Knowing Noir: Murder, My Sweet

This is the sixth in my 2021 series watching notable film noirs.

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. 

Perfect pauses: Luca and Murder, My Sweet

Haven't done one of these Perfect Pauses pieces in a while, so I figured, I might as well get in a twofer.

Of course, to do a twofer, you actually have to have two perfect pauses in the same evening, which I did Monday night.

The premise of this "series" -- which has had exactly five previous entries over nearly ten years -- is that when I pause a movie at a totally unpremeditated moment, and it captures a perfect frozen snapshot of some kind of sudden action or other fortuitous story moment, I consider that sufficient inspiration to write about it here. I think you can see what makes this one good, but let's get to that in a moment.

We got to our Luca viewing at the end of our first full day on holiday this week, after a lot of toing and froing about what night was actually best to project it on the wall of our holiday house. It was about 7:30 before we got started -- an hour later than we'd ideally like, so as to get our kids to bed at a reasonable hour -- but it did in fact work out best for the schedule, considering also our dinner options in the small town here where we're staying. Most of those places are dark Monday night, so eating frozen pizzas in front of a movie was the way to go. And I'd been planning to write about this screening here anyway, so now I can let this post take care of business.

The pause came during one of our many interruptions, to do things like check on the pizza and go to the bathroom. In this case I believe it was fetching ice cream. 

In any case, I think you can see why I considered it to be such a good pause. Giulia (left) is throwing a glass of water at Luca (right), and though I didn't know the actual reason she decided to do this -- I was distracted in the few moments before the pause, while working my way over to my computer to pause it -- I did know the consequences would be significant for Luca. Like Madison in Splash before him, Luca turns into his underwater form (a sea monster) when he's doused with water, and Giulia has never seen that form.

As it turns out, it wasn't quite as big a moment in the narrative as I thought it would be -- Giulia is the only one who sees the transformed Luca, and she's almost preternaturally accepting of the fact that he's a sea monster. But the pause is still great, as it catches the water in the air and Luca's hands up defending himself. In a way, it's like the final millisecond of innocence. 

Before we get to our second Perfect Pause, I'll spare a few moments to close the loop on the Luca viewing that I first mentioned in this post. 

As you will recall, my seven-year-old was inconsolable when it turned out he watched the first hour of a movie I had been saving as a surprise for this trip. I'm glad to say this did not impact the viewing whatsoever. In fact, I think he got a certain thrill from knowing certain things about the movie before we did. However, he was also really good about not saying "Oh, I love this part" or "This is the part when ..." In fact, I could see him actively resisting the urge -- a real sign of his budding maturity.

And here's a picture of him putting a smile on Luca's face:

After we finished Luca and shuffled them off to bed -- having to call them back once for a little post-credits sequence -- I left the projector up to watch my June installment of Knowing Noir. You'll get a full post on Murder, My Sweet tomorrow, so I'll only include the Perfect Pause here:

Nothing remarkable about what was going on on screen, of course. But if you look down in the lower left corner of the screen, you'll see something pretty remarkable indeed:

So yeah, when I had to pause this movie to get a Mini Coke from the fridge (I was pretty tired at this point), I happened to stop it on exactly the one-hour mark, down to the second. 

Did I time it? I might have if this were playing on my DVD player, where you can see the timecode running as you watch. I've actually been known to time a pause to an exact time landmark just for the fun of it. 

But in this situation, on an iTunes rental, the amount of time passed/remaining is not even visible until you actually press pause, at which point it jumps up on the screen. 

It puts one in mind of The Great Last Days in the Desert Pause of 2016, when I made an unpremeditated pause that exactly bifurcated the movie -- 49 minutes and 12 seconds on one side of the movie, 49 minutes and 12 seconds on the other. (Or whatever the case was. It's a 98-minute movie, in any case.) 

For some reason, I guess I did not see it fit to write about that. 

After a night of such twin perfection, I slept well.