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Looking for his girlfriend Velma, brutish ex convict Moose Malloy (Ward Bond) enters a nightclub, makes his way to the manager's office, kills the manager, then makes a hasty escape, forcing the Falcon's (George Sanders) sidekick Goldy (Allen Jenkins) to drive him to a certain address. When Goldy returns to the scene of the crime, police inspector O'Hara (James Gleason) wants to arrest him as accessory to the crime, but the Falcon manages to dissuade the policeman, then has Goldy to drop him off where he has dropped Moose off - which results in Moose stealing their car, but they also pick up some interesting clues from the lady at the address, one Jessie Florian (Anne Revere), wife of a clubowner Velma has once worked at. Back at his office, the Falcon soon receives a visit from one Quincey W. Marriot (Hans Conried), who wants to hire him as his bodyguard in a not quite legal exchange of money for a stolen necklace. But once at the scene of the handover, Marriot shoots the Falcon with the Falcon's own gun, but is then gunned down and killed himself - while the Falcon survives unscathed as he always loads his gun with blanks. Enter cub reporter Ann Riordan (Lynn Bari), who is following the Falcon around to get the scoop that will put her on the map, and who soon proves to be as valuable a sidekick as any. Also enter socialite Diana Kenyon (Helen Gilbert), the woman whose necklace Marriot and the Falcon were to buy back, and enter a whole host of other characters, like two swamis (Turhan Bey, Juan Varro) and a club owner (Selmer Jackson), who all have the tendency to not live that long thanks to the homicidal rage of Moose. And ultimately it turns out that Diana Kenyon is actually the mastermind behind it all, and she lures the Falcon into an ambush, wanting to kill him but not before she has spilled the beans. Also, she admits to being the Velma Moose is after - but unfortunately, Moose has by now caught up with her, and hearing her confession of how she played everyone but him especially, he kills her in a blind rage, just before the police arrives to apprehend him.

The very first big screen appearance of Philip Marlowe ... actually turned out to not be a Philip Marlowe-movie at all but, while this is an adaption of Raymond Chandler's Farewell My Lovely, Chandler's hard boiled private eye has been substituted by Michael Arlen's British dandy detective The Falcon, which had been turned into a B-movie series by RKO starring George Sanders (and in later entries his real life brother Tom Conway) in the early 1940s - and that's probably the biggest problem of this movie: While Chandler's source material creates a complex and also a tad convoluted net of intrigue, everything had to be ironed out and simplified for this film's mere 63 minutes of running time, plus well-established characters of the series all had to be added to do their routines, eating further into the story - and the result is a pretty tired whodunnit that has its funny moments though. Ward Bond makes a very good brute though, while George Sanders plays the character well, but seems to be out of place in the story at hand.

By the way, Raymond Chandler's Farewell My Lovely was remade a mere two years later as Murder My Sweet, again at RKO, the first actual big screen appearance of Philip Marlowe - and a far superior movie. Between this one and Murder My Sweet though another Philip Marlowe-novel, The High Window, was adapted for the screen, Tim to Kill, with Marlowe being replaced by Michael Shayne.

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

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