List Item: Watch all of the “1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die”
Progress: 842/1007
Title: Murder, My Sweet
Director: Edward Dmytryk
Year: 1944
Country: USA
Ah yes film noir. The genre of film where you get cracking lines like “she had a face like a bucket of mud” and “I tried to imagine him in love… it didn’t work” delivered with snark and sincerity. It’s one of those genres where I wouldn’t exactly rank it as one of my favourite and yet I am drawn back to its complex traps and style time and again. Sometimes it is the itch that needs scratching, which goes a long way to explain why the 1940s have so few films left for me to watch.
Whilst Murder, My Sweet was not the originator of the genre, it was a major player in shaping how we know the genre, alongside classics like The Maltese Falcon and Double Indemnity. This means that a lot of the tropes we later see in works such as The Postman Only Rings Twice and The Killers can be traced back here. Like with Citizen Kane you have to remind yourself that things you are seeing are not cliched, rather copied by many later films.
This is the third film that I have seen depicting the Philip Marlowe character, the others being The Long Goodbye and The Big Sleep, and I think that Dick Powell might have actually been the best one. Rather than just being the hard-boiled detective that later incarnations have him be, there is a playfulness to him (see: him playfully hopscotching in a marble hallway) which actually works to humanize him.
The plot is pretty typical film noir faire. Complex web of lies, many traps our hero manages to dodge and fall victim too and a woman of loose morals holding a bunch of the strings. One of these traps makes for a very interesting drugging scene which, whilst very noir, brings to mind similar sequences that would go psychedelic in the 1960s.
Whilst the number of 1940s films left on the list are dwindling, there are still a fair few noir classics left to discover in the 1950s. I may still be a few years away from finishing the 1001, but it’s beginning to feel rather close.
Before I Kick 