Murder, My Sweet a Forgotten Noir Masterpiece

 

MURDER, MY SWEET (1944)

Directed by Edward Dmytryk

RKO, 95 minutes, Not rated.

★★★★★

 

 

 

Many people think of Humphrey Bogart as the quintessential Philip Marlowe, but not many know that Dick Powell was the first to portray Raymond Chandler’s famed detective. Nor do they know that many film buffs consider Powell’s take on Marlowe the best. That can be debated, but Powell was certainly closer to what Chandler had in mind; his Marlowe was less sure of himself, made numerous false steps, and was less callous. Murder, My Sweet was adapted from Chandler’s novel Farewell My Lovely and RKO didn’t have to pay Chandler a dime as they had already purchased the film rights four years earlier for a mere $2,000.

 

The prelude to the film shows a bandaged-eyed Marlowe telling police Lt. Randall what he knows about the double murder that lies at center of the narrative. In essence, it’s a setup for flashbacks. Moose Malloy (former pro wrestler Mike Mazurki) has just been paroled after eight years in prison and wants Marlowe to help him locate Velma Valento, his girlfriend before he was sent up. Marlowe and Malloy visit a joint where Velma once sang, but no one remembers her except for boozy nightclub owner Jessie Florian (Esther Howard) who insists Velma’s dead. Moose refuses to believe it and strongarms Marlowe into continuing his inquiries.

 

Moose is as dense as a concrete block and Marlowe has a potentially more lucrative client, Lindsay Marriott (Douglas Walton), who wants Marlowe to be his personal guardian as hands over ransom money to a third party for jewels he claims were stolen from him. Some bodyguard! Marlowe is knocked out and when he comes to, he has to report Marriott’s death. Strangely, the cops warn him to drop matters as the case involves Jules Amthor (Otto Kruger), a quack psychiatrist. Enter Ann Grayle (Anne Shirley), who tries to get information out of Marlowe and has a cockamamie story about $100,000 worth of jade that she says belonged to her elderly father (Miles Mander), who has recently remarried a much younger woman, Helen (Claire Trevor).  Stranger still, Amthor appears to inform the dim-witted Moose that he knows of Velma’s whereabouts.

 

As you can see, this is not your straightforward white hats/black hats tale. What do we have here? Is this a wicked step-mother tale, a take-your-pick of dueling femmes fatales, or is everyone as mad as a March hare? All Marlowe knows for certain is that he likes the cut of Ann’s jib, and that too sounds alarms. Add a kidnapping, some mind-altering medication, a double cross or two, assumed identities, gunplay, and stories that don’t even close to adding up.

 

Raymond Chandler isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, but the man knew how to plot complex murder mysteries. That’s one element that makes Murder, My Sweet a certifiable film noir masterpiece, though one that has been unjustly underrated. Another standout feature is its deft mix of foreshadowing and shadows, courtesy of director Edward Dmytrk and cinematographer Harry Wild. I suspect that politics is a reason why Murder, My Sweet has fallen from the limelight. If Dmytrk’s name sounds familiar, he was one of the Hollywood Ten that appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947. Whereas most of the Ten (and numerous others) went to jail and/or were blacklisted for suspected Communist Party membership, Dmytrk avoided said fates by confessing his guilt and fingering other suspected communists. It saved his career but made him contemptible when alleged subversion in Hollywood later proved considerably more smoke than fire. Some never forgave Dmytrk and still others accused him of ripping off Orson Welles’ hypnotic use of light in Citizen Kane. Both condemnations perhaps have merit, but there is little denying that Dymtrk was a highly skilled director. (He won a Best Director Oscar for The Caine Mutiny in 1954.)

 

Nor can we deny that Murder, My Sweet was a game changer for Dick Powell. He had previously been cast in squeaky clean roles, a sort of Pat Boone type. Powell yearned to be a serious actor and this film helped him tremendously in that pursuit. Hs Marlowe was not as cynical or as tough as Bogart’s, but it was considerably more nuanced.

 

I am a film noir geek and a Bogart fan, but those confessions aside, I’d rank Murder, My Sweet among the finest of the genre. And, yes, I’d say that Powell was a superior Philip Marlowe.

 

Rob Weir

Gordon Lightfoot: A Tribute

 

1971: Philadelphia Academy of Music

 

I knew the name, but I was first lured by the venue, one of the best places to hear music in North America. When the show began–always late in those days–the house lights dimmed and a circle of light spilled onto center stage. Gordon Lightfoot stood in its midst and began to strum his 12-string. Then came a rolling baritone that seemed to sweep in from the Canadian prairie. Thirty seconds  into “Early Morning Rain” I knew what I had to do next.

 

When I returned to my South Central Pennsylvania home, I drove to a music store in Hagerstown, Maryland, to buy an acoustic guitar. I figured I’d better start with six strings, a good choice as I didn’t know an Am from an auxiliary verb. I picked up a cheap piece of junk a step up from a Sears Silvertone and the man at the counter refused to sell it to me. He handed me an Epiphone and said, “This is more money, but if you buy that other guitar you’ll be back in two weeks. This one will last you.” He was right. I still own that old Epiphone, though I seldom play it anymore. But you can guess what song I played after I learned three chords.

 

Imagine how I felt when I learned, on May 1, that Lightfoot had passed away at the age of 84. People often ask me to name my favorite musician. That’s a dumb question as tastes change over time and I’ve run through dozens of “favorites.” There are none, though, whose impact on me has been as profound as Gordon Lightfoot. Bob Dylan once said he never heard a bad Gordon Lightfoot song. I could probably name a few, but I know what he meant. I have a binder full of Lightfoot songs I play that keeps getting thicker, though my hands and voice are shot.

 

A lot of them aren’t hard to play because Lightfoot was always about the song, not the performance. He once told me that almost everything he did was capoed so he could re-use the same chord shapes. That’s not entirely true, but if you hear anything really complex on one of his songs, it’s probably either Rod Shea or Terry Clement you’re hearing. Lightfoot was a storyteller, not a showman.

 

He is probably best known for epic songs such as “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” and “The Canadian Railroad Trilogy,” the latter of which was once (and might still be) part of the soundtrack for a documentary film on Canada’s first transcontinental railroad shown at the Museum of Civilization on the Quebec side of the Ottawa River across from Parliament. Ironically, though, a lot of his very best were marked by concision. Listen to “I Heard You Talking In Your Sleep,” which lays out a world of pain in just two short verses. Or “River of Darkness,” which Marty Robbins covered and brought Lightfoot to public attention. “The way I Feel’ was the first song I ever finger-picked. Why? Just 16 lines–four of which are repeats–and two chords (Dm/Am7).

 

He has been called a pop star and a folk singer. True enough, but he was also an acoustic country throwback to the days in which country music wasn’t tarted up with pretense and bullshit. If “Second Cup of Coffee” and “Ten Degrees and Getting Colder” aren’t country songs, no one is yet to write one. The man sang about roadside diners, snow falling on windowsills, hitch-hiking, ice on the river, Chinook winds, the Rockies, and the bottle on the table. Yeah, country.

 

He tried the Greenwich Village scene and a stint in La-La Land, but they didn’t take. He went back to Ontario and spent most of his life no further from his home in Orillia than Toronto, 90 minutes to the south. On “Highway Songs” he sang:  …headin’ north across that line/Is the only time I’m flyin’.  Because he stuck, unlike Canadian-born stalwarts like Drake, April Lavigne, Joni Mitchell, and Neil Young, Gordon Lightfoot became a symbol of Canadian pride. I was in a B & B in Ottawa just before COVID and got into a music discussion one morning and talked about how Lightfoot almost died of an aneurysm. When I mentioned that I had interviewed him twice, the room hushed: “You interviewed Gord!?” I got so much cred I didn’t have the heart to tell them I only earned $50 a pop from those interviews.  

 

 

He was no saint. Gord married thrice and freely admitted he was a heartless Lothario in his youth. Listen to “I’m Not Sayin’” or “For Lovin’ Me.” They’re  catchy and brutally honest, but are definitely bad boy fantasies. You sometimes wonder how they came from the pen of the same guy who wrote the gorgeous “Song For a Winter’s Night” or the regret-filled “If I Could read Your Mind,” both of which vie for the status of my all-time favorite Lightfoot composition.

 

I could go on and on about Gordon Lightfoot, but I’ll just say that the news of his death hit me like a line from “one of his songs: I’ll be alright/I’ll be alright if I don’t have to smile.

 

Rob Weir

Dave Barry's Swamp Story Releases Tomorrow

 

 

SWAMP STORY (May 2, 2023)

By Dave Barry

Simon & Schuster, 320 pages.

★★★★

 

 

 

Dave Barry is a funny man, a talent he wields by writing id-driven broad humor. Like old-time comics such as Henny Youngman and Rodney Dangerfield, he throws one thing after another at us until we chuckle despite ourselves. Swamp Story is another tale set in one of Barry’s favorite lampoon targets: Florida.

 

As the title suggests, Swamp City is set in the Everglades. If you’re thinking alligators, snakes, and sinkholes, you’re on the right track. Add gold hunters, eccentrics, con artists, lovable losers, and lawlessness and you’re well on your way. There’s something about isolated spits of land abutting sinking mud, marshland, and deep water that make them refuges for the socially marginal. That’s where we find Phil and Stu trying everything to eke out a living, including hiring themselves out for children’s birthday parties. Only a besotted divorced guy in need of money like Phil would dare to show up for a Frozen-themed party armed only with an over-sized Dora the Explorer head. Let’s just say that it didn’t go well except on TikTok.

 

Meet Jesse Braddock, who plays the role of the beautiful golden girl who made bad decisions. She grew up in Connecticut comfort, rebelled against her parents, and ran off with a guy they warned her was a jerk. Now she has a baby, Willa, is living in the Everglades, and boyfriend Slater really is a jerk. He proves that by being more interested in shooting video of a giant python wiggling toward Jesse and Willa than in chasing away the snake. No wonder she likes to walk paths through the Everglades to get away from him and his crazy friend Kark. In one trip, she happens upon something that might be linked to a legend of buried Confederate gold. If only she had known she was being stalked by Billy and Duck Campbell, two rednecks, who plot to force her to show them where she found it, beat her up (or worse), and make off with the gold.

 

Now meet brothers Ken and Brad, the owners of Bortle Brothers Bait & Beer, a business begun by their father and uncle. To say that it’s out of the way and was an idea whose time never came understates matters. It’s one of those eclectic general stores that dot the American landscape where you stop in hope of lunch, glance at the décor and decades out-of-date dusty merchandise, and decide all you really need is gas and a soda. Phil’s Internet notoriety gives Ken an idea. After reading about Michigan Melon Heads–diminutive humanoids with gigantic heads who are rumored to be fierce–Ken convinces Phil to spray paint the Dora head, creates a film crew, and launches a hoax. He uploads deliberately blurry videos to suggest that Melon Head Monsters have migrated to Florida. Before you can say “‘Glades Man,” the handle for the shirtless and brainless Slater, 8.3 million people have seen the clips and curiosity seekers pour into the area and stop at Bortle Brothers.

 

The plot thickens and so does the cast. Patsy Hartmann was once a star TV reporter for Miami’s Channel 8 until a younger anchor forced Patsy out of the limelight. Guess who is tapped to go to the Everglades to cover the Melon Head story and stay for the annual python roundup? There is also Andrew Pletzger, an egoistic real estate developer; Eric Turpake, an attorney as crooked as a Bortle Brothers fishhook; an obese former University of Florida football player and purveyor of drugs nicknamed Pinky; U.S. Secretary of the Interior Whitt Chastain, who hates the outdoors; and python wrangler DeWayne “Skeeter” Toobs, who arrives for his interview on a runaway airboat and with his “emotional support boar” Buddy. Danger abounds in the Everglades, perhaps none as ominous as a crime gang led by Kristov Berliuz.

 

What could go wrong? Throw this many offbeat people into one small part of swamp and the sky’s the limit. In the hands of Dave Barry, though, even danger is a subject for absurdism and cheap laughs. His Florida makes Texas seem like a bastion of choir boys by comparison. Aside from occasional off-color language and comeuppance to those upon whom we’d wish it, though, Barry prefers belly laughs to distress. We laugh along with him because we know that he knows that everything is meant as a big goof, not high art.

 

Rob Weir

The Winners: A Novel for the Stanley Cup!

 

THE WINNERS: BEARTOWN #3 (2022)

By Fredrik Backman

Atria Books, 688 pages.

★★★★

 

 

 

I nearly skipped The Winners because I felt that three books about ice hockey in two Swedish towns was one too many. Send me to the penalty box for tripping. I should have known that Fredrik Backman would deke when I thought he was grinding. The Winners is a must read during the Stanley Cup playoffs, but you don’t need to know a Zamboni from tagliatelle to appreciate all three Beartown novels.

 

The Winners returns us to an isolated forested section of Sweden where the residents of Beartown and Hed simply hate each other. Though their economic survivals are inextricably linked, there’s little they won’t do to express their mutual disgust–rumbles between rival gangs, workplace antagonism, political machination–but the hockey rink is where the rivalry becomes the Crusades on skates.   

 

Backman picks up the narrative two years from where he left off in Book # 2, Us Against You. That book involved an assault that ripped apart Beartown, but it also paved the way for its reversal of fortune. Hed had always been the more prosperous town and usually prevailed on ice, but the pendulum has swung to Beartown, with its new businesses, expensive new homes, a star player (Amat), and a newly refurbished rink, whereas the roof of Hed’s rink has collapsed, a symbol of its overall decline.

 

Backman readers have previously met the Andersson family, former NHL player-turned-Beartown-general manager Peter, his lawyer wife Kira, and offspring Maya and Leo. Maya is now studying music in Stockholm, Peter is at sea after giving up the GM job, and Leo is AWOL in video game stocked room. Other Beartown fixtures have their own concerns. Amat is overweight from an injury, drink, and ennui; Benji left town to escape the homophobes; former golden boy Kevin has departed to parts unknown; Tails is engaged in all manner of dodgy schemes; Ramona is running out of steam; Ekisabeth Zackell remains a brilliant hockey coach with the personality of particle board; and Ana, Maya’s BFF, is mired in sadness and anger. Oddly, Peter and local thug Teemu have grown friendly, but the only happy campers in Beartown are Bobo, now an assistant coach; former coach Sune; and young Alicia, who might be the future face of Beartown hockey.

 

Backman introduces new characters, including junkyard mogul Lev, who is either a gangster or just a terrible agent. Backman parallels the Anderrssons with a Hed family—firefighter Johnny, his midwife spouse Hannah, and their four children (Tess, Toby, Ted, and Ture). Ted, though still in juniors, could be Hed’s equivalent of Amat. There is also a new editor in Hed who is being fed information by her furtive father that threatens Beartown hockey; Theo, a local politician even sleazier than Tails; a silent goalie plucked from Hed nicknamed Mumble; Aleksandr, a Bears recruit of unspecified ethnicity; a dog named Bang!; and Matteo, a poor kid from Beartown who grew up in a fundamentalist family and missing his sister Ruth, whose fate provides the novel’s crisis point.

 

You might think that a devastating windstorm would bring Beartown and Hed together, but hatred is so intense that even junior hockey is pretext for violence, and neither can desist from all manner of underhanded plots. Mostly, both towns adhere to the same standard they hold for killing wolves: “Shoot. Dig. Silence.” The novel’s’ most profound moments come when fate does bring them together. One involves social class realities. In Beartown it’s the impoverished Hollow versus the new-money Heights; in Hed, it’s the schemers versus the working-class.

 

My initial thought was that The Winners took too long to get serious. I still think that, but the last third of the book is deeply moving. Backman takes us into living rooms, bars, workplaces, campgrounds, and frozen sheets where unbridled play prevails. It’s also where a lot of Backman’s foreshadowing comes into the light, including the famed Chekov’s gun literary device. Backman’s technique reminds me of the late John Prine’s musical repertoire: he makes us laugh one moment, shake our heads at absurdity the next, but moves us to tears when we least expect it.

 

The wrap-up coda went by too fast and was (often) too neat. Yet when Backman writes, “Maya’s story could easily have ended the same ways as Ruth’s story,” we know what he means. If you can avoid a lump in your throat upon discovery, you’re made of sterner stuff than I. Would it have been a stronger 400-page book? Probably, but it’s a bloody good one at 688.

 

Rob Weir

 

 

60 Years of Collecting at UMass

 

University Museum of Contemporary Art

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Through May 14, 2023

[Click on Image for full size] 

 

The Morrill Act of 1862 is one of the lesser known pieces of legislation to bear President Abraham Lincoln’s signature. It–and a second Morrill Act in 1890–set up “land grant” colleges. They were supposed to offer “practical” degrees in four fields: science, military science, engineering, and agriculture. The first three bear little resemblance to the fields of study those terms conjure today and the fourth, agriculture, was the true centerpiece for most land grant colleges. In 1862, farming was still the largest occupation in the United States and so it remained until the 1920s.

 

Amherst, Massachusetts received a land grant college, one affectionately nicknamed “Mass Aggie.” As late as 1941, what was then called Massachusetts College had just over 1,000 students–a far cry from the more than today’s 31,000 students. UMass Amherst did not become a university until 1947.

 

What this means insofar as this post is concerned is that UMass and most other land grant schools haven’t been around long enough to accumulate the huge endowments and gifts of Ivy League schools or elite private colleges. Nor did they have the resources of museums such as the Metropolitan in New York or the MFA in Boston. Want to buy a Van Gogh? It could cost over $80 million and not even a school whose current budget is $3.4 billion can afford to allocate that much of its operating costs for one work of art. So how does a relatively new university acquire collections befitting what they have become? Collect contemporary art, especially that of yet-unknown, up-and-coming, or generous visiting artists.

 

Collecting contemporary art is a crap shoot though. How valuable is it? In many cases no one knows until years later. After all, who was Andy Warhol when he was just another kid from Pittsburgh who moved to New York to try to establish himself as an artist? You know, like untold hundreds of others! What the UMass Museum of Contemporary Art did was simply collect–photographs, prints, graphics, lesser known paintings, architectural mockups–and hope for the best. The last of those is particularly risky, as many interesting designs never get built.

 

UMass is now at a place where it can mount an exhibit of what it has acquired since the early 1960s when it grew like topsy. Photographs dominate Sixty Years of Collecting but you will recognize the shutterbugs and perhaps a few artists from other mediums. When you do, it means the staff chose well and that’s true as well of names that perhaps don’t ring a bell. 

 

Below is a sampling from the exhibit. Hurry to see it though, as it closes about the time of 2023’s commencement. 

 

 

Andy Warhol

   

Eliott Erwitt

 

Robert Mapplethorpe                                                                       

 

 

            

                                                                   

                             

 

 

 

 

 

                                                                 

                                        Ralph Meatyard

 

 Imo Nse Imel     

                                                            Roy Lichtenstein

Sheron Rupp

        

                                                                    Stephen Petegorsky

Tauba Auerbach

We Are the Light a Dud

 

WE ARE THE LIGHT (2022)

By Matthew Quick

Avid reader Press, 246 pages.

★

 

 

 Sometimes minimalism is efficient and appropriate. Sometimes it’s just minimal. We Are the Light falls into the second category. Perhaps I should have known better. Matthew Quick also wrote Silver Lining Playbook, which was made into a movie that I found schmaltzy. Like it, Lucas Goodgame, the central character of We Are the Light, is a damaged man.

 

Goodgame is part of a survivors’ group from a mass shooting at the Majestic Theater in Somewhere or Other, Pennsylvania, that left his wife Darcy and 16 others dead. Lucas isn’t too sad, though, because he believes that Darcy is an angel who visits him regularly. He even collects feathers that he says are from her wings and claims to have seen the souls of all the dead rise.

 

But when he writes to Karl, his Jungian therapist, and asks to see him to talk about all of this, Karl ghosts him. He writes letter after letter–often dropping them off at his door–until a restraining order makes him stop. Is Lucas so delusional that he has scared off his therapist? Lucas also angers Sandra Coyle from the group when he rebuffs her effort to enlist him in a gun control movement because he says he needs to focus on his grief before getting involved in politics.

 

The entire story is told through letters to Karl, which are loaded with Lucas’ take on Jungian theory in which he tries to apprise him of how he’s trying to heal himself. He tells of how his African-American friends Isiah and Bess are praying for him, of how Jill from the Cup of Spoons Diner has been cooking for him, and  how he has allowed young Eli Hansen to camp out in his backyard. That’s surprising because Eli has become the town pariah as it was his older brother Jacob who was responsible for the mass murder.

 

An old adage holds that a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing and this holds true for Lucas’ various “insights” into Jungian psychology. Even if you have only passing familiarity with such concepts, you can tell that Lucas understands some of its form, but not much about its function.

 

The plot takes other odd twists. Jill, who was Darcy’s best friend, seems to have moved in with Lucas almost immediately after Jacob shot up the town. Is she a grief maven or a grifter? That’s not nearly as weird as a subplot involving a way to help Eli to graduate from high school via a credited post-drop out project. The grand idea is to make a monster movie starring Eli and other locals that will debut at (gulp!) the Majestic Theater. This, somehow, is supposed to help the community heal. This really angers Sandra, who is convinced that Eli is as psychotic as his sanguinary brother. Lucas tells of his battles with Sandra, how the movie is proceeding, and his sadness that Eli has grown closer to two others and has moved out. All of this is detailed in, yep, letters to Karl–17 in all, one for each victim. Karl remains silent.

 

The last part of the book takes place nearly four years later and updates us on Lucas, his new Jungian therapist, his relationship with Jill, how Eli has fared, and Karl’s fate. If you sense you’ve been setup for a cheap plot ploy, who am I to dissuade you? You might like the resolution and manipulative sentimentality better than I did, but everything is pretty much what I expected from a novel that’s a classic one-trick pony.

 

About the best I can say for We Are the Light is that it didn’t turn into an evangelical Christian novel filled with miracles. Still, if this book is optioned, you’d do well to read reviews from respected film critics before viewing it. By all means avoid  trade magazine hacks and anyone who calls it “timely” because of it deals with the national plague of mass shootings. Let me be clear; those people insult Aurora, Buffalo, El Paso, Nashville, Sandy Hook, Uvalde, Virginia Beach, and all the other places where real people suffering from real anguish continue to grieve.

 

Rob Weir

Alice Howe: Artist of the Month

 

April’s Artist of the Month is a no-brainer. On Circumstance, Alice Howe shows how to make a folk/soul/country album that sounds like something special. “No histrionics” is a tag often applied to Howe and it’s apt. Unlike the oh-too-young singers who land in LA, Nashville, and Austin and think that drama is produced by volume alone, Howe understands that the key is to sing a song from the inside out. Her articulation is superb, a small detail that allows the deeper edges of her voice to shine and burnish her compositions.

 

On Circumstance, two other things stand out. First of all, she recorded it at the FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, and makes no bones about chasing the ghosts of Aretha Franklin and Etta James around the sound stage. Second, she collaborated with Freebo, the professional handle of David Friedberg, who has recorded and toured with a veritable who’s who of the music world: Ringo Starr, Bonnie Raitt, the McGarrigles, John Mayall, Crosby, Stills, and Nash… the list goes on. How many musicians do you know who drag out a tuba to go with their bass and guitar?

 

These days Los Angeles tries to claim Howe, but she’s from Newton, Massachusetts, grew up summering in Vermont, and graduated from Smith College so sorry, California, she’s a New Englander! You might know Howe from her 2017 EP You’ve Been Away So Long, the title track of which she reworks on Circumstance. (She also recorded two previous LPs.)  Check out how she mixes the lyrics-forward style of folk music with a bluesy country feel. Then watch her turn an NPR studio into a socks-on-the-sofa blues joint in “Travelin’ Soul.” Observe how she turns it up a notch higher still when she steps inside Muscle Shoals to take advantage of a studio band on “Somebody’s New Lover Now.” Somehow, she doesn’t sound totally devastated by her change of fortune! To circle back to the no-histrionics comment, notice how she airs it out without resorting to the vocal equivalent of playing air guitar. It’s a formula she repeats to great effect on “Love Has No Rules.”

 

If you prefer a more acoustic touch, “Let Go” will answer. As you watch this clip, ask yourself how many people sound this strong and clear when singing outside on a breezy day. “Things I’m Not Saying” is another keep-things-simple gem. Alice Howe wears a metaphorical Real Deal full body tattoo.

 

If you want to explore even more, you’ll find some clips of Howe performing amazing Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan covers. My only regret is that I had to be out of town when she played at the Parlor Room in Northampton last weekend.

 

Rob Weir