Le Retour du Faucon

Ward Bond is Moose Malloy, deranged escaped convict searching for a one time girlfriend named Velma. Drawing considerable noisy attention to himself, the Moose tracks down a shady night club manager who seems to know something—but is quickly murdered. That's just the beginning of a complicated plot that includes seedy characters, dimly lit locales, and more questions than answers.

George Sanders is excellent as Gay Lawrence—also known, of course, as the Falcon. Sanders handles the picture's serious mystery elements with gravity and style. He also manages to fit into the other half of the plot, which is essentially comic relief provided by the Falcon's right hand man Goldie Locke (Allen Jenkins) and the usual bickering police duo (James Gleason and Edward Gargan as exasperated inspector and dumb assistant detective).

Lynn Bari is fine as the female in the case – unexceptional but solid as the usual plucky girl that the Falcon teams up with. She and Sanders exchange some decent banter: "You believe me, don't you?" she asks at one point. "I like you," he answers, "which is much more important."

Easy viewing for fans of series mysteries, with Sanders' strong performance standing out.

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.

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.

As I watched the opening credits, I was surprised to see that this Falcon movie was actually based on the Raymond Chandler book "Farewell, My Lovely"--which I'd seen twice before in the forms of MURDER, MY SWEET (1944) and FAREWELL, MY LOVELY (1975). What particularly surprised me about this is that was a originally Philip Marlowe story, NOT a Gay Lawrence (a.k.a. "The Falcon") film. Now Raymond Chandler purists might balk at this, but the film actually compares reasonably well to these later films--even with a leading man who is so unlike the hard-boiled detective, Marlowe. While the settings were "classed up" quite a bit compared to the novel, the overall plot is still there with only a few minor changes (such as at the very end and the disposition of "Velma"). Additionally, Allan Jenkins, Lawrence's lady friend and the cops were integrated into the original plot.

Now if you were going to rate this film, you can't really compare this RKO B-film to the two later higher budget films. The later films are more faithful to the book, but they also have the advantage of being made AFTER Chandler became more famous--and when producers would have never considered getting rid of the Marlowe character. And, while some might be very critical of the lower budget THE FALCON TAKES OVER, if you compare it to other B-detective series films of the day (such as Boston Blackie, Charlie Chan or The Lone Wolf), it is clearly superior--mostly due to the basic foundation laid by Chandler. Plus, George Sanders is his usual affable and suave character--a guy that's hard not to like even if he isn't as jaded and tough as Marlowe.

For lovers of the B-movie genre, this is an exceptional and engaging film--significantly better than the later Tom Conway films in the series. In fact, aside from 'the earlier THE GAY FALCON, it might just be the best in the series.

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.