You glance up at a third-floor window over a drug store where shadows play against a drawn blind. Looks like some guy stabbing a woman. But what can you know? And why (though it will do no good, you stop at a phone booth, call the cops, give them the drugstore address, hang up before they can ask any questions) do you want to? Because the body has to eat and drink so it can stay healthy enough to enjoy an agonizing death, and the mind, to help out, has to know where the provisions are and how to get them and who else is after them and how to kill them. Then, once it gets started, it can’t stop. Gotta know, gotta know. It’s a genetic malignancy. Ultimately terminal.
—Robert Coover, Noir
Above, Dick Powell’s Philip Marlowe, in the throes of a similar existential quandary, in Edward Dmytryk’s Murder, My Sweet (1944), one of the cinematic touchstones of Coover’s latest fable/pastiche, and quite a deft and enjoyable one it is.
Murder My Sweet is an excellent film and that’s a great screen cap. Dmytryk deserves to be taken more seriously than he often is. Same goes for Dick Powell.
Dmytryk is a fascinating, often excellent filmmaker…who’s not terribly well-liked in many circles, on account of his cooperating with HUAC. I have two friends, red-diaper babies, kind of (one a former intimate of Losey’s), who more or less spit on the ground every time his name gets mentioned, as the song says. But he did some terrific films—“Cornered,” also with Powell, “Back to Bataan,” “Crossfire,” “The Sniper” (which is particularly exceptional), “Warlock,” “Mirage,” and more. And a few of his not-so-terrific pictures—“The Carpetbaggers,” “Where Love Has Gone,” “Bluebeard”—are perversely entertaining.
I’m not as confident about Dmytryk, but MURDER, MY SWEET has a fascinating drugged-hero sequence that anticipates KISS ME DEADLY as well as (the underrated) FRENCH CONNECTION II.
Amazing that these noir heroes are always getting the stuffing kicked or beaten out of them. Even Holly Martins was bitten by a parrot. And Rick Deckard’s relentless beatings *have* to be an homage to classic noir. (PK Dick sure didn’t make them up.)
Since this is a Literary Interlude may I recommend “Suspects” by David Thomson? The real story behind all the great films noir and that one Capra film.