Dick Powell in The Dark Side of the Screen

Among his many interesting achievements, as a musical star in the '30s, Dick Powell introduced several Harry Warren standards which have become part of the "Great American Songbook," including "I'll String Along With You" in TWENTY MILLION SWEETHEARTS (1934), "I Only Have Eyes For You" from DAMES (1934), "I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm" in ON THE AVENUE (1937), and "You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby" in HARD TO GET (1938). Once Powell parted company with Warner Bros. after NAUGHTY BUT NICE (1939), he spent the next few years appearing in a handful of comedies at a variety of studios. Some of these films were indifferent, but there were also two sterling classics: Preston Sturges' CHRISTMAS IN JULY (1940), in which Powell believes he's won a fortune in a contest, and Rene Clair's fantasy IT HAPPENED TOMORROW (1944), in which he receives newspapers which can predict the future. In 1944, Powell accomplished one of the most amazing transformations in the history of the movies: The onetime baby-faced singer became hardboiled, sarcastic Philip Marlowe in MURDER, MY SWEET (1944), and now Powell was the tough, hard-edged, darkly funny star of film noir. 

Dick Powell also seems to have been universally admired by his colleagues, not always an easy feat while maintaining a high-powered career in the entertainment industry. Behind the scenes, there are many stories underscoring Powell's reputation as a savvy, supportive colleague. Joyce Holden, Powell's costar in YOU NEVER CAN TELL (1951), echoed those sentiments in a 2008 interview for Films of the Golden Age. When the interviewer, Tom Weaver, noted she had stolen some scenes from Powell, she replied, "But he would let you steal from him, he allowed it... That's the kind of guy he was." 

Joyce Holden also added another fascinating insight: "You know who really directed the film ["You Never Can Tell"]? Dick Powell. Absolutely. Every shot, I saw him conferring with Lou Breslow, the credited director. Dick was very circumspect, but it was very obvious that he had the ideas, the set-ups, the little innuendos. Dick really was a brilliant person. He was extremely talented." 

When Alan K. Rode of the Film Noir Foundation introduced a 2012 screening of PITFALL (1948), he shared that he had recently interviewed Powell's PITFALL costar, Lizabeth Scott, and she'd said that Powell had been kind and a joy to work with, and she termed her experience making PITFALL with Dick Powell "delicious." Another compliment came from actress Jean Porter Dmytryk, who was the wife of the director of MURDER, MY SWEET and who also acted in Powell's CRY DANGER (1951), saying: "Dick Powell was so many things. First of all, he was the best businessman of any of the actors in Hollywood. I enjoyed working with Dick in his film CRY DANGER and appreciated his Eagle Scout attitude." Dick Powell was quoted by Tony Thomas in a 1961 'Films in Review' profile as saying, "I saw no reason why an actor should restrict himself to one particular phase of the business." When co-star Richard Erdman was interviewed about CRY DANGER (1951) at UCLA Film Festival in 2011, he said Dick Powell was always generous and supportive. In his personal life, while a marriage to Warner Bros. costar Joan Blondell petered out after a few years, he found lasting happiness with June Allyson, whom he married in 1945.

What is Altman saying in The Long Goodbye? That Marlowe’s code is no longer applicable to the cynical seventies? That trust and loyalty are irrelevant and misplaced feelings, and have no part in the life of a private eye? Elliot Gould’s sloppy Marlowe is deliberately a far cry from the sartorial neatness of Bogart and Dick Powell. Behaving altogether with a cuteness that would have given Bogart the shudders, Gould plays Marlowe as a mumbler who lives in a pig sty and holds absent-minded conversations with his cat. This Marlowe gets his revenge at the end, in a radical and quite unexpected gesture, when he kills his betraying friend and then walks away, seemingly purged, an act of cold-blooded murder that Chandler’s Marlowe would never commit. 

The fundamental objection to The Long Goodbye, which included professionals such as director Joseph Mankiewicz and film critics, was that Elliott Gould's performance as Marlowe was no match for the likes of Bogart and Powell, whom they had seen essay the role in the course of the film festival. Asked later if she thought Elliott Gould was miscast in the role, screenwriter Leigh Brackett responded, "I thought he did a beautiful job, except that he was not hardboiled enough."

The actor whose record in noir most closely approximates Humphrey Bogart’s is Dick Powell (even surpassing Robert Mitchum). Powell had earned a reputation in the thirties' musicals as a crooner with an engaging personality and a charismatic singing style. By the mid-forties he was eager to change his image, and he sensed that the current noir phase offered him an appropriate opportunity. He played Philip Marlowe (before Bogart) in the 1944 film version of Murder, My Sweet. Raymond Chandler later said that Powell came closest to his own idea of Marlowe. If anything, Powell is even dryer in the part than Bogart, erasing entirely the crooner’s geniality that had made him a popular fixture in Warner musicals. The only echo of the earlier Powell is the actor’s physical grace—he has a dancer’s flowing ease. However, Powell’s voice is flat, his face taut and frozen in the masklike noir vein, and he plays Marlowe as a blunt, no-nonsense professional. He is guarded and sardonic, and yet he is capable of projecting an aura of integrity. Dmytryk concurred that Powell played Marlowe "as Chandler visualized him, with a patina of toughness only skin deep:" 

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. Then, too, Claire Trevor, as the bewitching platinum blonde temptress who is deadlier than any male, played the dangerous noir siren Helen Grayle to perfection. 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's simply there as a natural part of the character. Through it all, Powell remains a model of the Hemingway code of grace under pressure, his irony a shield against constant mischance. Powell's work is spare and subtly stylized, and 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 two-timing dames that he is wise to. 

Chandler himself characterized Philip Marlowe as a loser, Leigh Brackett pointed out, at least in a society where money alone is the measure of success. But Marlowe is "a man who is pure in heart, who is decent and honorable and cannot be bought. He is incorruptible:' Brackett continued. In fact, Brackett bought Chandler's description of Marlowe as a modern-day knight: "Here is the knight in shining armor with a shabby trench coat and snap-brim felt hat. I think he is a universal folk hero who does not change through the ages:' except that he carries a gun rather than a sword. "I think the concept was damn good, a very moral concept:' Chandler said that Marlowe, as he had drawn him in his novels, would indeed look plain foolish in the corrupt modern world that we live in. Certainly Marlowe is thought of as a chump, who is out of touch with the times, by several of the characters he encounters in his journey. Film critic David O'Brien says Chandler's conception of Philip Marlowe is "a study of a moral and decent man cast adrift in the selfish, self-obsessed society where lives can be thrown away without a backward glance, and any notions of friendship or loyalty are meaningless." —Sources: "Creatures of Darkness: Raymond Chandler, Detective Fiction, and Film Noir" (2003) by Gene D. Phillips and "The Dark Side of the Screen" (2008) by Foster Hirsch