Amazon.com video review:
Dick Powell will forever be known as a 1930s crooner in
archetypal musical comedies, but this career-changing role shows
Powell at his best and remains perhaps the most faithful cinematic
representation of Raymond Chandler's hard-boiled hero, Philip Marlowe,
ever put on screen. In this adaptation of Farewell, My
Lovely, Powell's cynical, smart-talking private eye is hired
by a dim ex-con (pug-nosed Mike Mazurki) to find his girl Velma, and
by the prissy stooge of a blackmail victim to babysit him during a
handoff. The meeting ends with the stooge's death, and Marlowe is
immediately engaged by the owner of some jewels, the wily Mrs. Grayle
(Claire Trevor), to recover them. As Marlowe navigates the dark,
dangerous world of wartime L.A., splitting his search between
high-society haunts and the cheap, smoky bars and flophouses of the
inner city, he turns up one too many stones, winds up on the wrong end
of a fist, and wakes up to a drug-induced nightmare that director
Edward Dmytryk delivers with a mixture of surreal symbolism and
sinister expressionism. Powell delivers screenwriter John Paxton's
snappy lines and droll asides with hard-boiled cynicism, like someone
not quite as tough as he talks; but it's Powell's innate vulnerability
that makes this reluctant saint of the city so compelling. Dmytryk's
shadowy style creates a visual equivalent to the web of intrigue
Marlowe navigates, an almost perpetual world of night. One of the
first great films noir and an often-overlooked detective-movie
classic. --Sean Axmaker
