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Old and filthy rich Mrs Murdock (Florence Bates) hires private detective Philip Marlowe (George Montgomery) to retrieve for her the almost priceless Brasher doubloon that has only recently been stolen from her safe - a case Marlowe initially doesn't much care for because Mrs Murdock refuses to give him the whole truth, but ultimately he's swayed by the old woman's lovely secretary Merle (Nancy Guild), who seems to be constantly bullied by her employer and yet would do anything for her. Thing is, she's also one of only two logical suspects for the theft, the other being Mrs Murdock's son Leslie (Conrad Janis), who doesn't care too much for the private eye and makes his feelings vocal. Marlowe follows the trail of the doubloon to a coin collector (Jack Conrad) and a coin dealer (Houseley Stevenson) but finds them both murdered, but on the former he also finds a ticket for a  P.O. box, and checking the box he finds the doubloon. He returns to the Murdock place, but refuses to hand over the doubloon, after all the investigations have landed him in the middle of a murder case, with him being a logical suspect. Still, Mrs Murdock refuses to talk, but later persuades Merle to try and seduce Marlowe and steal the doubloon - but he sees through her charade. However, Marlowe also receives visits from crooked club owner Blair (Marvin Miller), who tries to persuade him to drop the case, and another coin collector, Vannier (Fritz Kortner), who tries to force Marlowe to hand over the doubloon. Instead Marlowe gets some information out of him, as it seems he has film footage of the murder of Mrs Murdock's husband, him having been pushed out of a window. From Merle, Marlowe learns that it was her who killed old man Murdock because he tried to force sexual favours out of her. Marlowe and Merle pay a visit to Vannier - to find him murdered. But they find the incriminating film, too. Now Marlowe has the police collect all the suspects and plays the film that proves without a doubt that it wasn't Merle but Mrs Murdock herself who pushed her husband out of a window, and she has also killed Vannier. The other coin collector and the coin dealer were killed by Leslie, who has also stolen the doubloon, and who, together with Blair, wanted to blackmail his mother. And in the end, Marlowe of course gets the girl.

Between 1944 and 1947, Philip Marlowe was a busy film character, leading no less than four features for four different studios, Murder My Sweet, The Big Sleep, The Lady in the Lake, and this one, the last and arguably least of the quartet - and it's not so much that The Brasher Doubloon is a bad movie per se, it's just a very routine (yet nicely filmed) film noir with a bit too muddled a plot (not an unusual problem with Raymond Chandler adaptations) and a lack of wit to butter over the incongruencies. And while George Montgomery delivers an ok performance, he's no match for Dick Powell in Murder My Sweet or Humphrey Bogart in The Big Sleep. That's not to say this isn't an at least to some extent entertaining film, just one of the lesser, more forgettable Philip Marlowe movies.

By the way, Raymond Chandler's novel The High Window has previously been filmed in 1942 as Time to Kill (Herbert I. Leeds), yet here Marlowe was replaced by series detective Michael Shayne, as played by Lloyd Nolan.

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

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