Dick Powell scenes video

Dick Powell and Evelyn Keyes in "Johnny O'Clock" (1947) directed by Robert Rossen

Rhonda Fleming and Dick Powell in "Cry Danger" (1951) directed by Robert Parrish

A video featuring some scenes starring Dick Powell in the films "Murder, My Sweet" (with Claire Trevor and Anne Shirley), "Cornered" (with Micheline Cheirel), "Johnny O'Clock" (with Evelyn Keyes), "Cry Danger" (with Rhonda Fleming), and "The Bad & The Beautiful" (with Gloria Grahame).

"Farewell, My Lovely": metaphors and allusions in a literary hard-boiled novel

Martha Vickers as Carmen Sternwood in "The Big Sleep" (1946) directed by Howard Hawks

Next he sees somebody kill Geiger in his apartment. Carmen Sternwood is in the same room, without clothes. The next day a man calls Marlowe and says that Owen Tayler is dead. Owen Tayler was Sternwood’s chauffeur. Later Marlowe is held prisoner by Eddie Mars. Eddie Mars is a crook who has killed some people. Finally Marlowe finds out that Geiger was using Carmen to blackmail her father, but also that Eddie Mars was behind Geiger.

Claire Trevor plays the femme fatale in "Murder, My Sweet" (1944) directed by Edward Dmytryk, based on Raymond Chandler's novel "Farewell, My Lovely".

Philip Marlowe tells Police Lieutenant Randall in his novel "Farewell, My Lovely" (1940): "I like smooth shiny girls, hard-boiled and loaded with sin."

Dick Powell plays the detective Philip Marlowe in "Murder, My Sweet" (1944)

"Farewell, My Lovely" is famous for its metaphors. Chandler's second novel also features one of the richest troves of bizarre characters in American literature. This was Chandler's favorite novel, and many critics think it his best. There are three previous short stories whose parts or motifs are contained in "Farewell, My Lovely": “The Man Who Liked Dogs” (1936), “Try the Girl” (1936) and “Mandarin’s Jade” (1937). “The Man Who Liked Dogs” and “´Try the Girl” were originally published in Black Mask magazine. Chandler later changed publisher and “Mandarin’s Jade” (1937) was published in Dime Detective, which was contemporary alternative medium for pulp crime fiction.

Lindsay Marriott calls with a job: Marlowe iss to pay an $8,000 ransom for a jade necklace. The two drive to the rendezvous, but no one appears; when Marlowe investigates, he is sapped. Anne Riordan is waiting the next day in Marlowe's office, with the news that Mrs. Lewin Lockridge Grayle owned the jade necklace. Anne has persuaded her to hire Marlowe. The plots of the two stories begin to merge when it is revealed that Mr. Grayle owns KFDK radio, for Malloy's girl Velma was a singer. Anne then introduces Marlowe to the Grayles. After she and Mr. Grayle leave, Marlowe and Mrs. Grayle talk, drink and share a brief kiss.

"The house itself was not so much. It was smaller than Buckingham Palace, rather gray for California, and probably had fewer windows than the Chrysler Building. The floor was covered with Oriental rugs and there were paintings along the walls. We turned a corner and there was more hall. A French window showed a gleam of blue water far off and I remembered almost with a shock that we were near the Pacific Ocean and that this house was on the edge of one of the canyons."

"She reached for my glass and her fingers touched mine a little, and were soft to the touch. "George gets Thursday evening off. That's the usual day, you know." She poured a fat slug of mellow-looking Scotch into my glass and squirted in some fizz-water. It was the kind of liquor you think you can drink forever, and all you do is get reckless. She gave herself the same treatment."

-"I was wearing a white fox evening wrap"

-"I bet you looked like a dream," I said.

-"You're not getting a little tight, are you?"

-"I've been known to be soberer."

She put her head back and went off into a peal of laughter. I have only known four women in my life who could do that and still look beautiful. She was one of them.

-"You'd better sit over here beside me."

-"I've been thinking that a long time," I said. "Ever since you crossed your legs, to be exact." She pulled her dress down.

-"These damn things are always up around your neck," she explained.

-"I have to work in my own way." I took a long drink and it nearly stood me on my head. I swallowed a little air. "And investigate a murder," I said.

-"That has nothing to do with it. I mean that's a police affair, isn't it?"

-"Yeah -only the poor guy paid me a hundred bucks to take care of him- and I didn't. Makes me feel guilty. Makes we want to cry. Shall I cry?"

-"Have a drink." She poured us some more Scotch. It didn't seem to affect her any more than water affects Boulder Dam.

I took the refilled glass out of her hand and transferred it to my left and took hold of her left hand with my right. It felt smooth and soft and warm and comforting.

-"You're a little old-fashioned, aren't you?" She looked down at the hand I was holding.

-"I'm still working. And your Scotch is so good it keeps me half-sober. Not that I'd have to be drunk-" She slapped my wrist. She said softly:

-"What's your name?"

-"Phil. What's yours?"

-"Helen... Kiss me."

"She fell softly across my lap and I bent down over her face and began to browse on it. She worked her eyelashes and made butterfly kisses on my cheeks. When I got to her mouth it was half open and burning and her tongue was darting red between her teeth. The door opened and Mr. Grayle stepped quietly into the room. I was holding her and didn't have a chance to let go. I lifted my face and looked at him. I felt as cold as Finnegan's feet, the day they buried him."

"The blonde in my arms didn't move, didn't even close her lips. She had a half-dreamy, half-sarcastic expression on her face. Mr. Grayle cleared his throat slightly and said: "I beg your pardon," and went quietly out of the room. There was an infinite sadness in his eyes. I pushed her away and stood up and got my handkerchief out and mopped my face".

Marlowe wakes in a private sanatorium in "Bay City," modeled on Santa Monica, suffering withdrawal from an unknown drug. He overpowers an attendant and escapes, glimpsing Malloy on the way out. Anne Riordan's house is nearby; she feeds and repairs him and asks him to spend the night, but he returns to his apartment.

Marlowe and Riordan clear up loose ends over drinks. Mrs. Grayle killed Marriott, because he knew she was Velma and was blackmailing her. She used him to keep Jesse Florian quiet. Jesse gave Marlowe's card to Marriott and was accidentally killed by Moose. But the case does not conclude neatly. Mr. Grayle still loves Velma, who he elevated from vaudeville. He won't cooperate with police.

To spare him, Velma flees East and sings in nightclubs until a Baltimore policeman recognizes her, then she commits suicide. Like Othello, to whom Marlowe alludes in the novel's last lines, Malloy and Mr. Grayle both "loved not wisely, but too well." Spying on Malloy and necking with Velma, bringing him to face her infidelity, Marlowe could function as Iago. But Chandler avoids that implication by his final burst of empathy for Velma.

Perhaps the most literate hard-boiled novel ever written, Farewell, My Lovely explodes with metaphors and allusions. Their density is manifest on the first page: Moose Malloy "looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food" is not only a stunning contrast of black and white, the edible and the poisonous, but an allusion to Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, in which a spider emerges from Miss Havesham's wedding cake. When he and Marriott drive to the rendezvous, he remarks that "this car sticks out like spats at an Iowa picnic": This refers to the well-dressed politicians who courted the votes of immigrant Iowans at the Iowa Society picnic every January 18 in Long Beach.

Beneath the novel's frantic action, the theme is tightly knit. In the astonishing revealed plot, all the crime results from Velma's rise to become Mrs. Grayle. She believes in the great American economic myth, but must give up her profession, her name, and her boyfriend to succeed – and then lives in constant fear of discovery. Chandler, as an immigrant living in the foremost city of migration, shows not only the cost of success, but that it is antithetical to that sentiment called love, represented in Malloy.

Some of Marlowe's wisecracks in "Farewell, My Lovely":

"We sneered at each other across the desk for a moment. He sneered better than I did."

"I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a gun. I put them on and went out of the room."

"The wet air was as cold as the ashes of love."

"His dinner clothes were midnight blue, I judged, because they looked so black. I thought his pearl was a little too large, but that might have been jealousy."

Marlowe alludes to soured romance and love interests that could only come through personal experience:

"All men are the same. So are all women — after the first nine."

"Dead men are heavier than broken hearts."

Marlowe is, described by Chandler: "a complete man, a common man and an unusual man… I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things."

"Therefore, while the reader may be concerned with the intimate details of Marlowe’s private life, wondering about his past romances and relationships, Chandler is telling us simply to take Marlowe for what he is—a man of honor. What is inside his heart does not matter. If he is honorable, we just know that it is there. Instead, Chandler has to focus on making Marlowe into the ideal man. This gives Marlowe a tempered, unemotional machismo that shields us from seeing what is inside him. Therefore, masculinity can be seen as a driving force behind Chandler’s novels. They are works into which men can escape and be the hardboiled tough-guys they only dream about, and that give women an icy yet attractive man they want to get to know better." Source: home.comcast.net

In "The Little Sister", Marlowe describes the Los Angeles that used to be: “There were trees along Wilshire Boulevard. Beverly Hills was a country town. Westwood was bare hills and lots offering at eleven hundred dollars and no takers. Hollywood was a bunch of frame houses on the interurban line. Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but goodhearted and peaceful. It had the climate they just yap about now. People used to sleep out on porches.” He admits that he “used to like this town… a long time ago” and laments its transformation from the so-called “Athens of America” to “a neon-lighted slum.” The transformation of the city and the feelings it engenders in Marlowe are made clear when he spies a club with a packed terrace and parking lot. It is so overcrowded, that the people are “like ants on a piece of overripe fruit.” The image immediately tells the reader what has changed Los Angeles: the population boom of the early twentieth century. Marlowe, too, is reminded of what Los Angeles has become, and begins to name its faults. Source: ue.ucdavis.edu

Jake Gyllenhaal having lunch date with a mysterious brunette

Jake Gyllenhaal out & about with a lady friend in NYC, on 30th June 2012

Jake Gyllenhaal shows he has moved on from Minka Kelly fling as he enjoys New York lunch date with mystery woman

He was recently linked to Minka Kelly but if these pictures of Jake Gyllenhaal are anything to go by, it didn’t take him long to move on.

The hunky actor was spotted going to have lunch with a mystery lady in the Soho section of New York City on Saturday and only had eyes for his companion. The pair enjoyed a joke as they strolled along in the sunshine and Jake appeared to have put Minka completely out of his head.

Eyes only for each other: Jake Gyllenhaal was spotted in New York with a mystery lady and the pair were oblivious to everyone except each other. The dressed down star is still sporting a bushy beard and went incognito in a baseball cap and sunglasses.

He also wore camouflage shorts and a white T-shirt. Jake’s pretty companion was equally casual in jeans and a long sleeved white top with her long, curly hair left loose.It is unclear if the mystery lady is a love interest or simply a friend but Jake is available again after his previous romance fizzled out.

Source: www.dailymail.co.uk

Dick Powell ("You Never Can Tell") video

Peggy Dow and Dick Powell in "You Never Can Tell" (1951) directed by Lou Breslow


A video featuring stills of Dick Powell (in films "Murder, My Sweet", "Cry Danger", "Johnny O'Clock", "Cornered", "Pitfall", "Dames", "Station West", "Meet the People", "I want a divorce", "It happened tomorrow", "Christmas in July", "The bad and the beautiful", "Susan slept here", etc.) and co-stars, wives: Joan Blondell, June Allyson, Claire Trevor, Lizabeth Scott, Gloria Grahame, Rhonda Fleming, Anne Shirley, Linda Darnell, Ruby Keeler, Ellen Drew, Lucille Ball, Jane Greer, Debbie Reynolds, etc.)

Songs "You Never Can Tell" by Chuck Berry and "Paradise" by Helen Forrest

Jake Gyllenhaal spotted at University of Toronto’s Scarborough campus

Jake Gyllenhaal on the set of "An Enemy" (2013) at the University of Toronto campus in Canada (June 24, 2012)

Jake Gyllenhaal is at University of Toronto’s Scarborough campus today, shooting An Enemy. Jakey G was spotted wearing his costume for the film, which includes a squared-off wool tie, and an untucked shirt. Kind of like a hotter version of Ryan Gosling in Half Nelson. Source: www.torontolife.com

"Double Indemnity" Blu-Ray, Dick Powell: an ambiguous hero in "Murder, My Sweet"

Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck in "Double Indemnity" (1944) directed by Billy Wilder

The classic, quintessential film noir, which set the standard for all future noirs, Double Indemnity is to be released in the UK as part of Eureka’s Masters Of Cinema Series on Blu-ray (Standard and SteelBook editions) on 25 June 2012.

“That’s a honey of an anklet you’re wearing, Mrs. Dietrichson.”

Double Indemnity is the dazzling, quintessential film noir whose enormous popular success and seven Oscar nominations catapulted Billy Wilder (Some Like It Hot, Sunset Boulevard, The Apartment) into the very top tier of Hollywood’s writer-directors. Adapted from a novella by James M. Cain (The Postman Always Rings Twice), co-written by Wilder and Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye), Double Indemnity remains the hardest-boiled of delectations.

SPECIAL BLU-RAY FEATURES:
Exclusive new high-definition restoration, officially licensed from Universal Pictures
Optional English subtitles for the deaf and hearing-impaired
1950 Lux Radio Theater adaptation starring Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck
The original theatrical trailer
Shadows of Suspense — a 2006 documentary featuring film historians, directors, and authors discussing the making of Double Indemnity
PLUS: A 36-page booklet featuring rare articles, images, and more! Source: whatculture.com

In the early forties, Dick Powell campaigned in vain for the part of a murderous insurance agent in Billy Wilder’s noir landmark, Double Indemnity. But Fred MacMurray snagged the role. Undeterred, Powell approached RKO chief Charles Koerner, pleading to be cast against type in another noir. Koerner actually wanted Powell for RKO musicals, so he said yes. Source: suite101.com

Like Bogart, Powell fits so snugly into Marlowe's character that the audience is unaware that he is acting: his is the kind of style that conceals style. As Chandler's private eye, he is noir's perfect tough guy, yet the toughness is never insisted on, it is simply there as a natural part of the character. Powell as Marlowe has a rough time of it: he is hit over the head, duped by a devious woman trying to hide from her notorious past, drugged, locked up, suspected of murder by the police. Through it all, Powell remains a model of the Ernest Hemingway code of grace under pressure, his irony a shield against constant mischance.

"Murder, My Sweet" was among the most favorably received of all films noirs, and Powell decided to stay within the noir mode for the rest of the decade. From the hired professional detective of the Chandler film, he switched to playing a more impassioned investigator in "Cornered" (1945), where he is cast as an ex-soldier tracking down the gang responsible for killing his wife. Here, his search is not that of the disinterested sleuth but the personal quest of a man bent on vengeance; his performance is therefore more high-strung than in "Murder, My Sweet".

In Pitfall (1948), Powell becomes a noir victim, playing a straigh-laced insurance man (recalling Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity 1944) who makes a fatal choice to double-cross the company for which he has worked loyally. Like Bogart, then, Powell covers the noir keyboard from detached investigator to weak-minded bourgeois who slips into crime. His work is spare and subtly stylized, regardless of the kind of character he is playing, though like Bogart, Powell is at the top of his form as the ironic observer, maintaining a skeptical distance even from his own misfortunes as he trades cracks with his adversaries the police, and with the low-down, two-timing dames that he is wise to. -"Film Noir: The Dark Side of the Screen" by Foster Hirsch (2001)

Dick Powell and Rhonda Fleming in "Cry Danger" (1951) directed by Robert Parrish

In the wake of Murder, My Sweet (1944), Dick Powell re-invented his screen persona as a world-weary, acid-tongued noir deadpan guy. He was more likely to deliver a devastating put-down than a gun-butt or upper-cut. In Cry Danger, Powell pushes this persona to its reasonable limits. At times, as the ex-convict Rocky Mulloy, he seems more like a displaced stand-up comedian than an underworld denizen.

Dick Powell’s Rocky Mulloy is among the biggest sour-pusses in film noir. And he’s got a right to be sore. Five years in jail have taught him the fine art of tongue-lashing. He is, perhaps, too good at it. He drops verbal bombs left and right, not caring about their half-life—or their threat to his social standing. Powell completely digs into Rocky Mulloy. He plays him flat as pavement, and twice as hard. Source: www.noiroftheweek.com

Anne Shirley and Dick Powell in "Murder, My Sweet" (1945) directed by Edward Dmytryk

"Forget Humphrey Bogart, forget Robert Mitchum, Dick Powell really is Raymond Chandler's gritty, sharp-tongued detective, Phillip Marlowe. This is perhaps surprising considering that he was better known up to this point for playing the juvenile lead in backstage musicals (so much so that Chandler's originally title 'Farewell, My Lovely' was dropped for fear of causing disappointment with audiences expecting a romantic comedy). But no, this is the real thing. One of the defining examples of film noir; dark, bleak and alienated with a cast of sordid characters headed by an ambiguous hero."

Dick Powell and Claire Trevor playing Philip Marlowe and Helen Grayle in "Murder, My Sweet"

Of all the adaptations of Chandler novels, this film comes as close as any to matching their stylish first person narrative and has the cinematic skill and bravado of direction to carry it off. Since the '40s countless mystery and neo-noir films have been made in Hollywood and around the world. Murder, My Sweet is what they all aspire to be. Source: www2.eufs.org.uk

Murder, My Sweet complicates narrative to the point of extraneity, explicating it as the mere pretext for a poetic topography of mid-century L.A., as well as an elaboration of its quintessential resident - private eye Philip Marlowe (Dick Powell). Although Bogart may perfect Marlowe's iconic one-liners, Powell's background in musical comedy provides him with the requisite awareness, or assumption, of audience to ensure that his delivery is less solipsistic, more generous and, ultimately, closer to the wry self-deprecation of Chandler's original ("If I always knew what I meant, I'd be a genius"), if not its more embittered overtones. Source: www.afilmcanon.com

Creatures of Darkness: Raymond Chandler, Detective Fiction, and Film Noir by Gene D. Phillips (2000)

A comprehensive introduction to America’s foremost mystery writer.” -- Alain Silver, co-author of Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles

With a Preface by Billy Wilder and a brief biography of Raymond Chandler, "Creatures of Darkness: Raymond Chandler, Detective Fiction, and Film Noir" offers Phillips's interpretation of the Chandler oeuvre in fiction, screenwriting, and film. Phillips analyzes, among many others, the three film versions of Farewell, My Lovely and the two film versions of The Big Sleep through extensive comparisons to Chandler's novels. Chandler despised Hollywood yet needed Tinseltown's lucre as a source of income, and Phillips is at his best as he describes how Chandler's screenplays, including Double Indemnity (directed by Billy Wilder) and Strangers on a Train (directed by Alfred Hitchcock), implicated him in torturous collaborations with the Hollywood elite. -Kirkus Reviews

"Murder, My Sweet" would be recognized as one of the first true noir films produced in Hollywood. Raymond Chandler really liked the picture. Dick Powell, he thought, came closest to his own conception of Marlowe - he was better even than Bogart, who would portrait him later. Although, Chandler thought Bogart was terrific, so much better than any other tough guy actor. Bogart had a sense of humor that fit well with Marlowe. He had his sad good naturedness. -"The Long Embrace: Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved" (2007) by Judith Freeman

Chandler was a romantic, more like F. Scott Fitzgerald than the worldly Hammett, and through the character of Marlowe he became a haunting poet of place, this place, Los Angeles, whose split personality of light and dark mirrored Chandler's own. He caught the glaring sun, the glittering swimming pools, the cigar-stinking lobbies of seedy hotels, the improbable mansions, the dismal apartment buildings, the sound of tires on asphalt and gravel, the sparkling air of the city after rain and how the fog smells at the beach at night.

Frank MacShane published the standard Chandler biography more than 30 years ago, and until now, no other book has made us view this great American writer afresh. "The Long Embrace" does. "To take care of Cissy. That was his driving life force," Freeman writes. Chandler worked in the oil business for Cissy, and he turned himself into a crime writer for his wife, while feeling he never "wrote a book worthy of dedicating to her." Source: articles.latimes.com