Raymond Chandler seldom painted word portraits of his heroes, perhaps because of the falter in his first story, “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot,” when he gave his protagonist Mallory a “diffident” touch of gray in his hair. We know what the Chandler hero looks like; tall, dark, masculine, attractive to all society types, but if you read closely you will notice that complete as he is, Philip Marlowe has no face. That wasn’t a problem for Chandler, but it would become one in other media.

   That became Hollywood’s quest when they took notice of Chandler’s work: What did Philip Marlowe look like? Even Chandler struggled with that, veering from Cary Grant to Dick Powell, from Fred MacMurray to Humphrey Bogart — Chandler’s favorite, but not how he describes Marlowe in a letter that sounds suspiciously like MacMurray and Powell, and a young bartender he met in Hollywood, Robert Mitchum.

   The first screen Marlowe’s weren’t Marlowe at all. George Sanders’ Falcon took on Farewell My Lovely as The Falcon Takes Over, and Lloyd Nolan’s Michael Shayne took on The High Window as Time to Kill, and while both were faithful adaptations of the books, they weren’t Philip Marlowe. Marlowe was still faceless. All that changed in 1946.

   Well, actually it changed in 1945, but it was 1946 before anyone knew, and by then Marlowe already had one face, ex-crooner and male ingénue Dick Powell in the career changing Murder My Sweet, based on Farewell My Lovely, the Edward Dymytrick film that gave that became mid-wife to the film noir genre that had been in labor since German expressionist cinema in the teens.

   Powell is much as we imagine Marlowe, a bright attractive, but not devastatingly handsome, man, a bit shop worn, a bit defensive, and too human for his own good. To that Powell brings a post-war cynicism common to many ex-G.I.s, an ironic voice tinged by sarcasm, and a leery eye toward the idea he is so devastating that women like Claire Trevor will just throw themselves at him, at least without a distinct curve on the act. Bluff, brash, rude, and surprisingly gentle, Powell seemed to find every niche of Marlowe’s character, and would even play Marlowe again of television in an adaptation of The Long Goodbye.

   Howard Hawks and screenwriters Leigh Brackett, Jules Furthman, and William Faulkner had attempted Marlowe earlier in 1945, but a year too early for the slow to change moguls, who held the film back until Dymytrick’s film hit the boxoffice. The money showed them the light and The Big Sleep was rushed into release along with the second iconic face of Philip Marlowe, Humphrey Bogart.

   Physically Bogart was no more Marlowe than he was Sam Spade, but he brought to the character and screen a world weary romanticism and guarded heart only hinted at in the Powell Marlowe. Teamed with real-life wife Lauren Bacall, Bogie’s Marlowe has a subdued eroticism running beneath the tough façade. Add to that a very real tendency to defend the helpless and tilt at windmills, and Bogart may come closest to the fully developed Marlowe we see in Chandler’s masterpiece, The Long Goodbye.

   Sadly the film is deeply flawed by the ending imposed by the censors, one so absurd it comes close to ruining a masterpiece. Even seeing it the first time in my teens I can recall thinking John Ridgey’s (Eddie Mars) fall guy was covering up for someone, Carmen Sternwood, who conveniently drops out of the film midway through the proceedings before Marlowe can throw that famous old maid hissy fit and throw her out of his apartment and bed.

   Still, even Chandler was impressed by what Bogart brought to the role. Powell’s Marlowe is still half a genial boy turned rude. Bogie’s Marlowe is a man.

   That said, I agree with noir critic Eddie Mueller, The Big Sleep is as much a screwball comedy as it is film noir.

   George Montgomery is the next Marlowe, and not bad in John Bahm’s The Brasher Doubloon. based on The High Window. Replete with a silly mustasche, Montgomery is Marlowe lite.

   Still he fares better than the next Marlowe, who for the most part is a voice without a face, Robert Montgomery in his own film of Lady in the Lake. Using an experimental subjective camera technique the film falters, despite good work from its star/director and a fine cast including Audrey Totter, Lloyd Nolan (outstanding), and Tom Tully. The problem is it doesn’t look like a movie half so much as a live television broadcast.

   Save for Phil Carey’s slick Marlowe on a brief lived television series and Powell’s second outing, we don’t get another Marlow until James Garner in the sixties take Marlowe, based faithfully on The Little Sister.

   Garner’s Marlowe has generated a lot of criticism, but in many ways he is the epitomy of the Marlowe in that book, and the wary humor and slow exasperation that would make him a star is ideal for the character. He sparks in the scenes with cop Carroll O’Connor, Rita Moreno’s stripper, and Gayle Hunnicutt’s film star, and Bruce Lee has two of the best scenes of his career in a small role.

   That said, the critics and many fans savaged the film and Garner. Maybe if he had tried a fedora and trenchcoat …

   Elliot Gould is a terrific Marlowe — in audio books — on screen he’s not so good, though not even Bogart could have played the role to anyone’s satisfaction in Robert Altman’s petty tantrum of a film because of Chandler’s homophobia, The Long Goodbye. The movie is badly acted, hard to follow, and completely foreign to the character. Altman so disliked Chandler and Marlowe he undercut his own film, and even a Leigh Brackett script can’t save it.

   On my own personal list of the worst films ever made this ranks high. I have no problem with Altman disliking Chandler, or even wanting to savage the mythos, but not in a bitchy and at times campy film that plays like something made by the Hasty Pudding Club, arch, snide, and boring.

   By the way, if I wasn’t clear, I don’t like it.

   Too old, too fat, too weary, we finally get Robert Mitchum’s Marlowe in Farewell My Lovely, and it is a lovely one. Dick Richards’ moody recreation of noir and Mitchum’s well earned cynicism make this film work, and he’s ably abetted by another noir veteran John Ireland as Nulty, the cop.

   Alas, almost no one else in the film is up to them, and Richard Kiel’s Moose Malloy will make you yearn for Mike Mazurki and Ward Bond, who played the role in earlier films. It’s a singularly bad performance in a role vital to the film. Like me, you may well wonder why Marlowe didn’t just shoot the hulking jerk in self-defense.

   But even with that, Mitchum manages to give us close to the perfect Marlowe, if only it had come even ten years earlier.

   And even he can’t save The Big Sleep, which moves Marlowe to contemporary London, and falters badly despite the presence of James Stewart, Oliver Reed, and Richard Boone as the sadistic killer Canino. When Colin Blakely dies in the Elisha Cook Jr. role, you almost envy him being out of this. Still that scene and a few others work, and you can see where it might of been.

   Powers Boothe gets the part for the HBO series Philip Marlowe, and he’s great in well done adaptations of the short stories, but Danny Glover as a black Marlowe in the Fallen Angels adaptation of “Red Wind” doesn’t do half so well, largely because they add nothing to the story of the role even though Glover is a black Marlowe in the forties. It’s as if the story is set in a parallel universe where prejudice never happened, he’s no Denzel Washington and Easy Rawlins ,just a private detective who happens to be black.

   To date, James Caan is the last Marlowe in a made for television film of The Poodle Springs Murders, based on Chandler’s unpublished last novel completed and published by Spenser’s Robert B. Parker. Caan’s older Marlowe, confronting love, marriage, and wealth is a new dimension, but when things get rough he’s every bit Marlowe. It’s an exceptionally well done film, and it captures the unease of Marlowe in the new world of the late fifties and early sixties.

   Marlowe is also available on radio and audio books. Van Heflin and Gerald Mohr essayed the role on the classic radio production from the forties while Elliot Gould and Daniel Massey (Raymond’s son) are the audio book voices, and both very good, while more recently Ed Bishop (UFO) has been Marlowe’s voice on BBC 4 in several readings and dramatizations.

   Still Marlowe remains an elusive voice. You’d know him if you saw him or heard him speak, but you never really have so you remain wary. Some of that is Chandler’s intent, since Marlowe is everyman as the hero, that famous man “good enough for any world” from the essay “The Simple Art of Murder.”

   Philip Marlowe is a living breathing flawed human being; he’s a hero because he doesn’t let that stop him. He’s a man because he questions the motive and necessity of those heroics. He’s Philip Marlowe because he does those things in an iconic literary voice that has so come to dominate literature even today’s literary icons use it. (Michael Chabon for one.)

   The fact is he doesn’t have a face — or need one. He has a voice, and no actor, good or bad, can ever take that away from him, or us, and I don’t think there is a reader who ever read a page of Raymond Chandler who wouldn’t know him anywhere.

THE PEARL OF DEATH. Universal, 1944. Basil Rathbone (Sherlock Holmes), Nigel Bruce (Doctor Watson), Dennis Hoey (Inspector Lestrade), Evelyn Ankers, Rondo Hatton. Based on the characters created by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Director: Roy William Neill.

   One indisputable “B” Classic is The Pearl of Death, seventh in Universal’s Sherlock Holmes series with Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce, and my favorite of the set.

   Holmes purists object to the modernizing of the series, and to the portrayal of Watson as a buffoon, but I find the atmosphere of these things charmingly old-fashioned — no car-chases or shoot-outs, and very sparing use of phones and electric lights — and I appreciate Nigel Bruce’s shtick for its own sake; every “B” series had to have Comic Relief and his was rather good of its type.

   At that, Watson’s a couple laps ahead of Dennis Hoey’s delightfully dense Inspector Lestrade, whose exchange …

      HOLMES – “Two persons found with their backs broken and smashed crockery all about. What do you make of that?”

      LESTRADE – “Coincidence, I calls it.”

… seems impressively obtuse even for a Movie Cop.

   But Pearl scores points mainly as an atmospheric horror movie. It offered Rondo Hatton his first “starring” part, in the expert hands of director Roy William Neil, who exploited “the Creeper” with real Gothic flourish. Here, as never before or since, there’s someone using camera angles, lighting and background to lend the character a screen presence that the actor never really had.

   There’s also a particularly fine climax — memorable enough that it appeared again later that same year in the better-known Murder My Sweet.

PENTHOUSE. MGM, 1933. Warner Baxter, Myrna Loy, Charles Butterworth, Mae Clarke, Phillips Holmes, C. Henry Gordon, Martha Sleeper, Nat Pendleton. Based on a story by Arthur Somers Roche serialized in Cosmopolitan. Director: W. S. Van Dyke.

   A forgotten mystery writer is Arthur Somers Roche; a forgotten film is Penthouse, which was based on his story in Cosmopolitan. (In 1935 it was published in hardcover by Dodd Mead.)

   Crisp!y directed by W. S. “One Take” Van Dyke in three weeks, this movie provided the breakthrough role for Myrna Loy. Not forced to play a vamp, she displayed her natural sophistication and flair for comedy so well that M-G-M cast her as Nora Charies when Van Dyke filmed The Thin Man the following year.

   Also noteworthy in Penthouse are Warner Baxter as a Perry Mason type defense lawyer who does some real detecting and Nat Pendleton almost walking away with the picture with his performance as a gangster.

   Penthouse is as slick as the pages on which it originally appeared, but it is fun and worth seeing.

EVIL UNDER THE SUN. Universal, 1982. Peter Ustinov (Hercule Poirot), Colin Blakely, Jane Birkin, Nicholas Clay, Maggie Smith, Roddy McDowall, Sylvia Miles, James Mason, Denis Quilley, Diana Rigg. Based on the novel by Agatha Chrsitie. Director: Guy Hamilton.

   In a recent issue of the Times Literary Supplement, Julian Symons complained mightily about the betrayal of the Christie novel on which this is based. Chris Steinbrunner, in the July 1982 EQMM, recognized the tinkering with the novel but thought the result was splendid.

   I haven’t read the novel, but, apart from competent performances by good actors — of whom the most amusing are Peter Ustinov, Maggie Smith, and Diana Rigg (whose archness is, however, beginning to wear thin) — good tunes by Cole Porter attractively orchestrated by John Lanchbery, and handsome location filming on Majorca, there is no reason to pay more than a bargain matinee admission for this film.

   It is too long, the narrative sags intermittently as the camera doodles across the landscape and sets, and there is the curse of a campy performance by Roddy MacDowell as a critic who is probably modeled on the insufferable Rex Reed.

   This might warm you if there’s a blinding snowstorm outside, but this is television fare dressed up as a big screen offering.

THE CROOKED CIRCLE. World Wide, 1932. Ben Lyon, Zasu Pitts, James Gleason, Irene Purcell, Burton Churchill, Frank Reicher, Tom Kennedy. Director: H. Bruce Humberstone. Shown at Cinefest 19, Syracuse NY, March 1999.

   This hit all the right buttons for me, although some people felt it was one of the worst films of the weekend. Lyon, Churchill and Karns are members of the Sphinx Club, a group of amateur criminologists. Their opposite number is The Hooded Circle, a gang of masked villains, who appear to have infiltrated the Sphinx Club and to be poised to eliminate their competition.

   Much of the action takes place in an old house, reputed to be haunted, and it has the requisite sliding panels, chairs that dump occupant down chutes, and a clock that strikes 13 times.

   Almost nobody is what he (or she) appears to be, and you may not care, but I had a good time and I would like to think I wasn’t the only one. Yes, Zasu flutters like an inebriated butterfly, but Gleason’s dry style manages to provide something of a tonic.

TELL NO TALES. MGM, 1939. Melvyn Douglas, Louise Platt, Gene Lockhart, Douglass Dumbrille, Florence George. Dorector: Leslie Fenton.

   Tell No Tales offers a Good Idea for a Movie, almost buried under MGM production gloss. Melvyn Douglas — who, in his day, starred opposite Greta Garbo and Boris Karloff with equal aplomb — plays a big-city newspaper editor who gets a break on a kidnapping case: a Hundred Dollar bill marked as part of the ransom payment falls into his hands. Using his connections and newsman’s instinct for a story, he follows the bill from hand to hand, back to the kidnappers.

   This is fairly standard stuff for a 30s crime reporter story, but writer Lionel Houser milks a lot of extra interest from it. As Douglas tracks the bill from person to person, we get unsettling glimpses of the lives he’s walking in on: an older man whose pretty young wife bought a gift for another man with it; a black prizefighter who paid his doctor bill before dying or a prestigious singer afraid it will betray a sordid secret.

   Writer Houser and director Leslie Fenton make the most of this Woolrichian bent (the scene at the prizefighter’s wake, held over a seedy nightclub, is particularly unsettling) with flashes of insight that lift this film well out of the ordinary.

   Unfortunately, there is that MGM Gloss to contend with, and it almost suffocates a very intelligent little B-movie. At Warners, Tell No Tales would have established the lead character cracking a case with a quick montage of sirens, bullets and screaming headlines; Monogram would have opened the film with economic stock-footage and a wise-cracking talk on a pinch-penny Editor’s Office Set.

   But not MGM. No sir. They open Tell No Tales with a big money shot of editor Douglas walking through a busy newsroom packed with extras, taking a few minutes of his (and our) time to give a break to an honest politician, and organizing a surprise party for file paper’s oldest employee, thus establishing him as a man of character and sensitivity (like all big city newspaper editors) and incidentally wasting about ten minutes of a one-hour movie.

   The surprising thing is that once you get past this yawning chasm, Tell No Tales still manages to pack a lot of interest, thanks mainly to fine writing and the considerable charm of leading players Melvyn Douglas and the under-used Louise Platt (who played the pregnant army wife in Stagecoach that same year) seriously abetted by veteran nasties like Douglas Dumbrille and Leroy Mason.

   Look for this one.

Editorial Comment:   This movie has been reviewed once before on this blog, the earlier post contributed by David L. Vineyard. Check out what he had to say here.

WARNING: Part Two of the YouTube video provided is incomplete. (See Comment #1.)

STRANGER ON THE THIRD FLOOR. RKO Radio Pictures, 1940. Peter Lorre, John McGuire, Margaret Tallichet, Charles Waldron, Elisha Cook Jr. Director: Boris Ingster.

   Stranger on the Third Floor is sometimes cited as the first film noir, and it certainly is the first film I know of to combine that sense of bleak oppression and German expressionism in a contemporary crime film. And if it’s not completely successful, one has only to look at the obvious effort involved and give it high marks for trying.

   The story is certainly essential noir: reporter Mike Ward has just gotten a big promotion for being the star witness in a murder case, he’s about to marry his girl and move out of his crummy apartment… in short one of those guys coming up in the world who, in movies like these, invariably comes crashing down.

   In this case it starts with Ward’s fiancée having doubts about how Mike’s testimony helped convict a man who may be innocent — doubts enough to break off their engagement. This segues into an extended nightmare sequence wherein Ward dreams he’s executed for a murder he didn’t commit. From there, it’s just a short step to Ward actually being arrested for Murder, and his girlfriend’s lonely, desperate efforts to save him (a theme to recur in films like Phantom Lady and Black Angel).

   This echt-noir story is ladled out with generous helpings of dark photography, ominous music and corrosive characters: an inattentive judge, nosy neighbor and sanctimonious landlady, cops both brutal and dumb (when two identical murders occur within a block of each other, Ward has to point the similarity out to the investigating officer) and the stranger skulking about the third floor. And then there’s that long nightmare, a tour-de-force that outdoes Caligari in its use of surreal lighting and sets.

   Unfortunately, director Boris Ingster (whose career stretched from The Last Days of Pompeii to The Man from U.N.C.L.E.) and writer Frank Partos (The Uninvited) took it all a bit over the top. Except for Ward and his girlfriend, there are simply no likeable characters in this dark, seedy world. In fact, everyone seems to go out of his way to be a little more unpleasant. Ingster also seems to have directed his players to put it on the edge of hysteria; only Margaret Tallichet, a talented Maureen-O’Hara-type, seems at all natural or convincing.

   On the balance though, Stranger is saved from itself by Peter Lorre, who is only in the movie maybe ten minutes as the—well, as the stranger on the third floor. Seen only in quick haunting glimpses at first (like Raymond Burr in the thematically similar Rear Window) Lorre finally emerges as a supremely terrifying and oddly sympathetic little boogeyman, just the type to chill your spine and tug your heart strings. It’s a memorable bit of casting in a film that for all its faults deserves a look.

CRIME WITHOUT PASSION. Paramount Pictures, 1934. Claude Rains, Margo, Whitney Bourne, Stanley Ridges, Leslie Adams, Charles Kennedy, Paula Trueman. Written & directed by Ben Hecht & Charles MacArthur

    On a brighter note, Crime Without Passion is a Clever, Woolrichish little thing written and directed by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, no less, about a high-powered shyster (played a bit broadly by Claude Raines in his third screen appearance) tired of his inconvenient mistress.

   When said mistress gets thoughtlessly shot, arguing over possession of a gun in her apartment, Raines knows that circumstantial evidence around her death will convict him of murder (and we know he deserves to step off for it) but being a legal mastermind, he also knows how to go about removing said circs while planting a trail of evidence that will absolve him, which he spends the rest of the film doing.

   Okay, with a premise like this, you pretty much know Raines is going to trip himself up and get hung, so it’s no surprise that’s just what happens here.

   But just how Hecht and MacArthur score is the trick of this thing, and I have to say when they put it across the plate, I wasn’t just looking the other way, I was up in the stands buying peanuts, that’s how well they misled me. It’s one of those films that I can tell you it has a surprise ending and it’ll still surprise you.

   I should also add that Crime starts with one of the most remarkable montage sequences ever committed to film: a blur of images that evokes the most febrile and lurid of the old Horror Pulp Covers and a few minutes of Cinema that will stay in my memory long after whole other films have vanished:

ANTHONY GILBERT – The Woman in Red. Collins Crime Club, UK, hardcover, 1941. Smith & Durrell, US, hardcover, 1943. Digest-sized paperback: Mercury Mystery #91. Also published as The Mystery of the Woman in Red: Handi-Books #29, paperback, 1944. Film: Columbia, 1945, as My Name Is Julia Ross. Film: MGM, 1987, as Dead of Winter.

MY NAME IS JULIA ROSS. Columbia, 1945. Nina Foch, Dame May Whitty, George Macready. Based on the novel The Woman in Red, by Anthony Gilbert. Director: Joseph H. Lewis.

   I almost gave up on Anthony Gilbert’s The Woman in Red after the first few pages because it seemed like every other paragraph conveyed some form of Had-she-but-known, often more than once. F’rinstance: She was wondering why she should be so convinced that nothing but harm, of danger even, could come of this venture…her whole being shaken by a protest that was instinctive and illogical In her brain, a voice rang like a chiming bell, “Don’t go,” it pealed, “Don’t go, don’t go, don’t go!”

   At which point I damnear went. But I stayed with it and I’m glad I did. Woman in Red isn’t completely successful, but when the characters talk, they slip the surly bonds of Gilbert’s prose and come alive, with entertaining results. This was my introduction to series sleuth Anthony Crook, a delightfully irreverent character and light counterbalance to the turgid and often ridiculous story around him.

   Well, maybe not ridiculous; the tale of Julia Ross, a working girl who takes a position as an old dowager’s secretary, only to find herself whisked off to a remote house in the country where everyone calls her by another name and treats her like she’s crazy has some effective moments and even generates a good deal of suspense.

   But it’s hard to take a story seriously when the would-be killer tricks our heroine into wearing a red dress so as to rouse the deadly ire of a passing bull. And when the basis of the plot turns out to be a nest of foreign spies being coincidentally pursued by Julia’s beau…. Well I’m just glad there were enough bright characters and tricky bits of business to make it all worthwhile and even entertaining.

   Woman in Red was turned into a film called My Name Is Julia Ross (Columbia,1945) and it had the artistic fortune to be adapted by Muriel Roy Bolton and directed by Joseph H. Lewis, a filmmaker who brought artistry to just about everything he touched. Shot in 18 days (as delightfully detailed in Mike Nevin’s Joseph H. Lewis [Scarecrow, 1998]) on a budget that wouldn’t buy catering on most “A” pictures, this emerges as a riveting, atmospheric film, and one to look out for.

   Nina Foch is excellent as the imperiled heroine, set neatly against Dame May Whitty as the dotty-looking but sinister master- (or should it be mistress?) -mind. Even better, there’s George Macready as Whitty’s not-quite-right son. Bolton re-structures the basis of the plot, replacing spies with a background story that George married a wealthy heiress for her money, then inconveniently killed her. Now he and Mom need a replacement who can be passed off as the wife and meet a more acceptable end so he can inherit her fortune and avoid the gallows.

   It’s fine work from writer Bolton, who also did an intelligent job on something called The Amazing Mr. X, which I must get around to reviewing someday.

   Director Lewis does an outstanding job with all this. His off-beat angles and compositions are never just showy, but always work to establish character or atmosphere. And he creates a nifty tension between the murderous mother and son, with Whitty always trying to take knives and other sharp objects away, and Macready always on the point of rebelling — a nasty prospect from the look of him, and one he would relish. Macready’s career ran the gamut from the preposterous The Monster and the Ape to the prestigious Paths of Glory, but he was never better than right here, playing off Dame May Whitty like an incestuous Lorre and Greenstreet.

PostScript:   Mike Grost has a lot to say about this film on his website. Check out his long insightful article here. The movie was also reviewed by J. F. Norris on his blog. Here’s the link.

   Meet Boston Blackie (Columbia, 1941) was a zippy 60 minutes, with the crisp direction of Robert Florey making the difference here. Rochelle Hudson was a luscious treat as the female lead, and Chester Morris and Richard Lane sparred amiably as Blackie and his sympathetic nemesis, Inspector Faraday.

   Even better was Raffles (Hyclass Producing Co., 1917; George Irving, director). John Barrymore was a charming and stylish Amateur Cracksman, his performance fully justifying the curtain line delivered by the detective: “I’m delighted he’s escaped! He’s really splendid!” (Frank Morgan plays Raffles’ friend, Bunny Manders, an early appearance for the future MGM contract player.)

   As Meet Boston Blackie demonstrated, B-films can be the most enjoyable and dependable of film viewings. I was. therefore, depressed by the lackluster Mr. Moto Takes a Chance (2Oth Century Fox, 1938) and by the dreadful The Lone Wolf Strikes (Columbla, 1940).

   Peter Lorre couldn’t salvage the back-lot jungle melodrama of the Moto film, and Warren William, Eric Blore and Montagu Love brought only momentary life to the Lone Wolf’s dead-at-the-starting-gate caper. The pacing of the Lone Wolf film was funereal, and I am convinced that the director (Sidney Salkow) told his actors to count to three before delivering a line.