wes-139
The plot of Chandler's "Farewell My Lovely" gets garbled enough to remind you of "The Big Sleep" four years later (where Chandler himself helped confuse things). More so from being compressed into B-film one hour running time, but surprisingly it works on its own terms. The Falcon, foregoing his customary evening dress after the opening scene to pose as a private eye, cannot be a real private-eye, with the British accent, good manners, a butler and a comic sidekick, but there is a surrogate investigator added to the plot in the form of a girl reporter (perky Lynn Bari), and Helen Gilbert contrasts her well as Veronica Lake-style femme-fatale Velma. Moose Molloy the ex-convict doesn't employ the detective, he remains an ominous background figure, emerging from the curtains in the psychic's consulting-room with real menace, and substitutes himself as driver (that old trick) to appear at the pay-off. The plot rehash overdoes the comic business with Chief O'Hara and Falcon's sidekick "Goldie" Locke, but it does work and is an interesting genre hybrid.
robert-temple-1
Enthusiasts for Raymond Chandler need to see this first filmed version of 'Farewell, My Lovely', which came out two years before the famous version entitled 'Murder, My Sweet' in the USA and 'Farewell, My Lovely' abroad. Ward Bond does an excellent version of playing Moose Molloy, unfortunately eclipsed by the unforgettable Mike Mazurki in that role in the next version. Sanders is as witty as ever, but seems somehow to be losing his enthusiasm, and a lot of the sparkle seems to have gone out of this third film, partly because Chandler and Arlen really did not mix. It must have been a terrible struggle to squeeze the Falcon and his entourage of stock characters into the brilliant Chandler novel. Chandler may have written a lot of wisecracks, but he did not write comedy, and the Falcon should never be separated for too long from gags. The brilliance of the second and the fizz of the first Falcon film do not really carry over here. One reason may be that the plot did not allow a suitable male/female battle for this one; there is a lot of kissing, flirting, and even swooning, but the true dynamics of the gender struggle are absent, and it all seems a bit forced. Hans Conreid swoops in again, this time as the suave Marriott, but he is soon killed without even having a chance to make a wisecrack as he falls. At this stage, the team were getting a bit world-weary and into the series mould. Staleness threatened, and soon Sanders would hand the role over to his brother Tom Conway, escaping while the going was good. Nevertheless, anyone with a serious interest in Chandler needs to see this, and as a Falcon film, it is not negligible, merely a lesser effort, and still manages to be amusing. If we hadn't been spoiled by the first two when the World Was Young and the falcon was fresh, maybe we would have thought this was better.
dbborroughs
This is an odd mix. The humor of the Falcon grafted into a Cliff notes version of Raymond Chandler that doesn't do either justice.The plot of Moose Malloy trying to find his Velma and leaving a trail of bodies in his wake has been done several times all very seriously. Here the case is taken from Phillip Marlowe and given to George Saunders as the Falcon and its almost is a classic.The problem is that the two styles, the Falcon's wisecracking doesn't mix with the seriousness of the source material. The two parts the humor and the crime drama are perfectly done when each takes the center stage but the shifting from one to the other doesn't really work well. Saunders is so good a hard boiled private dick that I really wonder what would have happened had be been allowed to play a real tough guy.The worst flaw of the film is only apparent to those who know the original story and that is the speed at which its told. We fly through this story at light speed, and while it works here as a programmer, its shortening is glaring and jarring to those who love the other versions.On its own terms its a very very good movie. As a representation of a Raymond Chandler book its a mere curio. I suggest you just take it for what it is for a good nights entertainment.
bmacv
This entry in an otherwise it-is-what-it-is series of crime programmers merits attention because it preserves the first filming of a novel by Raymond Chandler: Farewell, My Lovely two years before Edward Dmytryk's Murder, My Sweet, one of that handful of 1944 films that really got the noir cycle rolling.Often such adaptations bear scant resemblance to their original material, bringing to mind the screenplay Joe Gillis (in Sunset Blvd.) wrote that started out with Okies in the Dustbowl and ended up on a torpedo boat. But The Falcon Takes Over startlingly opens with a character called Moose Malloy (Ward Bond) looking for his Velma (Helen Gilbert can't even begin to pinch-hit for Claire Trevor). Along the way we visit that drunken old streel Jessie Florian (Anne Revere, every bit as good as Esther Howard) and Jules Amthor (Turhan Bey, complete with turban and crystal ball).Given the quality of much of the cast and the initial fidelity to Chandler's material, the movie promises to be much better than it turns out. And what sinks it is the notion that Chandler could supply fodder for a `programmer.' First of all, 90 or 100 minutes offer too brief a span for his baroque tales to unfurl; an hour plus change mutilates them irreparably. Second, franchises like Charlie Chan, or The Saint, or The Falcon are struck from the same template, to which all material must conform. So the setting is not the languorous corruption of Los Angeles but the hurly-burly of New York; missing as well is any sense of Chandler's awareness of the advantages conferred by wealth and class.But most conspicuous in his absence, of course, is Philip Marlowe. He disappears into George Sander's last run as The Falcon, before he bequeathed the franchise to his brother Tom Conway. (Sanders walks through this picture as if he had given up on the last one.) He has a sidekick, too (Allen Jenkins), who's chock-full of amusing malapropisms. Sidekicks and malapropisms are about as far from Chandler's dark universe as it's possible to go.
AD
