Sightlines · reception

How Murder, My Sweet was received

1944 · Edward Dmytryk · Murder, My Sweet on Sightlines

The arc

A hit in 1944 and one of the films French critics actually had on the table when they coined the term 'film noir' in 1946 — so its stock never crashed; it just got promoted from snappy thriller to founding document of a genre.

What’s debated

The forever fight: is Dick Powell the best screen Philip Marlowe — as Raymond Chandler himself reportedly felt — or does Bogart in The Big Sleep own the role?

Its footprint

Its hallucination sequence and hard-boiled voiceover ('a black pool opened up at my feet...') became the template for a thousand noir parodies — when a comedy spoofs a trench-coated detective narrating his own concussion, it's channeling this film.

Where it stands

Essential-noir syllabus material: the film noir fans hand you right after Double Indemnity and The Maltese Falcon, and a perennial 'Powell was robbed' rewatch on Letterboxd.

Did you know? RKO retitled Chandler's 'Farewell, My Lovely' to 'Murder, My Sweet' because Dick Powell was famous as a crooner in musicals, and they feared audiences would assume a Powell picture with 'Lovely' in the title was another song-and-dance movie.