Murder, My Sweet

Starring:Dick Powell, Claire Trevor, Anne Shirley, Otto Kruger, Mike Mazurki, Miles Mander, Douglas Walton, Donald Douglas, Ralf Harolde, Esther Howard, Bernice Ahi, Donald Kerr, John Indrisano, George Anderson, Shimen Ruskin, Sam Finn, Dewey Robinson, Jack Carr, Bill Hamilton, Larry Wheat
Director: Edward Dmytryk
Studio: Turner Home Ent
Product Type: DVD

Amazon.com

Some boxed sets claim to be definitive, but are haphazardly selected. Not this one. Four of the five titles here can legitimately lay claim to being essentials in the film noir canon, and the fifth, The Set-Up, is a terrific boxing picture with a strong noir atmosphere. If you're a fan of noir--or have no idea what it's all about--this collection is a treat.

Of course, none of these movies were made as "film noir." The term was coined later by French critics to describe the moody, anxious feel of postwar American movies, especially the genre that highlighted duplicitous dames and susceptible men lost in the criminal jungle. Indeed, the title The Asphalt Jungle conveys the edgy urban arena of these pictures. That film is John Huston's masterly 1950 account of a heist, with Sterling Hayden the disenchanted, noirish hero. Joseph H. Lewis's Gun Crazy (1949) is one of the most supercharged (and sexually perverse) of noir films, with John Dall and Peggy Cummins as young criminals in love. Murder, My Sweet (1944) is a straight adaptation of Raymond Chandler's novel Farewell, My Lovely. Amid the film's shadowy chiaroscuro, former musical comedy star Dick Powell makes a career-changing transition as Chandler's private dick, Philip Marlowe. Out of the Past puts Robert Mitchum (perhaps the quintessential noir actor) in trouble with gangster Kirk Douglas, complicated by classic femme fatale Jane Greer. Jacques Tourneur provides the evocative direction. And The Set-Up plays out an ingenious boxing tale in "real time," superbly enacted by (former boxer) Robert Ryan. --Robert Horton

Customer Reviews:

Film Noir Classic Collection Vol 1.......2007-01-16

The product is exactly as described.
The picture quality is excellent.
I have no hesitation in recommending this product to any propective purcher

If You Want One Film Noir Collection, This is the One........2006-10-11

If you want to buy one film noir collection, this "Film Noir Classic Collection, Volume 1" from Warner Brothers is the one to get. These are all 5-star films. "The Asphalt Jungle", "Gun Crazy", "Murder, My Sweet", and "Out of the Past" are top-notch films from the height of the film noir movement 1944-1950, each representing at least one iconic film noir motif. "The Set-Up" is not film noir, but it's brilliant nonetheless. All of the films in this collection are accompanied by audio commentaries that vary in quality and focus but are worthwhile for film noir buffs. A better sampler of crime films from Hollywood's Golden Era could not have been assembled.

"The Asphalt Jungle" (1950) is a steadily paced, thoughtful heist film. The requisite crew of mastermind, safecracker, driver, stick-up man, and financier are assembled to pull a grand jewel heist. Complex characters and themes make this a great deal more than a typical heist flick. Based on the novel by W.R. Burnett and directed by John Huston, "The Asphalt Jungle" was nominated for 4 Academy Awards. The audio commentary is by film historian Drew Casper, and there is a short introduction to the film by John Huston.

"Gun Crazy" (1949) is a Bonnie-and-Clyde-inspired fugitive couple film that might be the most blatant expression of the sexualization of violence in the film noir canon. Sharpshooting femme fatale Annie Laurie Starr lures her equally "gun crazy" nice-guy husband Bart into a life of crime. Their "amour fou" is irrational but, at the same time, completely fascinating. The audio commentary is by film critic Glenn Erikson.

"Out of the Past" (1947) typifies the noir style so elegantly and in so many ways. Retired private detective Jeff Bailey has settled down to a quiet life in a small town when his past comes back to haunt him. Years before, he was hired by a wealthy gambler in New York to track down the man's errant mistress Kathie. But Jeff fell head over heels for the beautiful, duplicitous Kathie, and now both the lady and her lover insist on his loyalty. Actors Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer make a striking pair, accented by beautiful low-key light. The audio commentary is by film noir historian James Ursini.

"Murder, My Sweet" (1944) exemplifies labyrinthine plots in the style of Raymond Chandler, upon whose novel the film is based. Private detective Philip Marlowe finds that two of his cases may be related when a quest to find the girlfriend of an insistent thug and a case of missing jewels lead him around in circles but always to Mrs. Helen Grayle, the lady whose jewels went missing. The audio commentary is by film noir historian Alain Silver.

"The Set-Up" (1949) is not film noir, but an introverted character drama starring Robert Ryan as a boxer past his prime, clinging to hopes of moderate success in the ring. "The Set-Up" is perhaps best remembered for being shot in real time, including15-minutes in the ring. With a beautiful naturalistic visual style and a subdued, sympathetic performance from Robert Ryan, "The Set-Up" is one of the most memorable boxing films made. The audio commentary is by directors Robert Wise and Martin Scorsese, who were recorded separately.

"You're not a detective, you're a slot machine. You'd slit your own throat for six bits plus tax.".......2006-08-21

From Warner Home Video comes the Film Noir Classic Collection, Volume 1, featuring, in no particular order, the following films...

The Asphalt Jungle (1950), directed by John Huston and starring Sterling Hayden as a streetwise hooligan hired on as muscle for a big-time heist, caught in the middle when things go seriously sour. The picture, presented in fullscreen (1.33:1), looks very good, limited to a few, very minor flaws, and the Dolby Digital audio, available in both English and French, comes across sharp and clean. There is a so-so commentary track featuring author/film noir specialist Drew Casper with co-star James Whitmore, along with a theatrical trailer, an introduction by director John Houston (0:49), and subtitles in English, Spanish, and French.

Gun Crazy (1949) aka Deadly Is the Female, directed by Joseph H. Lewis and starring John Dall and Peggy Cummins as a pair of pistol packing newlyweds who embark on a life of crime because it's a hell of a lot easier (and exciting) than actually working for a living, that is at least until the Johnny Law makes the scene...the picture, presented in fullscreen (1.33:1), looks very good, limited to a few, very minor flaws, and the Dolby Digital audio is sharp and clean. There is a commentary track featuring author/film noir specialist Glenn Erickson, along with subtitles in English, Spanish, and French.

Murder, My Sweet (1944), directed by Edward Dmytryk and starring Dick Powell and Claire Trevor, the former playing Private Eye Philip Marlowe, caught up in a mystery involving a stolen jade necklace, a couple of hot tomatoes, and a corpse or two. The picture, presented in fullscreen (1.33:1), looks very clean and clear, and the Dolby Digital mono audio comes across clearly. As far as extras, included is a commentary track with author/film-noir specialist Alain Silver, a rough looking theatrical trailer, and subtitles in English, Spanish, and French.

Out of the Past (1947), directed by Jacques Tourneur and starring Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, and Kirk Douglas. Mitchum plays a once private eye now fulltime schlub whose past catches up to him after getting too close to a dame he was only supposed to find for a well to do client, and ultimately ends up on the wrong end of a murder investigation. The picture, presented in fullscreen (1.33:1), is strong, and the Dolby Digital mono audio comes across well. As far as extras, included is a commentary track with author/film-noir specialist James Ursini and subtitles in English, Spanish, and French.

The Set-Up (1949), directed by Robert Wise and starring Robert Ryan as an aging boxer who gets crossed by his unscrupulous manager while going for his last, big shot. The picture, presented in fullscreen (1.33:1), comes across well with few, if any, noticeable flaws, and the Dolby Digital mono comes through cleanly. As far as extras, there's an audio commentary track featuring director Robert Wise and Martin Scorsese, along with subtitles in English, French, and Spanish.

While each film in this set is outstanding in its own right, my personal favorites are The Asphalt Jungle and Murder, My Sweet.

Cookieman108

By the way, if you dig on these, you might want to check out the other DVD sets in the series, listed below...and the quote I used for the title of this review came from the film Murder, My Sweet.

Film Noir Classics Collection, Volume 2
Born to Kill (1947), Clash by Night (1952), Crossfire (1947), Dillinger (1945), The Narrow Margin (1952).

Film Noir Classics Collection, Volume 3
Border Incident (1949), His Kind of Woman (1951), Lady in the Lake (1947), On Dangerous Ground (1952), and The Racket (1951). This set also includes a bonus disc which includes a handful of short features

5 of the Best.......2006-08-18

Excellent choice of movies, either as intro to Noir, or for the aficionado who can recite the lines and anticipate every scene.Through the cynical postwar eyes of writers and directors like Huston and Tourneur, bleak views of human behavior are handled with style and wit, and the denouement of criminal behavior comes from the moment of conscious choice to treat people with contempt.
Superb.

Black & White rarely looks and sounds this good.......2006-01-26

I jump-started my personal noir collection with this box. I can't say enough about these movies -- all 5 are classics. I will give THE SET-UP special attention since it is unique. Told in almost real-time, it's a fascinating boxing/mobster/underdog drama.

Average customer rating:

Murder, My Sweet
Tracing a Missing Person
L.A. Wiseguy -
Great Film Noir!
The film certainly marked an astonishing transformation in its star...

Murder, My Sweet
Starring: Dick Powell , Claire Trevor , Anne Shirley , Otto Kruger , and Mike Mazurki
Director: Edward Dmytryk
Manufacturer: Turner Home Ent
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

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ASIN: B000244EX8
Release Date: 2004-07-06

Amazon.com

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

Customer Reviews:

Murder, My Sweet.......2007-06-25

Edward Dmytryk's trim, crackling noir has enough twists and turns to befuddle most any snoop, but that's the whole fun of it. Powell's bravura tough guy turn as the original Marlowe (Bogie would follow him two years later in "The Big Sleep") opened up gritty new avenues for the actor, and the sultry Claire Trevor scorches the screen as femme fatale Helen Grayle. Packed with the patter of gunsels and molls in dimly lit, smoke-filled rooms, noir doesn't get much "noirer" than this. Hard-boiled mystery fans should pounce.

Tracing a Missing Person.......2007-06-08

This is the film version of Raymond Chandler's "Farewell, My Lovely". It opens with Philip Marlowe being questioned by police detectives. It started when Marlowe was hired by Mike Malloy to look for an old girlfriend. Malloy had been away for years. Marlowe finds a dead end. Then a stranger hires Marlowe to ransom stolen jewelry. Marlowe is sapped, his client Marriott cannot speak. The police question him but Marlowe knows little. Then a reporter visits him to ask questions but Marlowe figures out the answers. Next Marlowe is hired by Mrs. Helen Grayle, the woman whose necklace was stolen. Malloy takes Marlowe to meet a guy; Jules Amthor is very interested in that necklace. They try to get information from Marlowe. [There are some novel special effects here.]

Marlowe continues in his quest for the truth. Ann Grayle hates her stepmother. Mr. Grayle was the owner of Marriott's apartment, so the police questioned him. Helen Grayle explains how Amthor worked: he talked to people, gained their confidence and their secrets, and used this information for blackmail. But Helen reveals her own character to Marlowe. When Marlowe returns to Amthor's office he finds Amthor won't speak to anyone. So now Marlowe begins to put the pieces together and figure out what the solution is, and returns to the beach house. There is a confrontation between the main characters that brings and ending to this story.

You will note how the film varies from the novel, but not extensively. The actions of Mr. and Mrs. Grayle seem more correct than the story in the novel. Chandler was a former oil company executive and knew about the lives and scandals of the super rich. The story of a rich old man marrying a young "show girl" could have been ripped from the headlines, then or now. [This story of a search for a missing person seems to echo "The Big Sleep".]

L.A. Wiseguy -.......2007-02-08

Philip Marlowe is the original American wise guy, like Bugs Bunny with gun, predating recent mafioso films and distinctly lone-wolf in style. No fraternal order of crimeys here, just a "slumming angel", as Ross MacDonald put it. Fascinating look at pre-war Los Angeles culture and viewpoints - before the city had any freeways, remember...

Great Film Noir!.......2007-01-18

You might not think Richard Powell could pull off a role as a hard-bitten private eye, but he comports himself well. The story winds around a bit (as it should), has good characters and acting, and is all you could want in a film noir. Great middle-of-the-night movie.

The film certainly marked an astonishing transformation in its star..........2007-01-09

There were many attempts to recreate on the screen Raymond Chandler's immortal character, Philip Marlowe, and probably the first serious effort was in 1944, with Edward Dmytryk directing... The film was called "Farewell My Lovely" in Britain and "Murder, My Sweet" in the United States...

The plot, as always with this genre, mattered far less than the characters and the action: it was sparked when Marlowe was hired to find an ex-convict's girl friend... This Marlowe was played by Dick Powell... He made a daring, successful effort to drop his all-singing, all-dancing image, and he was tough enough; but he was a little too charming, a shade too superficial, to suggest the depths and the strengths of the real Marlowe...

Humphrey Bogart was the man to do this above all others... And he did it superb1y in Howard Hawks' "The Big Sleep" in 1946...

"Murder My Sweet" is a complex thriller which seemed at the time to demonstrate all manner of strikingly new techniques in a film noir mood, and certainly marked an astonishing transformation in its star... Thirty years later, the second half has a jaded look...

Murder, My Sweet (Farewell My Lovely) [ NON-USA FORMAT, PAL, Reg.2 Import - Spain ]

Average customer rating:

Murder, My Sweet (Farewell My Lovely) [ NON-USA FORMAT, PAL, Reg.2 Import - Spain ]
Director: Edward Dmytryk
Manufacturer: Manga Films
ProductGroup: DVD
Binding: DVD

Product Description

Spain released, PAL/Region 2 DVD: it WILL NOT play on standard US DVD player. You need multi-region PAL/NTSC DVD player to view it in USA/Canada. LANGUAGES: English (Dolby Digital 2.0), Spanish (Dolby Digital 2.0), Spanish (Subtitles), SYNOPSIS: One-time movie crooner Dick Powell literally turned his career around in the 1944 film noir Murder My Sweet. Powell stars as Phillip Marlowe, the hard-boiled private detective antihero created by novelist Raymond Chandler. Hired by hulking, psychotic Moose Malloy (Mike Mazurki) to locate Moose's old girl friend, Marlowe is pitched headlong into a morass of intrigue and deception. The participants include duplicitous glamour-girl Claire Trevor, sodden slattern Esther Howard, suave blackmailer Otto Kruger and dyspeptic doctor Ralf Harolde. At one point, Marlowe is railroaded into a lunatic asylum, where under the influence of drugs he experiences a surrealistic nightmare the like of which would not be seen on screen again until Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958). So fascinating are the 'bad' characters in Murder My Sweet that the two 100% 'good' characters, heroine Anne Shirley and detective Don Douglas, seem wishy-washy wimps by comparison. After years of insipid golly-gee roles, Dick Powell startled his fans with his cynical, world-weary portrayal of Philip Marlowe. The part put him back on top of the box-office tallies and enabled him to extend his acting career into the 1950s, which led to an even more lucrative 'third life' as a powerful TV-studio executive. Murder My Sweet was based on Chandler's Farewell My Lovely, previously filmed in 1942 as The Falcon Takes Over; a remake, also titled Murder My Sweet, was produced in 1975, with Robert Mitchum as Marlowe. SPECIAL FEATURES: Deleted Scenes, Filmographies, Interactive Menu,

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