The Falcon Takes Over

Put this one in the same category as "Satan Met a Lady". An amusing way to kill some time for hard-core fans (of Chandler or Hammett), but so far from "essential" that you can't even see the road back to "essential".

I guess that we have "The Thin Man" to blame for all this. The success of that movie (and franchise) must have inspired every movie studio out there to create their own version of the suave, wise-cracking society detective.

It terms of the source material, it's kind of a "mystery" to me (sorry) why they even felt it necessary to borrow part of the plot from "Farewell, My Lovely". The movie is only 65 minutes long, so you barely get past the first visit to Amthor (the psychic) and things are starting to wrap up. That's only about 1/4 or maybe 1/3 of the way through the original novel -- and most of what *is* taken from the novel had to be twisted around to fit the characters in this movie -- so you get none of the classic Chandler material about Santa Monica (excuse me, "Bay City"), the sanitarium, the gambling boat, etc, etc, etc. Also, the whole setup with Lindsay Marriott coming in to ask the detective to accompany him to his payoff is pretty absurd when the main character is a society bon vivant who solves crimes in his spare time rather than a professional private investigator. It seems to me like it wouldn't have been that much harder to just write a new mystery (or adapt some less incongruous one) but I guess that starting with "Farewell My Lovely" allowed them to finish the script for this movie in, say, twenty minutes instead of an hour.

So there's nothing "noir" about this movie at all; it's really only for hard-core fans of Chandler's writing or light 30s/40s mystery/comedies, but it's a fun way to pass some time on a rainy Sunday afternoon.

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.

Comparing this film to Chandler's novel or to Murder My Sweet - and I'm a huge fan of both - is pointless. This 'Falcon' is a terrific 40s programmer, and I enjoyed seeing how plot elements and characters from the novel were whipped up into a frothy and fun comedy. I've read all the bios on Chandler and knowing he loathed Hollywood, he probably loathed what RKO did to his magnum opus, but Falcon fans, and me, liked it. This is my first Falcon film, watched only because Lynn Bari played the female lead. My interest in seeing Bari's films comes from reading her superbly wonderful biography, 'Foxy Lady', and Bari is terrific here as the investigative reporter who could have solved this mystery all by herself. I've always liked George Sanders, and he doesn't disappoint. The Velma actress had the right vampish allure, but her hairstyle is jarring and I got distracted wondering why RKO didn't borrow Metro's Guilaroff to fix her wig. I laughed a lot at the comedians - Jenkins, Gleason and his sidekick, the Falcon's valet. All in all, I had a very enjoyable Saturday night at the movies.

Better than average Falcon, thanks to colorful Raymond Chandler characters and noirish touches. The suspense centers on what's happened to mystery woman Velma, instead of the more standard whodunit. An even bigger mystery is why the cast credits are so skimpy. A number of principal actors appear without name credit, including the pivotal Ward Bond and Hans Conreid. So, what's the story with this?

Anyway, Sanders is his usual smooth self as he tracks down the mystery woman; at the same time, Lynn Bari makes a sprightly girl-Friday reporter. The script comes up with some good throw-away lines, so cock an ear. Importantly, director Irving Reis has a feel for noirish touches that create more atmosphere than most Falcon entries.

Of course, the Chandler original has been filmed many times, most effectively as Murder My Sweet (1944). Nonetheless, considering its programmer status, this first version manages some interest. Ward Bond makes a convincing Moose Malloy, and get a load of Helen Gilbert as Diana Kenyon. She looks like a double-scoop vanilla ice cream cone. Also, the usually riveting cult actress Ann Revere has a minor role, unfortunately as a not very convincing Jesse Florian. Too bad the script didn't develop the phony psychic thread more fully since the hocus-pocus provides both atmosphere and color. Nonetheless, it's still an entertaining 60 minutes of Falcon.

George Sanders is again The Falcon in "The Falcon Takes Over," a 1942 entry into the series. This one is the plot of "Farewell, My Lovely," and Ward Bond as the nearly catatonic strongman Moose Malloy walking around in a fog looking for Velma.

They've sort of stuffed The Falcon and Goldy into this plot, a complicated story that was tough to cram into 65 minutes. Consequently this isn't the breezy Falcon we're used to, and most of the comedy goes to Goldy, who is terrified of Malloy and sees him around every corner. James Gleason, as the Inspector O'Hara, investigating the murder of a night club manager, also had a funny bit he did several times with his underling.

Hans Conreid has a serious role here as Marriot, and Turhan Bey has a small role as swami Jules Amthor.

All in all, entertaining, maybe not the usual Falcon except for his flirting with every woman, but decent.