Watched "Murder My Sweet" recently on TCM , a masterclass detective yarn starring Dick Powell and directed with artful craft by Edward Dmytryk. This is an inspired and fairly taut adaptation of Raymond Chandler's "Farewell My Lovely", and Powell, who we usually think of as a song-and-dance man, makes for an engaging Philip Marlowe, a cynical private eye, not-so-tough, wisecracking and whiskey drinking, a man who, once hired for a job, goes to the cruel truth at the heart of all the enterprises he finds himself embroiled in. Marlowe is a knight errant, in many ways, bound by a personal code me manages not to compromise in a city that is dark, full of sharp black corners and a population ruled by Bad Faith. Everyone lies to Marlowe, and they lie about everything--in this word, everyone has secrets they want to keep hidden, but coming up against Marlowe the protagonist, with his skewed virtue, hard truths and foul intents are revealed. Beautiful black and white here, a solid, even essential example of the film-noir style. The angles of the camera shots, the hard corners, the mastery of black and white and the various, shaded tones in between the extremes are nothing less than sculptural. As with the best dark shades, tones and textures created by the best camera artists in Hollywood when it comes to turning mere black and white into a menacing canvas of dread, danger and barely concealed mendacity, Murder My Sweet presents a world where the Greater Good and the Bigger Bad seem nearly indistinguishable from each other that only a steadfast pragmatist like Marlowe could navigate and remain sane
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