The Maltese Touch of Evil by Clute Shannon Scott; Edwards Richard L.;

Author:Clute, Shannon Scott; Edwards, Richard L.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Dartmouth College Press

Noireme 067: Murder, My Sweet (1944)

N = 00:46:17 || RT = 01:46:02 || RTP = 43.650%

NOIR IN THE HEAD

Near the middle of Murder, My Sweet, there is a drug-induced dream sequence that illustrates just what a masterful director Edward Dmytryk was. Philip Marlowe (Dick Powell) gets dragged by the wrongdoers to an alcohol and drug rehabilitation clinic (one of the shady “private sanitariums” of the day), and shot full of smack for a few of days—an attempt to find out what Marlowe really knows about a criminal event. He has crazy visions of the doctor chasing him, hypodermic needle in hand, as he goes through a series of increasingly smaller doorways. There are cobwebs over his vision and Dmytryk captures the scene with spinning cameras and moments that fade to blackness. This sequence is deeply suspenseful and visually inventive; it anticipates a more famous scene in Hitchcock’s Spellbound by a year and allows us to see how far ahead of his time Dmytryk was.

SC

This scene in Murder, My Sweet also establishes a duality between the private investigator and the psychiatrist. They both run very similar types of businesses. They’re trying to get inside the heads of their clients to find out things that even the clients may not fully understand. The radical subjectivity of Murder, My Sweet reminds us that the psyche of the private investigator is a horrible place to be. Though the ostensible purpose of this plot twist is to try to find out if Marlowe has the jade necklace, the pathos of the scene is played for the nightmare qualities of a detective who usually lives by his wits being “out of his wits.”

RE

I think that insight helps us to understand one reason PI stories became so popular in the postwar years. So many people returned from the war psychologically scarred and were trying to work out “the case” of what it meant to live the life they were living, what the intrigue was that they were involved in. To be inside the head of a man who is scarred by the experience of having seen people killed is indeed a dark place to be.

SC

Episode 26 || 06/30/06

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