Murder, My Sweet (DVD)

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Early one evening, Marlowe is visited in his office by a huge, inarticulate, dim-witted lug named Moose Malloy, who hires the detective to find his old girlfriend. Malloy has been in the pen for eight years pining for her, and now that he's finally out, she's disappeared, and he wants to find her again. Malloy is played by big Mike Mazurki, a 6'5" actor with a face only a mother could love. Mazurki played heavies in Hollywood for almost fifty years, and Malloy is one of his best roles. He's reminiscent of Lon Chaney, Jr. playing Lennie in "Of Mice and Men." Mazurki talks with vacant eyes, as though the heart works but the brain is disconnected. A wonderful part.

Claire Trevor and Anne Shirley play a pair of beauties who show up in the picture just moments later. They are the Grayles: Helen Grayle, the beautiful, new wife of an old millionaire (Miles Mander) and Ann Grayle, the fellow's beautiful, young daughter. "She had a face like a Sunday School picnic," Marlowe says of the younger woman. Needless to say, there is no love lost between the new wife and her stepdaughter. Indeed, they hate one another.

How do the Grayles play into the story? The old man is a collector of jade, and he's paying off thieves to get a stolen jade necklace back. Grayle uses a friend, Lindsay Marriott (Douglas Walton), to make the transaction, and Marriott hires Marlowe to go with him in the event something happens. But Marriott winds up dead and Marlowe knocked unconscious.

Enter next in rapid succession a "psychic consultant," in reality a con man and big-time blackmailer named Jules Amthor (Otto Kruger); a quack doctor named Sonderborg (Ralf Harolde); an alcoholic floozy named Jessie Florian (Esther Howard); a police Lieutenant named Randall (Don Douglas); a police detective named Nulty (Paul Phillips); plus a whole lot of others, and you get a pretty spirited supporting cast. Eventually, the Moose Malloy case and the Grayle case merge, but you've got to wait for it.

The movie is narrated in proper, subjective private-eye fashion in a voice-over by Marlowe, which tends to emulate the spirit of the novel. Moreover, the movie provides a wealth of dark shadows, and because it was filmed at the RKO studio just a couple of years after Welles had made "Citizen Kane" there and popularized the use of deep-focus photography, the studio filmmakers were quite comfortable using the same techniques with "Murder, My Sweet," getting a good deal of contrast between light and shadow while at the same time capturing plenty of detail in every shot from foreground to background.

Incidentally, you're probably wondering if there is ever a happy ending to the mystery? Hah! Does Bond ever die? I can't wait to see who plays Marlowe next.

Video:
The picture quality in this Academy-standard, 1.37:1 ratio presentation (rendered here at 1.33:1) ranges from acceptable to excellent. Some few parts of it are exceedingly grainy, others parts are not. The grain is particularly noticeable in the opening scenes, but it is no doubt attributable to the original print, as are the occasional age flecks and light flickers. Most of the film comes across well, however, hardly showing its age. The black-and-white contrasts are especially noteworthy, with very deep blacks and brightly lit whites. My guess is the video is better than almost anyone has ever seen it before.

Audio:
The sound is furnished via an ordinary monaural of the day, but the Dolby Digital remastering has undoubtedly clarified it extensively. The midrange is extremely clear, helping dialogue to be easily understood, and in a film where dialogue is paramount, that's all that's important. There is not much in the way of frequency response or dynamic range, but there doesn't need to be. Any background noise that must have accompanied the original soundtrack has been considerably tamed and is, for all intents, negligible.

Extras:
There's not much in the way of bonuses on the disc beyond an informative audio commentary by author and film-noir specialist Alain Silver. He provides a wealth of detail on the noir movement in general as well as an astute analysis of the movie itself, but his presentation is fairly straightforward and may not appeal to everyone but fans of the genre. Beyond that, there is a well-worn theatrical trailer and twenty-five scene selections. English is the only spoken language offered, but subtitles come in English, French, and Spanish.

Parting Thoughts:
"Murder, My Sweet" is one of five film-noir classics that Warner Brothers have made available individually or in a five-disc box set. The other films are the definitive film-noir classic, "Out of the Past," plus "The Asphalt Jungle," "The Set Up," and "Gun Crazy." All of them are worth pursuing, but I have a special affection for detective movies, so "Murder, My Sweet" is a natural for me. Fact is, there aren't all that many private-eye movies out there, making "Murder, My Sweet" among the select few.

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