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CORRIDOR
OF NOIR |
DARK CORRIDORS A DARK CORRIDORS CLASSIC |
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Dick Powell's JOURNEY into DARKNESS PART ONE |
In the 1940s, boy singer Powell re-invented himself as a noir hero
"Down these Mean
Streets a man must go who himself is not mean, who is neither
tarnished nor afraid."
. . . Raymond Chandler
By
JOHN STANLEY
of TheColumnists.com
The
"Mean Streets" of Raymond Chandler's L.A.--the dark
boulevards that would one day play a major part in the career
of Dick Powell, when he would turn private detective and prowl
the seedy side of town--seemed far away from the world of the
studio musicals that were his bread and butter for more than
a decade.
Powell singing "I'm Young and Healthy" to drop-dead-beautiful
Toby Wing, a platinum-blonde clone of Jean Harlow, was the image
that Depression-era moviegoers had of this guy they called "The
Crooner." A song-and-dance man, a hoofer, a romantic lead,
the eternal juvenile--these were the standard descriptions heaped
onto Powell, who had grown up in Mountain View, Ark., where he
first sang in the church choir.
Powell in those bread-line times was busy at Warner Bros., his
home studio, belting out songs to his beautiful co-stars. "I'll
string along with you," he purred to Ginger Rogers in "Twenty
Million Sweethearts." "I only have eyes for you,"
he intoned to Ruby Keeler in "Dames." "Jeepers
Creepers," he exclaimed to Anita Louise in "Going Places."
"Naughty, bawdy, gaudy . . . " he said of bustling,
hustling New York city in "42nd Street."
In fact, about the closest Powell ever got to the sinful side
of life in his movies was "42nd Street." During Busby
Berkeley's main-title production number, Powell, in bowler hat,
sang about the travails of big-city life from a second-story
window while a jilted man down on the street plunged a knife
into the back of his unrequited lover and she dropped to the
pavement shrieking. (In later movies, Powell, in fedora and trenchcoat,
would have climbed down the fire escape, grabbed the guy with
the knife and knocked him senseless. But for the moment he was
just playing a cynical, crooning observer of life.)
Even from the beginning, Powell was never completely happy with
the limitations of these "nice guy" musical-comedy
roles. Hadn't he heard somewhere that nice guys always finish
last? There was a tough guy struggling to break through and obliterate
the pleasantness and bland qualities of his musical characters.
Once he told some friends he wanted to "sling some dramatic
hash around . . . I'm tired of the same stupid story over and
over."
Some critics were kind and acknowledged he had a nice voice.
(He always knew it wasn't the greatest, though it could hold
its own in film after film.) Other critics were quick to point
out the actor always conveyed a sympathetic quality audiences
took to and even pined over on occasion.
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Boy Crooner: Powell with Marion Davies in 'Hearts Divided' (left); with Ruby Keeler at the kissing rock in 'Flirtation Walk'
On the other hand, one critic pointed out Powell's thespian weaknesses and insulted him in print by describing him as "an Arkansas farm boy who got into show business because his voice was too sweet for calling hogs, and who never got the hay out of his hair." Nevertheless, he allowed nature to take its course throughout the '30s. Why not? In 1935 he ranked as the seventh most popular movie personality, and he climbed to sixth place in 1936.
Toward the end of the decade he began his battles with Jack L. Warner for a shift to dramatic parts, and he married Joan Blondell, an actress who could play a gun moll or femme fatale any day of the week. It turned out to be a stormy marriage, but Powell kept working: "Gold Diggers of 1937," "Hollywood Hotel," "The Singing Marine."
The "singing ninny," as he called the typical character he played at Warner Bros., finally did his last take when his contract was up in 1940. But in those days you were typecast (some actors got typecast for life) and good dramatic parts didn't seek him out. It wasn't until 1944 when he played a newspaper reporter who gets tomorrow's paper today (in "It Happened Tomorrow" opposite Linda Darnell) that he felt he was finally on the right acting track.
It made up a little for the fact he had gone after, but lost, the role of Walter Neff, the crooked insurance salesman in Billy Wilder's 1944 hit "Double Indemnity." Wilder had never taken the idea seriously, sneering with contempt when he heard that Powell was beating at his door.
Ironically, it was a part that went to another actor who had endured playing light-hearted guys in romances and comedies: Fred MacMurray. And it completely turned MacMurray's career around, allowing him to do melodramas, westerns and other dramatic parts. All Powell could do was sigh, be philosophical about it and continue to dream. And to wait.
While Powell was struggling to shirk his crooner image once and for all, Raymond Chandler, who had started out as a writer for the crime pulp magazines and became a well-read (if not well-paid) private-eye novelist, was having some troubles of his own. He was making the rounds of Hollywood's Mean Streets, trying to get his creation, Philip Marlowe, onto the big screen. It's a crime, he told a friend, how Hollywood was always messing up good books. But he needed money, and he needed it quickly.
Chandler (1888-1959), to whom pulp fiction had come late in life, had written his first Marlowe novel, "The Big Sleep," in 1939, followed by six more novels about the L.A. shamus. Marlowe captured a sense of nihilism about life, being a tarnished, cynical ex-something. Though he dealt with dirty people, he narrated his stories morally: "We've got the fast-dollar boys, the hoodlums out of New York, Chicago and Detroit. We've got the flashy restaurants and night clubs they run, and the hotels and apartment houses they own, and the grifters and con men and female bandits that live in them. The pansy decorators, the lesbian dress designers, the riff-raff of a big hard-boiled city with no more personality than a paper cup. . . .There was something to be done, but I didn't know what. Whatever it was, it would be useless."
All of Chandler's novels
had met with critical success, but the payback to Chandler remained
small and he always lived on the edge of desperation, sensing
poverty was about to pull him down one final time. And his wife,
Cissy, was always ill and in need of more medical attention,
payment for which always seemed to exceed the mediocre advances
he got.
So he began seeking high-paying screenwriting assignments and,
to fatten the bank account a little more, told his agent to make
deals for the Marlowe books. Although "Farewell, My Lovely,"
the second Marlowe novel, had been sold to RKO in 1941 for a
flat $2,000, the story had been turned into a quickie plot for
an entry in the George Sanders "Falcon" series. "The
Falcon Takes Over" was definitely not Chandler. (The same
fate befell another Marlowe novel, "The High Window,"
when it was turned into "Time to Kill," a 1942 Mike
Shayne series film starring Lloyd Nolan.)
When RKO finally decided it was time to do justice to Chandler's
book, and announced its third try would be given the A-budget
treatment, Powell was quick to seek out the director, Edward
Dmytryk. Powell did a lot of fast talking, and apparently did
it well because Dmytryk admitted years later that the frustrated
actor had convincingly pitched himself.
"He fit the character, as far as I could see," recalled
Dmytryk. "After all, what is Marlowe? He's no Sam Spade.
He's an eagle scout among tough guys. He's a moral, ethical man,
with a strong sense of responsibility."
Although the film was released in late 1944 as "Farewell,
My Lovely," it was quickly retitled "Murder, My Sweet."
Under either title, it instantly changed Powell's life forever.
The critics hailed him as a major movie tough guy as the film
became an instant box-office hit.
In what is now judged to be one of the best of the film noirs
of the '40s Powell is introduced at night with his head bandaged,
staring out across the city skyline, his unshaven, saturnine
face illuminated by flashing neons from across the street. A
plainclothes cop, looking well seasoned in the art of the third
degree, hovers over him as the shamus begins in a lingo and slang
that Chandler had picked up from the L.A. lowlife natives:
"It was about seven o'clock, anyway it was dark."
"What were you doing at the office that late?"
"I'm a homing pigeon.
I always come back to the stinking coop no matter how late it
is. I'd been out peeking under old Sunday sections for a barber
named Dominique whose wife wanted him back. I forget why. The
only reason I took the job was because my bank account was trying
to crawl under a duck. And I never found him. I just found out
all over again how big Los Angeles is. My feet hurt and my mind
felt like a plumber's handkerchief. The office bottle hadn't
sparked me up so I'd taken out my little black book to go grouse
hunting. Nothing like soft shoulders to improve my morale . .
. "
With the self-deprecating narrative continuing as voiceover,
Powell's Marlowe flashbacks into a disorderly, chaotic City of
Angels where there are no angels --everyone who comes into contact
with Marlowe seems to have just crawled out from beneath a rock.
They lie or tell half-truths, and slink in and out of the shadows.
Even the cops smell like they're on the take, which in those
pre-"Dragnet" days most of them were. The danger to
Marlowe in his rumpled suits is all the more striking, given
Powell's cherubic good looks and an odd kind of vulnerability
that still carried over from the musical-comedy days.
There's a dream-like quality
to the convoluted storyline as Powell/Marlowe begins a search
for a woman named "Velma" (a Moose of a man named Malloy
is looking for her) and takes on a second job of helping a man
recover stolen jewelry. He doesn't know the two cases are going
to dovetail and smash him right in the kisser. And then comes
the inevitable blow to Marlowe's head, a private-eye cliche that
would become more significant to his future as a newfound dramatic
actor.
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"I caught the blackjack right behind my ear. And a black pool opened up at my feet again, and I dived in. It had no bottom. It felt good. Just like an amputated leg. Next thing I remember I was going somewhere. It was not my idea. The rest of it was a crazy, coked up dream. I had never been there before."
Tough with his fists, fast-talking, throwing tantrums when he can't get the information or help he seeks, Powell's Marlowe bullies his way through the cast of bizarre characters and doublecross situations and even wakes up drugged out of his mind in an asylum for straitjacket patients. He does it all in a world-weary style that would set the standard for later movie private eyes.
After "Murder, My Sweet" there would be no more musicals or light-hearted inconsequential comedies for Powell. Now he walked the "Mean Streets" that Chandler had described, submerging himself into various prototypes of Marlowe.
William F. Nolan, a biographer of Chandler, describes these characters as "men of honor who followed a strict code of personal morality, who couldn't be bluffed or bought off, who could stand up under a police grilling, and who knew how to take a punch and deliver one. They were tarnished knights, without armor. Too much booze, too many cigarettes, too many lonely hours in cramped apartments. With a dark past and a dubious future."
Nothing dubious about Powell's future as a dramatic actor, which would keep him within the darkness of film noir for years.
© 2000 by John Stanley
IN PART TWO: John Stanley
chronicles Dick Powell's rise as a movie and radio tough guy,
detailing his impact on the noir mystery genre.
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