Motion Picture Herald (Jan-Feb 1945)

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"As good a piece of melodramatic 20minute-egg sentimentality as the famous 'Double Indemnity'. In some ways it is even more likeable, for though it is far less tidy, it is more vigorous and less slick, more resourcefully photographed and even more successfully cast. . . . "It handles Chandler's extremely cinemadaptable story so well that, if anything, it improves it in the retelling. It is the story of an indigent Los Angeles private detective (Dick Powell) who, for the sake of a few spare dollars, helps a gigantic imbecile named Moose Malloy (Mike Mazurki) to hunt down the girl he loved when he went to jail. In the course of the quest the detective interviews a wonderful, boozy old floozy (Esther Howard) who could bring Hogarth up to date. Before long he finds himself suspected of murder and hired by several conflicting sides in a fight whose meaning and dimension he only gradually finds out. It involves invaluable jade, the slaughter of a gigolo, a psychoanalytic theosophist (Otto Kruger), a charlatan (Ralf Harolde), an aging multimillionaire (Miles Mander) his young wife (Claire Trevor), and her angry stepdaughter (Anne Shirley). The wife treats the shabby detective with brazen cozyness, the theosophist slams him across the chops with a pistol, the charlatan pumps him full of dope, the stepdaughter feeds him alternate Scotch and scorn, and the elderly, heardess-seeming nabob is in savagely at the climactic kill. The hyperpituitary ex-convict, incidentally, finds his lost lovely at last. "'Murder, My Sweet' is done to a farethee-well by everybody from the costumer to the excellent cast. Sets that should look threadbare have seldom looked so rat-ridden. The neon sign outside a crummy dive is almost too properly defective. There is an enthusiastic appetite for everything possibly sinister about a big city and its people. The makers of the film go farther with their realism: they try to make sensations and states of mind visual. Best: the drug sequence, presenting through double exposure an indecipherable web of confusion and dreamlike memory."