Murder, My Sweet (1944)

 “How do you feel?”

“Like a duck in a shooting gallery.”

            When I think of films that are considered Film Noir I think of gritty places and gritty people, night time sleaziness, detectives with bad attitudes, and women with ulterior motives. Not all Noirs have every single one of those elements they either have one or two with a touch of high class glamour. There is just one Noir that I have seen so far in my Classic Hollywood/Film Noir viewings that has all of the characteristics I think of and that film is Murder, My Sweet from 1944.

            Detective Philip Marlow (Dick Powell) is being interrogated with bandages covering his eyes. He was involved in some heavy stuff and the police believe he played a major role in the crimes that were committed. Philip recalls the story that lead to him needing the bandages.

            Some time ago Philip was in his office looking out the window at nighttime LA. He turns around to see a large man standing in there who snuck in quiet as a church mouse. The big guy’s name is Moose and he wants to find a girl named Velma who he has not seen in eight years. Philip does not think anything will come of finding the girl since she disappeared so long ago but he tags along with Moose to the last place he saw her. Eight years ago Moose left Velma at the night club where she was a dancer. They had been engaged but he was being sent to prison. The night club was turned into a bar. Moose starts asking if anyone has seen Velma and it seems he had been going there quite a lot since everyone is sick of his question and tells him to get out. Philip gets the idea to look up the wife of the former night club owner Mrs. Florian. He finds her in the phonebook and pays her a visit. Mrs. Florian is a raging alcoholic she can barely keep herself up in a chair but she manages to answer some of Philip’s questions about Velma. She goes to a chest and takes out some pictures. Philip notices that she left one photograph in there and it was one of Velma. Mrs. Florian yells out that Velma is dead she died years before. Philip leaves and as he walks past the house he sees in the window Mrs. Florian in a panic calling someone.

            From the elevator boy in the building his office is located in, Philip has a man waiting for him in his office when he comes in the following day. The man is Lindsay Marriot and he needs Philip’s help with recovering some jewels that were stolen from his friend. The only reason Philip takes the job is because Marriot is paying him a lot of money. That nigh Philip drives Marriot to deserted place off the roads where the meeting is to take place. Philip gets out of the car and is immediately hit over the head unconscious. When he comes to Marriot has been killed and he sees a girl standing over him asking him if she is alright and then she runs away.

            And this begins Philip Marlowe’s adventure into finding some apparently missing very expensive jade jewelry, getting kidnapped and drugged for three days, and being blinded by the flash of a gun going off.

            The story gets a little long and complicated so I will spare any confusion and me just getting things wrong. And plus, why would I want to give away how Velma is found? You need something to make you want to watch this film!

            Murder, My Sweet was not bad. There were some parts that dragged and made me bored (ADHD is a killer!) but for the most part it was very good Dick Powell was amazing. Before this he had been known as a singer and good boy in musicals in the 1930s. When he went over to RKO they wanted him to do musicals. Powell told the studio he would make musicals but only if he got to do a drama first. Well, Murder, Sweet became a success and Powell was cast in grittier more dramatic roles. This is the Dick Powell I like seeing I am not a fan of his love sick sing dancing little boy roles. From start to finish Murder, My Sweet is gritty and raw and dark. Philip Marlowe is put through the ringer between getting knocked out twice and drugged for three days. None of the characters are really likable including Philip. There is not glitz and glamour to Murder, My Sweet like some other Film Noirs and that to me is what makes it one of the greats of the genre. 

Dark Passage (1947)

 “I'm hiding.”

“From what?”

“My wife, my friends, my family, everybody.”

“Come on now, it can't be as bad as all that.”

“Well, I tell you what you do. You go up there and spend seven years with my wife, and then if you're still in your right mind, come back down here and tell me about it.”

            No actor ever wants to hide their face. They act so people can see their face and gain attention. As an audience we go to theaters to specific faces. When that specific face we went to the theaters to see is not on screen we may not pay attention or we may feel the film lacks in those scenes. In the 1947 film Dark Passage one of Hollywood’s leading actors, Humphrey Bogart, was cast as the lead in a story where his face is not shown for over an hour. The lead actor’s face not being shown for that long was never even heard of or done before and is not done so much even to this day.

            Vincent Parry (Bogart) has escaped from jail. From first person perspective and a voice over we hear his inner monologue and what he says to other people he encounters. He hitches a ride with someone who asks him too many questions. A radio announcement comes on warning people about Vincent’s escape and his description. The guy pulls over and before he can do anything Vincent punches him out, takes him out of the car and takes his clothes. Another pulls over to the side of the road. A young woman comes out of the car and she wants to help Vincent get away from the cops and back into San Francisco.

            They get into San Francisco past the police. The young woman who has helped Vincent is Irene Jansen. He finds she is helping him because her father was in a similar situation where he was convicted of killing his wife but he was not the real killer. Irene believes that Vincent is innocent that someone set him up for the murder of his wife and wants to help prove his innocence. Irene goes out leaving Vincent alone. A woman comes the door and incessantly knocks. Vincent recognizes the voice and makes her suspicious when he tells her to go away.

            When Irene comes home he tells her he cannot stay with her especially after the visitor who happened to be Madge Rapf (Agnes Moorhead) the woman who accused Vincent of killing his wife. Irene knows who Madge is and purposely came to know her. Vincent has to leave and stay with a friend of his. On the way to his friend’s place in a cab the driver figures out who he is and tells Vincent that he knows a surgeon who specializes in plastic surgery. When the surgery is over Vincent goes back to his friend’s house only to find he has been murdered. He goes back to Irene’s apartment and writes down what has happened and that he needs to stay with her until the bandages can come off.

            A few days later Irene takes the bandages off of Vincent’s face. Now that his face has changed and no one would recognize him Irene feels they can finally be together but Vincent still feels he has to go away so he will not be caught. Irene figures out he is going to South America and she wants to go with him. He tells her she cannot follow him no matter how much she wants to. Sitting in a diner, Vincent asks questions about past events at a race track. A man comes over to Vincent and asks questions. The man is a detective when Vincent realizes this he runs away. He manages to get away and find a room to stay in. Somehow the guy who had picked him up on the road after he escaped tracks Vincent down to the room. The guy tries to blackmail him and get money out of Irene. Vincent gets the best of the guy on the road once again. They get into a fight and in self defense Vincent pushes the guy off a cliff into the ocean. Before the guy falls to his death reveals in so many ways who really murdered Vincent’s wife and friend.

            Vincent goes to see Madge Rapf. Since his face has changed she does not recognize him right away. He tells her who he is and that he knows she is the murderer. She lets him know that she killed his wife because she loved him and the only way they could be together was if the wife was out of the way. When he did not love her back she blamed the murder on him. In one last push to torture Vincent, Madge jumps out the window to her death to make it look like he killed her.

            Vincent makes it out of North America to a place he wrote for Irene to meet him. Irene meets him at a hotel night club and they dance.

            Dark Passage I have had for years on DVD and watched when I first bought it. At the time I first watched the film I do not think I was running this blog so now I am reviewing it. Plus, I am currently enrolled in TCM’s free online program Into the Darkness: Investigating Film Noir and Dark Passage was one of the films sent out to break down the opening. They send out some questions to create discussion and the one I really liked was do you think if the first person point of view added to the tension of the opening scene. I absolutely think it does because you are looking at the world from the person’s point of view and you are hearing his thoughts and his anxieties and you see the other characters the way the person sees them. I think it the first person point of view was really genius it works very well for the story. Humphrey Bogart was a good choice for the character because he always played a tough guy and to hear this tough guy sound anxious created great tension. Dark Passage is a good film. It is worth watching as an atypical Film Noir and as a Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall film. 

M (1931)

“At least while we hear children sing we know they’re alive.”

            I do not believe there is such a thing as a perfect film. There are some that I believe come close but like people all films have flaws. There is one film, however, that has possibly changed my belief that there is such a thing as a perfect, flawless film. That one film is Fritz Lang’s 1931 masterpiece M.

            The film opens to a group of children playing a game. The game is played by one little girl singing a gruesome song about how a man in black will come and get them and chop them into pieces. One woman hears the children singing and yells at that to stop playing such a horrid song. The children stop for a moment until they believe the woman is out of earshot. The woman brings laundry to the apartment of a Mrs. Beckmann. She washes some of the laundry until she hears the cuckoo clock chime the hour when she expects her daughter to be home. When the cuckoo sounds she puts down the laundry and begins to make dinner.

            Mrs. Beckmann’s daughter Elsie goes to school in the city. She is walking down the sidewalk bouncing her ball to an ominous rhythm. She bounces it against a poster for a wanted man. The wanted man is a murderer who has murdered children and has yet to be caught. The shadowy figure of a man against the post comes up to Elsie. He takes her to get a balloon and some candy.

            Back the apartment Mrs. Beckmann begins to frantically worry about her daughter. Elsie was supposed to be home and she has not arrived. She yells out into the apartment complex and into the streets for Elsie.

            In an area of plants and trees the small hand of Elsie Beckmann falls out. The scene cuts to her balloon floating between two telephone pole wires.

            The next day the newspapers blare out that another little girl has been murdered. This new murder and the fact that the murderer has not yet been caught sends an extreme amount of panic and paranoia throughout the city. A group of men sitting in a café reading the newspaper with the latest headline immediately begin accusing one another of being the killer. An old man is mobbed in the street when he is seen speaking to a little girl after she had asked him the time. While panic erupts around him the murderer writes a letter to a newspaper since the police would not print his last one and whistles an upbeat tune that creates an unsettling feeling.

            The police are doing everything they can to catch the murderer. They are encouraging his letters to the newspapers in the hopes that they can somehow lift his fingerprint from it. They also have it psychoanalyzed and poured over for clues. To further help track down the murderer the police enlist the help of the homeless of the city. They give the homeless men streets to watch and corners to watch over.

            The police begin to narrow down their search to a list of patients who have been released from mental institutions within the last year. They track down the former patients to their current addresses. One detective goes to an apartment complex where the murderer has just walked out of only moments before.

            Even the world of the underground is after the murderer. The police have been performing so many raids on their rackets that they cannot get any business done. The heads of some of the gangs have a meeting and pledge to take down the murderer themselves. They place their informants all over the city just like the police have placed the homeless men.

            While walking down the street the murderer stops to look at a store front. In the reflection of a mirror on display he sees a young girl. The temptation is too much for him and when the girl walks away he follows her whistling his uncomfortable happy tune. Before he has a chance to grab the girl she fortunately finds her mother.

            Sometime later the murderer is walking and whistling down the street with another young girl. He passes a blind man selling balloons. The blind man recognizes the whistle as the same one he heard the day Elsie Beckmann disappeared. The man calls the attention of a boy and has the boy follow the murderer. The boy sends word that the murderer has been found and has another girl. When the murderer walks out of the store someone bumps into him. What that person did was mark him with an “M” so people on the streets and the police would know who he is. The murderer realizes he is now being followed and runs away into a building. The leaders of the gangs get word about the murderer hiding in the building. They storm the building knocking out the guards taking complete control over it. They just tracked the murderer to a junk room on one of the top floors when one of the guards comes to and pulls an alarm warning the police of trouble.

            The leaders manage to find the murderer and bring him someplace outside of town. They hold a trial in front of a large room of people. They interrogate him and get him to confess to killing the girls. Unfortunately one of the criminals was caught when the police answered the alarm and he is caught. He confesses that the other leaders have the murderer and where they can be found. The police come to the building and take the murderer away for a real trial. Elsie Beckmann’s mother is at the real trial. She mournfully cries out that nothing will ever bring her daughter back.

            One of the aspects of this film I love the most is how there is no music score. All the background noise is just that. There is no music to create tension with the exception of the murderer’s whistling. The bells of the clocks and the bouncing of the ball at the beginning was genius. Those sounds proclaimed the coming of the end of life for Elsie Beckmann. There were other scenes where the sound cuts out. For a few moments I thought YouTube was being stubborn and cut the sound out but then I realized it was part of the film itself and later learned that those few silent scenes were due to the fact that sound was still relatively new to films. The second moment of silence in the film happened when the murderer was looking at the display window. That silence was perfect because it was as if it had come from the murderer himself as if was blocking out all the noise around him and only concentrating on the little girl behind him.

            Fritz Lang’s direction in this film deserves every ounce of praise. It was stunning, raw, emotional, tense, and dramatic without going over the top. I could not get over his direction in the beginning when Mrs. Beckmann is calling out for Elsie. Lang shows us an empty room where the laundry hangs and an empty place at the table where Elsie should have been. The meaning of that emptiness is so impactful.

            M is a film I have been wanting to see for quite some time. I am currently participating in TCM’s Into Darkness: Investigating Film Noir. It is a free online class where four times a week they send out clips and questions about certain noirs. The first ten minutes of M kicked off the course. M is a considered a precursor to the noir genre. It is fascinating to see where all the elements of a typical noir got its start.

            M is that rare flawless film that is all around genius, stunning, intense, dramatic, and suspenseful. If you are a film buff or just want to see a perfectly made film than M is a must watch. It is available to view in full with subtitles on YouTube.