Farewell, My Lovely had already been filmed by RKO as The Falcon Takes Over, but the studio decided to make another version a few years later when crooner Dick Powell wanted to play Philip Marlowe to change his image. (They changed the title of the novel out of fear that audiences might think Farewell My Lovely was a musical.)
It’s crisp, strong film noir filmmaking. It starts memorably with a blinded Marlowe being interrogated by cops. Marlowe gets called in three cases: a search for Velma by Moose Malloy, a blackmail attempt that ends in murder, and a search for a necklace. They all connect, and incorporate various shady types and slinky dames; Marlowe gets knocked out and interrogated by police several times, flirts with and slaps around women, drinks liquor and eventually figures out what’s going on. I admit that occasionally I found it dragged – I get that way with a lot of detective movies, there comes a point around the two-thirds mark when it feels just the scenes are just scenes with more character actors or something. But overall I liked this a lot.
The cinematography isn’t as “dark” as later noirs, but there is an utterly trippy dream sequence which results in Marlowe waking up in an institution, worthy of Spellbound. (Powell gets the chance to act a bit crazy here, which actors playing private eyes didn’t get to do that often, and he does quite well. Come to think of it, he also gets knocked out a few times and is temporarily blinded at the end – a very human detective.) There’s a cute ending where Powell can’t see but the female love interest can and won’t tell him.
The support cast includes Claire Trevor (main femme fetale), Anne Shirley (who I think was married to producer Adrian Scott, one of the Hollywood Ten), Otto Kruger, Mike Mazurki and Miles Mander (who always seems to pop up in the old movies I’ve been watching lately). Marlowe at one stage says “a cancer doesn’t stop just because you ask it to” – Powell died of cancer. Sniff.
Good script by John Paxton and excellent direction by Edward Dmytryk. RKO weren’t the best Hollywood studio by a long shot, but they had few equals when it came to turning out B pictures (or, more accurately in this case, A2 pictures).
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