Murder, my sweet

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Movie
German title Murder, my sweet
Original title Murder, my sweet
Country of production United States
original language English
Publishing year 1944
length 95 minutes
Rod
Director Edward Dmytryk
script John Paxton
production Adrian Scott
music Roy Webb
camera Harry J. Wild
cut Joseph Noriega
occupation

Murder, My Sweet (Alternative title: murder, my darling , and Goodbye, darling ) is a in black and white twisted American film noir of Edward Dmytryk from the year 1944. The film is based on the mystery novel Farewell, My Lovely ( German Farewell, my Darling , formerly betrayed and atoned for ) by Raymond Chandler and is the first film appearance of Chandler's character Philip Marlowe . Murder, My Sweet counts alongside The Falcon's Trail , Laura andWoman without a conscience among the early and pioneering exponents of film noir.

Private detective Philip Marlowe is tasked with looking for the missing girlfriend of an ex-convict. He is also investigating a stolen, valuable jade collar, which several people are interested in getting it back, and they are not very squeamish about it. Marlowe's research leads him to cheap dives and shelters, to a dubious private clinic and the elegant dwellings of Los Angeles ' upper class, until the connection between the two cases becomes apparent.

plot

Private detective Philip Marlowe is interrogated at the station by Lieutenant Randall and his men. His eyes, which were injured in an exchange of fire, are blindfolded. In a flashback , Marlowe recounts the story of the shooting that killed three people:

Marlowe receives the order from the recently released giant Moose Malloy to look for his missing friend Velma Valento. The nightclub in which Velma performed has meanwhile changed owners and staff. Marlowe asks Mrs. Florian, the widow of the previous owner, who claims that Velma has died. As she leaves, Marlowe notices Mrs. Florian making a phone call in a hurry, as if to warn someone.

Marlowe returns to his office where the dandy Lindsay Marriott is waiting for him. Marriott hires Marlowe to accompany him in handing over the money to buy back stolen jewelry. At the place of delivery, Marlowe is knocked down and Marriott is murdered. When Marlowe wakes up, he sees a young woman fleeing the scene. Police lieutenant Randall warns the private investigator to stay out of the case and above all to avoid the possibly involved "healer" Jules Amthor.

Ann Grayle appears in Marlowe's office and asks him about the whereabouts of a valuable jade collar. He accompanies Ann to the estate of her father Llewellyn Grayle, who is married to Helen, Ann's stepmother, who is many years her junior. The collar was stolen from Helen in a robbery and Marriott had agreed to buy it back. Helen asks Marlowe to find the collar and Marriott's killer. Surprisingly, Jules Amthor turns up at the Grayles' house; Marlowe warns that the police are on his tail.

Later, the private detective and Moose Malloy meet in a nightclub. Moose forces him to accompany him to Amthor's apartment. There Marlowe accused Amthor of colluding with Marriott and running a blackmail ring; Amthor, on the other hand, is convinced that Marlowe knows where the collar is. When Marlowe denies this, he is knocked down, taken to Amthor's private clinic and drugged. After three days of captivity, Marlowe is able to free himself and go into hiding with Ann. He recognizes Ann as the young woman he saw at the site of Marriott's failed surrender and murder, but Ann denies any involvement in the crime.

Marlowe drives Ann to the Grayles Beach House, where Marriott last lived. After a brief rapprochement between the two of them, an argument breaks out, and she accuses him of using her only as an informant. When Helen appears, Ann leaves the house. Helen admits to Marlowe that she intended to give Amthor her collar in exchange for his silence about her marital infidelity, but that it was stolen beforehand. Suspecting Amthor of killing Marriott, she tries to convince Marlowe to help her get rid of Amthor by luring him to the beach house. Marlowe visits Amthor in his apartment and comes across his body, apparently his neck was broken by a man with great strength. Moose later appears in Marlowe's office. Marlowe promises to take him to Velma.

The next evening, Marlowe and Moose drive to the beach house. Marlowe instructs Moose to follow him only on his sign and goes ahead. In the house, Helen shows him the collar and explains that she only faked the theft so that Marriott, who blackmailed her, could be eliminated when it was handed over. Marlowe combined that Helen would have killed him too, had it not been for Ann unexpectedly showing up at the scene. Shortly thereafter, Ann and her father appear. When Helen tries to kill Marlowe, Grayle shoots her. Moose, who heard the shot, enters the apartment and recognizes the Velma he was looking for in the dead Helen. Moose and Grayle shoot each other, Marlowe, who tries to intervene, is blinded by the muzzle flash.

Marlowe finishes his story. Since this coincides with Ann's testimony, who survived the shooting unharmed, he is released from police custody. His eye injury, he is told, will take months to heal. Marlowe and Ann kiss on the cab ride from South Kingsley Police Station to 1800.

background

Literary prelude: the “hard-boiled” detective novel

In the 1920s, with the stories published in the magazine "Black Mask", a new type of crime story developed, the so-called hard-boiled detective story. Was style development it primarily Dashiell Hammett that "with gangsters, who portrayed an urban milieu femme fatales , brutal cops and corrupt rich" was populated. In the early 1930s he was followed by Raymond Chandler , whose protagonist, private detective Philip Marlowe, was the counterpart to Hammett's investigator Sam Spade. Chandler's first Marlowe novel, The Big Sleep , was published in 1939, and Farewell, My Lovely , in 1940 . Hammett and Chandler's books, together with the novels by James M. Cain and Cornell Woolrich , formed the literary fund from which many film noirs made use.

Book and film

Director of the film: Edward Dmytryk

Chandler's novel Farewell, My Lovely had already been filmed in 1942 by the film studio RKO Pictures as The Falcon Takes Over , but, as RKO producer Adrian Scott and director Edward Dmytryk agreed, without using its potential. The Falcon Takes Over had taken over the main features of the plot of the novel, but replaced the main character Marlowe by RKO's series hero "The Falcon". Since RKO still had the film rights and the news of Chandler's collaboration with the not yet started woman without a conscience made the rounds in Hollywood , it was decided to make a remake. Chandler was unable to participate in Scott's project because he was under contract with Paramount Pictures .

The film adaptation made a few changes to the novel. The opening scene of the novel, in which Moose Malloy kills a man in a bar frequented exclusively by blacks, has been toned down, as well as a frame story at the police station and a happy ending between Marlowe and Ann Grayle. The issue of corruption in the ranks of the police and, in the case of Amthor and Marriott, allusions to homosexuality have been erased. Despite these interventions, Chandler congratulated screenwriter John Paxton in a letter after the film was released for the adaptation of his novel, which he had considered impossible to film.

Production and film launch

Murder, My Sweet was made with a modest A-movie budget of 450,000 US dollars and 44 days of shooting. Since many scenes took place at night, Dmytryk was able to work inexpensively with uncomplicated backdrops that were often submerged in darkness. Most of the shooting took place in the studio. For the outdoor shots, the Sunset Tower (now the Argyle Hotel) on Sunset Boulevard , which is the Amthor's apartment in the film, was used. Filming ended on July 1, 1944.

According to Anne Shirley , she and Claire Trevor had tried in vain to convince Scott and Dmytryk to cast the two female roles against the image of the actresses - Trevor "bad and fascinating", Shirley "good and stupid". In early 1945 Shirley married Scott and withdrew from the film business (the marriage divorced in 1948). Dmytryk had initially resisted the occupation of Moose Malloy with Mike Mazurki , until RKO production manager Charles Koerner campaigned for Mazurki.

The film first opened in the USA on December 18, 1944 under the novel title Farewell, My Lovely and on March 8, 1945 under the new title Murder, My Sweet . The title change was made after negative audience reactions, as Farewell, My Lovely suggested a musical with the lead actor Dick Powell . Powell had become known for singing roles and was just undergoing an image shift towards more dramatic roles, which was highlighted in the advertising for Murder, My Sweet with the slogan "the new Dick Powell". Chandler later admitted that Powell had come closest to his vision of Marlowe. Powell's Marlowe "is the rough but vulnerable hero who throws Chandler's snappy jokes around to cover his tangible side." (Gene D. Phillips) After the title change, Murder, My Sweet became a box office hit. In Great Britain , the film started as Farewell, My Lovely, analogous to the book .

Murder, My Sweet was shown in the Federal Republic of Germany on November 14, 1972 as Mord, mein Liebling on television and was first shown in German cinemas in 1988 under its original title. In 2012 the film was also released on DVD in Germany under its original title .

Analysis and aftermath

Style: influences and effects

Although film historians mainly name John Huston's Dashiell Hammett film Die Spur des Falken (1941) as the first genuine film noir, Murder, My Sweet , which was only launched three years later, is also counted among the early and style-defining examples of this new film genre or series. The French film critic Nino Frank , who coined the term film noir in 1946, cited (in addition to Die Spur des Falken , Laura and Frau ohne Conscience ) Murder, My Sweet as an example of a new type of crime film whose trademarks include their radical visual style , their complex narrative form and their interest in the psychology of the characters. Dmytryk countered this in an interview: “We did n't see Murder, My Sweet as a film noir. It was just a movie that needed that dark mood from start to finish. [...] It wasn't until a year or so later that the French decided to call it film noir. "

Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward described Murder, My Sweet in their film noir compendium as archetypal for numerous films made later: “The use of femme fatale, an atmosphere of paranoia , the hero's vulnerability, the motive for violence, excess grotesque characters and the threatening surroundings all contribute to the noir mood. ”The“ confusing shooting angles ”and“ high-contrast low-key lighting ”referred to a“ broken and ominous world that got out of hand ”. The film is "not only a highly stylized and complex detective thriller , but also an uncompromising vision of corruption and decay." Bruce Crowther pointed in Film Noir. Reflections in a dark mirror point to two further elements that should reappear in other film noirs, the use of the flashback and the narrator's voice or voiceover . “In the deadly unstable world of noir,” says Foster Hirsch in The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir , the voice-over often serves as a stop, it is the “guide through the noir labyrinth”.

Foster Hirsch deserves special mention for the hallucination scene in Murder, My Sweet , which was one of the first and best examples of the generally visible influence of German Expressionism in film noir . This had not only found its way into the gloomy thrillers of the 1940s because of its shadowy and high-contrast imagery, which was regarded as "useful", but was also the visible influence of the German directors who emigrated from National Socialist Germany . “A constant remnant of Expressionism in film noir is the nightmare sequence in which for a moment, under the protection of a dream interlude, the film becomes openly subjective and penetrates the hero's consciousness in order to reveal its disordered fragments.” At the same time, Hirsch restricted one that an American thriller, also with consideration for its audience, could only adopt such strong expressionist distortions over short distances.

Social criticism

Murder, My Sweet was the first of four films made jointly by producer Scott, director Dmytryk and screenwriter Paxton. This was followed by Cornered (1945, again with Dick Powell) on the struggle between European fascists and anti-fascists who went underground in Argentina , Unforgotten Jahre (1947) and In the Crossfire (also 1947), which highlighted anti-Semitic tendencies within the US armed forces . The focus on political issues was no coincidence: Scott and Dmytryk had joined the Communist Party of the United States during World War II , which, according to Dmytryk, “are the only ones who do something”.

Jennifer Langdon-Teclaw saw a close connection between the realistic film noir of the war years and the idealism of the left Popular Front in Murder, My Sweet : “Chandler's die-hard hero Marlowe wrestled with his need to protect the innocent and the knocked, and took away at the same time Cynicism realizes the violence and miserable reality of human nature and capitalist power relations. ” M. Keith Booker saw in the comparison of the world of Malloys and the Grayles a comment on existing class barriers. Dan Flory interpreted the desperate need to escape from one's own class and its social disadvantages as the mainspring for Velma / Mrs. Grayle, like most of the femme fatales of classic film noir. “Like“ The Glass Key ”,“ Murder, My Sweet ”was pervaded by a latent tendency towards social criticism, as can be demonstrated in the films, but even more so in the people involved, that the genre of private eye films is definitely a derivative of a “left” current in Hollywood that was put to an end by McCarthyism . ”( Georg Seeßlen ) Scott's and Dmytryk's careers came to an abrupt end during the McCarthy era. Both were summoned in 1947 for membership of the Communist Party, sentenced to prison terms and no longer found employment in the US film industry (see Hollywood Ten ).

One of the few different voices was that of John Paul Athanasourelis, who saw Chandler's novel in Dmytryk's film version stripped of social criticism. Robert Miklitsch gave the film a rare and unusual interpretation, comparing the ending with a fairy tale in which Moose Malloy played the role of the giant, Helen Grayle that of the evil stepmother, her husband that of the benevolent but ignorant father and Marlowe that of the knight. who, put to the test, rejects the "evil grail " (the jade collar and Helen) and chooses the "good one" (Ann).

successor

Murder, My Sweet was the third film to be made after Chandler's books, but it was the success of Dmytryk's production that sparked great demand for the author's work. Three more film adaptations were made in a short period of time: Dead Sleeping by Howard Hawks , Die Dame im See by Robert Montgomery and The Brasher Doubloon (based on The High Window ) by John Brahm . The biggest echo was the first published Dead Sleeping Firm , the Murder, My Sweet "in the public perception unjustly out of the running" (Bruce Crowther). It was not until 30 years later that Farewell's third screen version , My Lovely , appeared with Fahr zum Hölle, Liebling .

reception

criticism

Murder, My Sweet received outstanding reviews at the film's release. The direction and dialogues as well as the acting, especially by Dick Powell and Claire Trevor , were highlighted . Variety praised the film as “as clever as it is gripping” and Dmytryk's direction as “gruff and relentless,” adding, “The performance is on par with the production. Dick Powell is a surprise. ” Bosley Crowther of the New York Times described Murder, My Sweet as“ an outstanding heavy melodrama ”that, thanks to Paxton and Dmytryk, retains“ Chandler's sharp dialogue ”and“ the breakneck pace of the novel ”. Although Powell lacks “the iron coldness and cynicism of Humphrey Bogart ”, he does not need to apologize for it.

In later years, Murder, My Sweet was able to consolidate its classic status. In retrospect, Geoff Andrew of London's Time Out Film Guide judged the film to be a "successful adaptation" that "creates, like an incantation, a wretched, shabby world of changing loyalties and invisible evil". Powell's interpretation of Marlowe is "certainly closer to the author's imagination than Bogart in The Great Sleep " and Harry J. Wild's camera work is "real noir". For Phil Hardy's BFI Companion to Crime , Dmytryk and cameraman Wild created “one of the darkest and most beautiful films” of the 1940s. The “expressionist horror” of the “masterful hallucination scene” was particularly emphasized. Leonard Maltin said, in a nutshell, the film was "still powerful".

In Germany, Murder, My Sweet received little attention because it premiered around 30 years late on television, and the theatrical screening in 1988 also received no press coverage. The lexicon of international film gave a succinct verdict: “Expressive through the virtuoso use of cinematic means”.

Awards

Screenwriter John Paxton received the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Screenplay in 1946 .

literature

  • Raymond Chandler: Farewell, My Lovely. Alfred A. Knopf, New York 1940
  • Raymond Chandler: Cheated and atoned for. Desch Verlag, Munich 1958. WA: Farewell, my darling. Diogenes, Zurich 1980; Volk und Welt publishing house, Berlin 1980

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ David Levinson (Ed.): Encyclopedia of Crime and Punishment, Volume 1. Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, California, 2002, ISBN 0-7619-2258-X , p. 1016.
  2. ^ Gene D. Phillips: Out of the Shadows: Expanding the Canon of Classic Film Noir. Scarecrow Press / Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham, Maryland 2012, ISBN 978-0-8108-8189-1 , page x.
  3. ↑ Bruce Crowther: Film Noir. Reflections in a dark mirror. Virgin, London 1988, ISBN 0-86287-402-5 , p. 14.
  4. ↑ a b c d e f Gene D. Phillips: Creatures of Darkness: Raymond Chandler, Detective Fiction, and Film Noir. University Press of Kentucky, Lexington 2000, ISBN 0-8131-9042-8 , pp. 32-41.
  5. ↑ James Naremore: More than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts. University of California Press, Berkeley / Los Angeles / London 1998, ISBN 0-520-21294-0 , p. 234.
  6. ↑ "A-film" denotes, as opposed to a cheap B-movie , a film that is produced with a larger budget and effort.
  7. ^ Alain Silver, James Ursini: LA Noir: The City as Character. Santa Monica Press, Santa Monica 2005, ISBN 1-59580-006-9 , p. 82.
  8. ↑ Landmark hotel towers over Sunset Strip - and Hollywood lore. Owners hope new name will revive its glory , Los Angeles Times article, October 2, 1994, accessed February 14, 2013.
  9. ↑ a b Alain Silver, Elizabeth Ward (Ed.): Film Noir. An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style, Third Edition. Overlook / Duckworth, New York / Woodstock / London 1992, ISBN 978-0-87951-479-2 , pp. 192-193.
  10. ^ Murder, My Sweet on Turner Classic Movies, accessed February 12, 2013.
  11. ↑ James Robert Parish: The RKO Gals. Arlington House, New Rochelle 1974, p. 367.
  12. ^ William Hare: Early Film Noir: Greed, Lust and Murder Hollywood Style. McFarland & Co., Jefferson 2003, ISBN 0-7864-1629-7 , p. 51.
  13. ^ "Beneath Marlowe's tough exterior, Powell neatly implies in his superbly underplayed performance, is a humanity that can be reached. He is the tough-but-vulnerable hero, tossing off the biting Chandler wisecracks to cover up his tender spots. "- Gene D. Phillips: Creatures of Darkness: Raymond Chandler, Detective Fiction, and Film Noir. University Press of Kentucky, Lexington 2000, ISBN 0-8131-9042-8 , p. 41.
  14. ^ Richard B. Jewell, The Golden Age of Cinema: Hollywood 1929-1945. Blackwell, Malden / Oxford / Carlton 2007, ISBN 978-1-4051-6372-9 , p. 263.
  15. ↑ a b Murder, My Sweet in the Lexicon of International FilmsTemplate: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used .
  16. ↑ Entry on DVD publication in the online film database .
  17. ^ Charles Higham and Joel Greenberg refer to film noir as a genre, Raymond Borde and Étienne Chaumeton, however, as a series. Charles Higham, Joel Greenberg: Hollywood in the Forties. AS Barnes, London, New York 1968; Raymond Borde , Étienne Chaumeton: Panorama du film noir Américain. Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris 1955.
  18. ↑ Andrew Spicer: Film noir. Pearson Education, Essex 2002, ISBN 978-0-582-43712-8 , p. 2.
  19. ↑ “We didn't think of Murder, My Sweet as film noir. It was a picture that simply demanded that dark mood from beginning to end. […] It wasn't for another year or so that the French decided to call it film noir. "- Gene D. Phillips: Creatures of Darkness: Raymond Chandler, Detective Fiction, and Film Noir. University Press of Kentucky, Lexington 2000, ISBN 0-8131-9042-8 , p. 40.
  20. ↑ "The disorienting angles, low-key and high-contrast lighting [...] point to a disordered and ominous world beond control. [...] Ultimately Murder, My Sweet is the archetype for a number of films made later. The use of the femme fatale , an atmosphere of paranoia, the vulnerability of the hero, the motivation of violence, the predominance of grotesque characters, and the threatening environment all contribute to this noir ambience. There is nothing sweet in Murder, My Sweet , a film that remains not only a highly stylized and complex detective thriller but also an uncompromising vision of corruption and decay. ”- Alain Silver, Elizabeth Ward (Ed.): Film Noir. An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style, Third Edition. Overlook / Duckworth, New York / Woodstock / London 1992, ISBN 978-0-87951-479-2 , pp. 192-193.
  21. ↑ Bruce Crowther: Film Noir. Reflections in a dark mirror. Virgin, London 1988, ISBN 0-86287-402-5 , p. 32.
  22. ↑ "In the fatally unstable noir world, voice-over narration often serves as an anchor. […] The voice-over narrator is our guide through the noir labyrinth. "- Foster Hirsch: The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir. Da Capo Press, New York 2001, ISBN 0-306-81039-5 , p. 75.
  23. ↑ “Expressionist motifs filtered into film noir , in diluted but nonetheless significant ways, because the German style offered an appropriate iconography for the dark vision of the forties thriller and also because a number of German directors fled to Hollywood from a nightmare society, bringing with them the special sensitivity that permeated their early work. Adjusted to the taste of American producers and their audiences, Expressionist elements in noir are more muted than those in the German films. [...] A consistent vestige of Expressionism throughout noir is the nightmare sequence, where for a few moments, under the protection of a dream interlude, the film becomes overtly subjective, entering into the hero's consciousness to portray its disordered fragments. One of the earliest and best of these Expressionist nightmares occurs in Murder, My Sweet (1944), where a short sequence dramatizes Marlowe's drug-induced delirium. […] An American thriller can accommodate Expressionist distortion at this pitch in short spurts only. ”- Foster Hirsch: The Dark Side of the Screen: Film Noir. Da Capo Press, New York 2001, ISBN 0-306-81039-5 , p. 57.
  24. ^ Brian Neve: Film and Politics in America. A social tradition. Routledge, Oxon 1992, p. 95.
  25. ↑ a b "Chandler's hardboiled hero Philip Marlowe grappled with his desire to be a knight-protector for the innocent and downtrodden, while cynically recognizing the violence and sordid realities of both human nature and capitalist power relations. Neatly combining the realism of wartime noir and the idealism of the Popular Front progressives, Murder, My Sweet received stellar reviews and earned a tidy profit for RKO. ”- Jennifer Langdon-Teclaw in: Frank Krutnik: " Un-American "Hollywood: Politics and Film in the Blacklist Era. Rutgers University Press, 2008, p. 154.
  26. ^ "[...] the film's dialogue between the world of Moose Molloy and that of the Grayles suggests a broader critique of the class differences upon which capitalist society is built." - M. Keith Booker: Film and the American Left. A Research Guide. Greenwood Publishing Group, Westport 1999, p. 129.
  27. ↑ Even some of the worst fatal women, including […] Velma Valento (Claire Trevor) in Murder, My Sweet […] have backstories that imply a certain depth to their actions because through these details the workings of the femme fatale become clearer as Desperate efforts to overcome the disadvantages of class. - Dan Flory: Philosophy, Black Film, Film Noir. The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park 2008, p. 119.
  28. ↑ a b Georg Seeßlen: Murder in the cinema. History and mythology of the detective film. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1981, ISBN 3-499-17396-4 , p. 231.
  29. ↑ "In Dmytryk's film all of Chandler's social criticism is erased." - John Paul Athanasourelis: Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe: The Hard-Boiled Detective Transformed. McFarland & Co., Jefferson 2012, p. 167.
  30. ^ "Hence the fairy-tale ending where Moose is the giant, Mrs. Grayle the wicked stepmother, Mr. Grayle the benign but benighted father, and Marlowe the Chandlerian knight who, although tested and even tarnished, renounces the bad grail (the jade necklace and Helen) for the good one, Ann. ”- Robert Miklitsch: Siren City: Sound and Source Music in Classic American Noir. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick 2011, p. 52.
  31. ^ "[...] the movie was unfairly overtaken in the public consciousness a couple of years later when Humphrey Bogart played Marlowe in The Big Sleep ." - Bruce Crowther: Film Noir. Reflections in a dark mirror. Virgin, London 1988, ISBN 0-86287-402-5 , pp. 32-33.
  32. ↑ “Murder, My Sweet, a taut thriller about a private detective enmeshed with a gang of blackmailers, is as smart as it is gripping. […] Director Edward Dmytryk has made few concessions to the social amenities and has kept his yarn strong and unyielding. [...] Performances are on par with the production. Dick Powell is a surprise […] Claire Trevor is as dramatic as the predatory femme […] ”- Review in Variety from 1945 (year only), accessed on February 12, 2013.
  33. ↑ "[...] a superior piece of tough melodrama [...] This is a new type of character for Mr. Powell. And while he may lack the steely coldness and cynicism of a Humphrey Bogart, Mr. Powell need not offer any apologies. […] Whole passages of Mr. Chandler's pungent sardonic dialogue were preserved by John Paxton, the script writer, and Edward Dmytryk's direction maintains the racy pace of the novel. ”- Review in the New York Times of March 9, 1945, accessed on February 11, 2013.
  34. ↑ "Fine adaptation of Chandler's novel [...] evocatively creating a seedy, sordid world of shifting loyalties and unseen evil [...] Powell is surprisingly good as Marlowe, certainly more faithful to the writer's conception than Bogart was in The Big Sleep [...] And Harry Wild's chiaroscuro camerawork is the true stuff of noir. ”- Review in Time Out Film Guide, Seventh Edition 1999. Penguin, London 1998, p. 286, accessed online on February 12, 2013.
  35. ^ "[...] Dmytryk and cameraman Wild make this among the darkest, most beautiful films of the 40s. There is a bravura hallucination with Marlowe under the influence of drugs […] but this expressionist horror hardly seems any different from the rest of the movie […] “- Phil Hardy (Ed.): The BFI Companion to Crime. University of California Press, Berkeley / Los Angeles 1997, ISBN 0-520-21538-9 , p. 235.
  36. ↑ "Still packs a wallop." - Leonard Maltin's 2008 Movie Guide. Signet / New American Library, New York 2007, p. 941.
This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on February 27, 2013 .