go a bit long on Murder, My Sweet, but so as not to shortchange any of my notes, I'll finish with a few rapid-fire noir moments that I appreciated:
- Marlowe opens and closes the story by being interrogated under the hot lights by the police. That's both a classic noir moment and a classic noir narrative framing device, with the core story told in flashback, as part of a "confession" of sorts.
- There are a lot of shadows/silhouettes of men wearing fedoras.
- The film has not one, but two characters who could potentially function as a femme fatale -- the aforementioned Ann Grayle and Helen Grayle, played by Claire Trevor.
- Marlowe wears a wife-beater undershirt at one point.
- There are slatted doors, though no venetian blinds that I noticed.
Powell obviously didn't continue as Marlowe, as Bogart took up the role next. I'm not sure why that is, but I won't look into it because I've already done enough research for this piece. (You know I hate research!) I will say that iTunes, in its little write-up about the movie, described Powell's casting as "controversial at the time." I really should look into that, but frankly, I've got to get on to other things in my day.
I'll try to keep up with the more prototypical noirs in July, with Kansas City Confidential and Laura among my options.
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