Murder, My Sweet

            Tonight we begin a mammoth 18-week series devoted to Hollywood film noir. These are films from the 1940s and 50s, examples of the original film noir movement which later became so influential and has left such a visible mark on a lot of current film and television. This week our movie is one of the earliest full-blown examples of the form, Murder, My Sweet—a 1944 RKO project adapted from a novel by Raymond Chandler and starring Dick Powell as Chandler’s famous private detective Philip Marlowe.

            I guess we’d better start with the question “What is film noir?”—though the answer to that question is so complex that a shelf-full of books has been written about it and there’s still widespread disagreement on the topic. But here’s the quickest, simplest answer. Film noir describes a range of crime films of different kinds—detective movies, cop movies, thrillers, other related types—made between roughly the mid-1940s and the mid-1950s. These films are characterized by a moody and pessimistic atmosphere, stories that are far less upbeat than usual and often show disorientation and desperation on the part of their central characters. They also many times display a distinct visual style, dominated by shadows and aggressive photographic compositions.

            There are a host of difficulties and anomalies that come with the phenomenon of film noir, and I’ll give you a couple of examples. Why wasn’t film noir recognized at all by American critics and audiences at the time? Is film noir a genre—that is, a type of story—or is it a style? and can you have noir westerns and noir women’s pictures? Why did such gloomy and despairing movies show up just at a time when things were getting much better in American society—after the Depression, and after it became clear the war was won, or after it actually was won and the United States was the most powerful and prosperous nation on the planet? Where did the noir style come from, and why was there such a big time gap between its cinematic and literary ancestors—like German Expressionism and hard-boiled pulp novels—and the arrival of noir films themselves? Then, to what extent do the twisted and anguished stories of film noir undermine and subvert official values and American ideology in general? And that’s just a sample of the problems surrounding film noir as a historical and aesthetic phenomenon. Even over 18 weeks of detailed commentary on individual films we won’t be getting to the bottom of those questions. But I hope that by the end of our series viewers who are tuning in on a regular basis will at least have a more detailed and complex understanding of what film noir is.

            Everybody loves film noir. Certainly critics and scholars love it, film buffs love it, and the recent generations of film and TV directors who have been to film school love it, and try to replicate aspects of it in their work. Looking at movies from Blade Runner to Seven and TV programs from Miami Vice to The X-Files you can see the indelible imprint of film noir: shadows and decay, a moody atmosphere of suppressed violence, a spectacle of physical and moral ugliness overlaid by a slick and beautiful style.

            The movie we’re going to look at in a minute, Murder, My Sweet, is a particularly fine example of this style. It’s a movie with a lot of virtues, but the most striking single one in my view is the way it looks. Like arguably every single example of original film noir, of course it’s in black-and-white—what MGM/UA likes to call on their video reissue boxes “glorious black-and-white.” Watching the best examples of noir photography is almost enough to make you regret the arrival of colour. And noir photography is really black and white—it’s a whole visual universe that’s just not available to colour. Enveloping shadows, pools of light, silhouetted and backlit shots, striking compositions where everything depends on the contrasts of light and shade—these are essential features of the noir photographic style as seen in Murder, My Sweet. The very first shot in the movie hits you in the face with a glaring spotlight in a dark room. The hero Marlowe is being questioned by the cops, cops who lurk in the darkness and cast expressionist shadows on the walls. Marlowe himself, in a totally noir touch, has his eyes bandaged, he can’t see anything. The whole scene is immediately dreamlike and disorienting, and it ushers in a movie that’s full of subjective viewpoints which may or may not be true or accurate, and of disorientation and dreamlike shifts of time and space. Practically the whole movie takes place at night, and as it traverses dark streets and underilluminated offices, nightclubs and beach houses, it really puts the noir in film noir. Then the detective is sapped and drugged, beaten up and betrayed, and his experiences are visualized not just objectively in the locations of the action, but subjectively in the shadowy and menacing visual world of the photography—most graphically in the amazing scenes of his nightmarish perceptions after being shot full of weird drugs.

            The movie also gives you the hardboiled private eye, complete with first-person voiceover and lurid wisecracks, the seductive spider-woman, the grotesque oversized innocent and the arrogant and refined criminal mastermind. It’s still a beautiful piece of entertainment today, and a fine introduction to the phenomenon of film noir.

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            One of the principal sources of film noir is hardboiled crime fiction of the 1930s and 40s. Amongst a large collection, the most famous authors both at the time and now are Dashiell Hammett and James M. Cain—and Raymond Chandler. Chandler wrote a half-dozen novels featuring his private eye Philip Marlowe between 1939 and 1955, the first four of them in the years just preceding the arrival of film noir. Murder, My Sweet is an adaptation of the third of these novels, Farewell, My Lovely. The title was changed because the star, Dick Powell, was making a major gear change in moving from light-hearted musicals into heavy crime movies, and it was thought that viewers might think Farewell, My Lovely was just another Dick Powell musical. Anyway, Chandler is probably the best of all writers of American crime fiction, and any of the Marlowe novels can still be read with immense pleasure today. Chandler not only was a master of description and the poet of his seedy and morally compromised Los Angeles of the 40s, but also the all-time champion of the wisecrack. Marlowe’s vivid turns of phrase pop up all the way through Murder, My Sweet, from his sarcastic descriptions of the Grayle family mansion to his offer to kiss officer Nulty in the last shot of the movie, and they add immeasurably to the sense that there is a corrosively disenchanted sensibility viewing everything and failing to buy the idea that the good guys always win and the bad guys always lose.

            How noir Chandler’s novels are is an open question, because Marlowe is rarely truly disconcerted by anything he sees, and he maintains a kind of superiority and control through everything that runs counter to the basic noir sense of powerlessness and confusion. What makes Murder, My Sweet really noir—in addition to its visual style—is exactly the sense of disorientation and helplessness that Marlowe experiences at so many points throughout the action. A private eye whose eyes are bandaged and who can’t see—that’s the first, and also the last, image of the film. The difficulty of seeing and knowing and controlling the world is the most prominent theme in the movie. The fog and darkness and underbrush that obscures everything in the scene where Marriott is killed; the smoke and cobwebs that Marlowe can’t dispel when he’s drugged; the scorched eyeballs and subsequent blindness (and all the unplanned corpses) that are the result of the big all-revealing climax Marlowe plans for the last beach-house scene—these are all indications of the detective’s inability to master the story in the way he’s supposed to. In the end, of course, the movie lightens up and the anxieties are dispelled—Murder, My Sweet is at its least noir in the final scene with Ann Grayle, and it leaves a taste that’s not as bitter and unresolved as many noirs. But that sense of radical confusion—of being unable to see properly and understand properly, of not being able to comprehend how the world works and of being certain only that it is full of deception and violence—that’s really noir.

            Because characters in film noir are the opposite of characters in most mainstream Hollywood movies: instead of imposing order they reveal chaos, instead of mastering the world they are lost in it. Again, Murder, My Sweet is not the most radical film noir because it does finally pull its hero out of the maze, and in fact he’s never entirely swallowed up by it because he’s an outside investigator rather than a primary participant in the moral mess that’s revealed. It’s Moose Molloy who can never find his lost ideal, and Velma (or Helen Grayle) who can never escape the past. The tragedy isn’t Marlowe’s. But the world that’s revealed here isn’t really redeemed by the hero’s intervention, either. Moose and Helen and Grayle are all dead at the end of the film—and so are Amthor and Marriott—and the spectacle of deceit and treachery their lives showed is the state of the world, and can’t be fixed by anyone. That too is noir.

            And of course there’s that splendid visual style. Noir visuals of this kind date back to German expressionism, with its shadows and distortions which are the signs of a nightmarish and menacing world. But where the visual distortions of German expressionism existed within a completely fantastic and imaginary world, those of film noir occur in the realistic world of mainstream movies. Noir shadows and angles inhabit the recognizable environment of city streets and buildings, and they transform that everyday environment into something almost as weird and threatening as an Expressionist world, and in almost as straightforward a way they project the inner fears and disorientations of noir characters onto the outward landscape so that the whole environment becomes expressive of anxious feelings and moods.

            Disoriented and limited heroes, a disordered world, a threatening and anxious visual environment—those are amongst the essential ingredients of film noir. They’re there in Murder, My Sweet, and they’ll be there again and again throughout our whole series.