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The oneiric element understood later by Altman is swiftly indicated, the camera pans from bandaged eyes to a window and dollies toward the galaxy of neon outside. Philip Marlowe (Dick Powell) at work, the mind under the fedora "like a plumber's handkerchief." His client (Mike Mazurki) is a lovesick goon, punchy but resolute in his search for a missing sweetheart, the case dovetails with blackmail involving a necklace. "What do you know about jade?" "It's... green, isn't it?" The last face the shamus sees before blacking out at the scene of the crime belongs to a pert socialite (Anne Shirley), soon enough he's hopscotching on the checkerboard floors of the palace where her father (Miles Mander) keeps a "big-league blonde" (Claire Trevor). Raymond Chandler visualized by Edward Dmytryk is a collection of shadowy grids, from an interrogation lamp's inverted triangle of light in the opening titles to the silhouetted dame's cigarette plumes in the climax. "Some guys has the wrong ideas when to get fancy." The self-described "quack" (Otto Kruger) has his part to play, namely pumping the hero full of narcotics for a bravura nightmare of funhouse spirals and gargantuan hypodermics. (Floating doors swing open ahead of Hitchcock's Spellbound, smoke frozen like cobwebs is an effect reversed by Huston at the end of Fat City.) "Abrupt transitions" are prevalent when the guiding conscience gets habitually clobbered in the noggin, a running gag finds a mental pit spreading like oil to engulf the screen. "I felt pretty good. Like an amputated leg." Anchoring the noir comedy is Powell the hardened juvenile, signaling his shift from crooner to tough-guy by striking a match off a marble cherub's rump. "I'm a small business in a messy business, but I like to follow through on a sale." The tangle dissipates with a wink behind the blindfold, and two decades later there's Dmytryk's own anagram in Mirage. Cinematography by Harry J. Wild. With Douglas Walton, Don Douglas, Ralf Harolde, and Esther Howard. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |